My Family Tree

Mayflower passenger

Mayflower Passenger and Colonial New England Pioneer. He accompanied the Separatists aboard the Mayflower on their 1620 voyage to New England as a servant of John Carver, who was to serve as the first governor of Plymouth Colony. He rather famously fell off the Mayflower during a violent storm, but was rescued. This incident was recorded by his fellow passenger, William Bradford, who was to serve as the second governor of Plymouth Colony, and his history of the voyage and the early years of Plymouth Colony was first published in 1898, following the return of the original manuscript from England in 1897, entitled Bradford's History "Of Plimoth Plantation." Howland was among the principal men who signed the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of Plymouth Colony. He was included in the earliest exploratory excursions on shore once the ship had reached the New World. Howland, in the years following the ship's landing, but before the 1623 land division, married fellow passenger Elizabeth Tilley and they had a large family of ten children. He prospered and served as a selectman, Deputy to the General Court, and Plymouth Colony Assistant (to the governor). Howland was among the colonists who helped to pay off the colony's debts, along with John Alden, Isaac Allerton, William Bradford, William Brewster, and Myles Standish. John Howland played an important role in Plymouth Colony's efforts to establish a trading post in what is now Maine, exploring the Kennebec River with Edward Winslow, and was placed in command of the colony's northernmost trading post established there. He and his family would later move to a farm at Rocky Nook, northwest of Plymouth. Plymouth church records registered his death and stated, "… dyed Mr John Howland in his eightieth yeare, he was a good old disciple, and had bin sometime a magistrate here, a plaine-hearted christian" (Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume XXII: Plymouth Church Records, 1620-1859, Boston: 1920, page 147). John Howland's descendants include President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; President George H. W. Bush; President George W. Bush; author Louis S. Auchincloss; historian Henry Brooks Adams; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and Nathaniel Gorham, a signer of the United States Constitution.