A prominent local family with deep roots in Hartland has direct ancestral ties to passengers on the Mayflower, which first anchored in Provincetown Harbor 405 years ago on Nov. 11, 1620.
Following three weeks of scouting the outer Cape Cod area, the 30 crew members and 102 passengers aboard the famed sailing vessel moved on to a more suitable location with a good harbor and fields that had already been cleared by the indigenous Wampanoag people, who’d abandoned a village near what came to be known as Plymouth Rock. According to the historical record, it’s there that one year later, in 1621, more than 140 representatives of the Wampanoag and the Plymouth Colony settlers from the Mayflower gathered for a three-day celebration of a successful harvest season — the roots of the celebration we now call Thanksgiving.
When members of the extended Howland clan gather throughout the local area and elsewhere in Vermont and New England to mark the traditional Thanksgiving holiday next week, they’ll embrace their deep-seated historical ties to the Mayflower, buoyed by the genealogical research that 81-year-old Judy Howland of Hartland has conducted over the past quarter century. Howland spoke with the Standard last weekend, spelling out her family’s ancestral connection to Elizabeth Tilley, a teenage passenger on the Mayflower.
“I have just finished reading ‘Filled with Fortitude’ by Sally Hobart Whiting,” Howland, the Standard’s Hartland columnist, related in an email message that she also incorporated into her missive for this week’s issue. “The book is a fictional version of the life of Pilgrim Elizabeth Tilley Howland, based in part on written letters and documents from the time,” Howland wrote. “Elizabeth, who is one of my immigrant ancestors, was thirteen when she and her parents left their home in England and crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a ship named Mayflower. The crossing was difficult, and the ship’s passengers suffered a great deal.
“After they arrived in New England, about half of them died that first winter. But after that first winter and so many losses, Elizabeth was able to carry on, filled, as the title of the [newly published 2025] book suggests, with fortitude,” Judy Howland continued. “Elizabeth married [fellow Mayflower passenger] John Howland, and together they raised ten children — six daughters and four sons. Today, there are an estimated two million descendants who trace their family line back to Elizabeth and John.”
For more on this story, please see our Nov. 2o edition of the Vermont Standard.
