Person:Susanna Jackson (25)

The Mayflower (1620)

The Mayflower was the first settlement voyage to New England, carrying primarily English Separatists known as Pilgrims. It was destined for the mouth of the Hudson River, but landed at Cape Cod in present-day Massachusetts. Sailed: 6 Sep 1620 from Southampton, England under Captain Christopher Jones Arrived: 11 Nov 1620 at Plymouth, Massachusetts After spending the winter aboard ship, the surviving passengers moved ashore on 21 Mar 1621. Next Vessel: The Fortune (1621) Passengers: 104; 24 families left descendants (Full List) Pilgrim Families: Allerton (Asst. Gov. Isaac) - Bradford (Gov. William) - Brewster (Rev. William) - Chilton - Cooke - Fuller (Edward) - Fuller (Samuel) - Priest - Rogers - Sampson - Tilley (Edward) - Tilley (John) - White - Winslow (Edward) Other Families and Servants: Alden - Billington - Browne - Doty - Eaton - Hopkins - Howland - Mullins - Soule - Standish (Capt. Miles) - Warren - Winslow (Gilbert) Resources: Primary Sources: Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation - Mourt's Relation - Pilgrim Hall (wills and other contemporary documents) Wikipedia: Mayflower (voyage) - Passenger List - Pilgrims - Plymouth Colony - Captain Christopher Jones

Susanna came on the Mayflower with husband William, and son Resolved. She was pregnant, and gave birth to son Peregrine while the Mayflower was still anchored off the tip of Cape Cod. Her husband William died the first winter, and she remarried a few months later to fellow Mayflower passenger Edward Winslow. Their marriage in May 1621 was the first marriage at Plymouth. Susanna was one of only four adult women to have survived to see the "First Thanksgiving" at Plymouth that autumn. Susanna died sometime after 1654, when she is mentioned in her husband's will.

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3} General Society of Mayflower Descendants. Mayflower Families Through Five Generations: Descendants of the Pilgrims Who Landed at Plymouth, Mass. December 1620. (New England - United States: General Society of Mayflower Descendants., Various)
   13:3.

   Little is known about Pilgrim William White. Governor Bradford says that among the Mayflower passengers were “Mr. William White and Susanna his wife and one son called Resolved, and one born a-shipboard called Peregrine, and two servants named William Hobeck and Edward Thompson.” In 1651 he added that “Mr. White and his two servants died soon after their landing. His wife married with Mr. Winslow… His two sons are married and Resolved hath five children, Peregrine two, all living. So their increase are seven.”
   
   William and Susanna White left England with son Resolved. At Cape Cod, on November 11, 1620, according to the old calendar, William was one of the forty-one signers of the Mayflower Compact. Two to three weeks later son Peregrine was born, the first English birth in Plymouth Colony. Susanna was widowed in February. She became the first colony bride in May, marrying Edward Winslow, a Mayflower passenger who had lost his wife a few weeks before. At least five children were born to Susanna and Edward Winslow.
   
   About 1638, the Winslows with young Peregrine and Resolved White, moved to Green Harbor, now called Marshfield. Edward Winslow rose to prominence as Governor of Plymouth Colony, became Colony representative to England, and at last was persuaded to use his diplomatic skills for Oliver Cromwell, heading up a joint commission with the Dutch to award reparations for damage caused to Danish ships. Interesting though it may be to imagine Susanna sharing those years in London with him, hostess to officials from various governments, no evidence has been found to indicate that she accompanied her husband on any of his trips to England. One of the few extant documents mentioning her by name is a “Bill of Sale” in which “Susanna Winslow wife of Mr. Edward Winslow of Marshfield and his Agent in this tyme of the Absence in England” sold for ten years the services of an Indian man. The agreement was dated 12 (11) 1647.
   
   Edward Winslow spent the last six years of his life in England. His will in 1654 as a resident of London, leaves his land in New England to son Josiah “hee allowing to my wife a full third parte thereof for her life also.” If Susanna were living in London at that time, it would have been natural to provide for her there as well.
   
   No further record of Susanna has been found. She must have died before 1675 when her son Josiah Winslow made no proviso for her in his will, although he made bequests to numerous relatives and friends. This surely refutes the claim of some that she died at Marshfield with two weeks of Josiah’s death in 1680. It seems strange that this woman who was the wife of one colony governor and mother of another, first Plymouth Colony bride and mother of the famed Peregrine White, should have left no record of her passing in town, church, court or press.
   
   Susanna (-------) (White) Winslow was not the sister of Dr. Samuel Fuller as is often claimed. Samuel and Edward Fuller who came on the Mayflower were sons of Robert of Redenhall, England. Robert had no daughter Susanna. He did have a daughter Anna, born about 1578, far too old a bride for Edward Winslow who would not be born till 1595. The will of Robert Fuller in 1615 mentions no daughter Susanna, nor a daughter married to William White. Dr. Samuel Fuller’s will in 1633 mentions only one sister, Alice Bradford – actually his sister-in-law. The only positive clue to Susanna’s ancestry seems to be a letter from Edward Winslow to “Uncle Robert Jackson” in 1623, in which he sent news of Susanna, her late husband, and her children. He also sent his regards to his father-in-law in England, by which time Robert Fuller was nine years dead. A cursory investigation of the Jackson family has shed no light on the subject.
   
   The name White occurs too often in England to make an extensive search for William’s ancestry practical. Alexander and Eleanor White of Sturton-le-Steeple, Notts, in the heart of Pilgrim country, had daughters Katherine, Bridget and Jane who married Gov. Carver, The Rev.Robinson and Randolph Thickins. They had no son William, but a nephew named William White might be worth investigation.
   
   For many years genealogists have assumed that Pilgrim William White spent his early married years in Holland, marrying at Leiden in 1612 and burying children there in 1615 and 1616. A critical examination of Leiden sources casts heavy doubt on this assumption. Before 1620 there are five mentions of a William White in Leiden, but no proof that they apply to the Pilgrim. They may all apply to the William White who was still living there in 1621. There is no proof that Pilgrim William White was ever in Holland.

2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1 2.2} Griffin, Paula Porter, and Thomas Stephen Neel. The Ancestors of Daniel White, 1777-1836, and his wife, Sarah Ford, 1778-1847, and Their Descendants. (Evansville, Indiana: Unigraphic, 1979)
   pages 101-02.
3. ↑ Susanna White Winslow Unknown, in Find A Grave.
4.   New England Historic Genealogical Society; MF , in MF 1:96, 5:7; NEHGR 110:182-83; NEHGR 154:109-18, 244.

   Susanna (_____) (White) Winslow was not, as often claimed, sister of SAMUEL and EDWARD FULLER [MF 1:96, 5:7; NEHGR 110:182-83]. (The resolution of this problem fundamentally comes down to the question of whether the William White who married Ann Fuller, sister of Samuel Fuller, at Leiden in 1612 was identical with the William White who came to Plymouth in 1620. They are generally believed not have been the same William and (Sus)anna. That particular William White witnessed an antenumptual agreement of Samuel Lee in Leiden in April 1621, and witnessed the marriage of Sarah Priest in October 1621, and so he couldn't have been the Mayflower passenger. In 2000, however, Jeremy D. Bangs revisited the problem and argued that the possibility that the two William Whites were identical could not be dismissed, and in fact that it was more likely than not that they were identical [NEHGR 154:109-18, 244].)

5. ↑ Caleb Johnson, Sue Allen and Simon Neal, The English Origin and Kinship of Mayflower Passengers William1 White and Dorothy1 (May) Bradford of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, in The American Genealogist (TAG). (Donald Lines Jacobus, et.al.)
   vol. 89 no. 2 :81-94, April 2017.

   The authors identify her as Susannah Jackson and review the White and Winslow families in light of many new discoveries. This information was announced at the Mayflower Congress this year.