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This file presents a historical detective story spread over several years (even centuries). If just a handful of Myles Standish ‘experts’ were to read this file (and accept my argumentation?), we will have solved one of the mysteries of the 16th to 20th centuries: did Pilgrim Father Captain Myles Standish (born c. 1587) originate in the Standish family in Duxbury near Chorley or the Standish of Standish family who migrated to the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea? Who cares anyway? It seems that a few do still care, and can perhaps be divided into the following groups, which often become a little muddled.
(1) People (like me) who would just like to know the historical and genealogical truth, if still establishable from documents.
(2) U.S. citizens who would like to know the origin of one of the most famous Pilgrim Fathers on the Mayflower in 1620.
(3) U.S. citizens who are descended from Myles Standish or another passenger on the Mayflower.
(4) Descendants of Standish of Standish and Duxbury, wherever they ended up.
(5) Anyone who has visited Chorley Reference Library and read the largest collection of books in Old England outside London on Myles Standish and the Pilgrim Fathers.
(6) Anyone who has read widely in the history of Lancashire during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
(7) Anyone in the Isle of Man who still believes that Myles Standish grew up there and that they can claim him for tourist purposes.
(8) Anyone in the Chorley area who also wishes to claim him for tourist purposes.
Caleb Johnson, the real expert in the U.S.A on passengers on the Mayflower in 1620, has meanwhile changed his entry on Myles Standish to give him an almost certain ancestry in Lancashire and not the Isle of Man. I know he had nothing to do with the family on the Manx Isle, apart from a vague relationship because all Standishes were related to all other Standishes. I know that Myles’s Isle of Man in his will of 1656 was the Isle of Man farm straddling the border of Croston and Bretherton. I know that it will take several more years before this is generally accepted.
I never set off with a ‘theory’, I never had any ‘axe to grind’ and I never wished to tread on anyone’s toes, although I seem to have trodden on a few corns inadvertently (apologies). I just wanted to report on what I had found in Lancashire documents concerning Duxbury (the township in Lancashire and the family that took its name from the place). It seemed a bit of a give away (to me) that if Captain Myles Standish named his settlement in Massachusetts Duxbury in c. 1630, then it was more than likely that he was closely associated with Standish of Duxbury, Lancashire. His American descendants certainly thought so when they made moves to try to claim Duxbury Hall in the 1820s and 1840s after the male line at Duxbury Hall had died without leaving a son and heir. (They failed – rather dramatically - but the surrounding story is worth retelling.)
Recent interest and enthusiasm has been shown by a committee set up by Rev. Dr John Cree, Rector of St Laurence’s, Chorley, which is/ who are planning a series of events to celebrate Myles Standish’s origins in Duxbury in 2005 and 2006, all details of which will be posted on the web sites of St Laurence’s and Chorley Borough Council. At the centre of all this seem to be two extant documents of 1655 and 1657 (texts provided below), analysis of DNA swabs of Standishes from America and Britain (paid for by courtesy of the Mayflower Descendants Society in Plymouth Massachusetts, with the English end of the swabs provided by John Cree’s efforts, most particularly from the cheek of Benedictine Father Benjamin Standish) and a potential delve into the coffins of Standish of Duxbury skeletons in the Standish vault of St Laurence’s (to be filmed for posterity by a TV company). Heady (if sometimes dusty) stuff!
I have known, ever since I first read the 1655 document in the summer of 1999 in the Lancashire Record Office, that the story of Myles Standish’s origins in Duxbury, Lancashire was there. (I have my dated note book, written in pencil as I transcribed this in Preston, next to me as I write this.) At the same time I knew that no one would believe me back in 1999 because for the last century the theory of his origins in the Manx Isle had been accepted as the ‘truth’. This was tentatively proposed by Rev. T. C. Porteus in 1912, 1914, 1920 and 1927, had been followed up by various American descendants of Myles, and further followed up in books by G .V. C. Young (1984) and Lawrence Hill (1987), before being queried and demolished in the 1980s by Rev. Kissack of the Isle of Man. This story was written up briefly, with full references, in a series of articles in the Lancashire History Quarterly (on this web site for the past couple of years). I stand by every word I wrote then.