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In Part 1, a summary was presented of research into the ancestry and early life of Captain Myles Standish (EB),1 soldier in the Netherlands, on the Mayflower in 1620 and Military Governor of the Pilgrim Fathers until his death in 1656. He first achieved mild fame after American Independence, when the search for a national identity and national heroes inevitably generated great interest in the Forefathers (as they called themselves), among whom he was one of the most prominent and colourful characters. His fame reached new heights after the publication of Longfellow (EB, C)’s poem “The Courtship of Myles Standish” in 1858.2 He is incontrovertibly Lancashire’s most famous son in the United States, but is woefully uncelebrated in the county of his birth.3 The main 20th c. controversy has been whether his ancestry lay in the families of Duxbury and Standish, Lancashire, or in a cadet Standish of Standish branch of Ormskirk and the Isle of Man. The answer (already given in the last article, with sources of the proof) is that he was definitely a Standish of Duxbury and Standish.

 

MYLES MYSTERIES  -   UNTIL NOW

He has been surrounded for centuries by mysteries about his ancestry, hereditary lands, birth-date, birth-place, name, missing baptism, education, wives, religion, and the “lost years’ 1609-20 - in fact almost the whole of his pre-Mayflower life. A brief list of solutions to most of these mysteries was given in the last article, and this and subsequent articles will present these in more detail.

 

The mysteries were compounded because no authenticated contemporary record of his name has been found in Lancashire or the Netherlands, the two places where he is known to have lived.4 Nor has any record of his father, grandfather or great-grandfather been reported until now. This dearth of documentation has allowed free rein to all and sundry, some of whom have speculated wildly. The reasons for this lack of documentation will be revealed in his biography. The most intriguing mysteries for the last two centuries have been those surrounding his ancestry, the brief answer to which was given in the second paragraph above, and is presented in full in Family Trees 1 and 2. The most frequently asked questions, answered in this article, have been:

 

i)

Why did he name his new farm in c. 1627 Duxbury and not Standish, if he was descended

from a great-grandfather Standish of Standish, as he claimed in his Will?5

 

ii)

Why did his descendants fervently believe in 1846 that they, through Myles, might have a

claim to Duxbury Hall, a belief sustained until well into the 20th c. ?6

 

iii)

What was his connection with the Isle of Man, named at the end of the list of lands in his

Will? Was his first wife Rose from there? Or his second wife Barbara? Or both wives, given the tradition that they were sisters or cousins? Or was Myles himself descended from the Standish

family of Ormskirk and the Isle of Man, as proposed by Porteus (1914)?

 

 

 

 

 

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