Ancestry.com Connects Me and Millions of Others to the Pilgrims Who Arrived in 1620s, to European and American History

Americans rarely think of their personal fates tied to ancient history, but DNA reports and access to new databases tracing ancestry far into the past can change perceptions of who Americans are.

Fourteen generations before me, one of my oldest known ancestors was Simon Symonson, born in Leiden, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands in 1510, according to Ancestry.com. He died in 1545 at the age of 35. Other than his birth and death dates, little is known about Simon Symonson.

His descendants lived in Leiden for two more generations and joined the Pilgrim separatist community that came from England in 1607-8. Their ties with England were strong. Simon’s namesake and grandson Symon was actually born in England in 1579, four years after the opening of Leiden University.

It is likely the Symonsons were acquainted with or associates of famous Pilgrims such as:

Miles Standish (1584-1656), who served in both the English and Dutch armies and later became military advisor to Plymouth colony in Massachusetts;

William Brewster (1568-1644), an English official and Mayflower passenger who published books forbidden in England.

John Robinson (1575-1625), pastor of the Pilgrim fathers, one of the early English separatists and one of the founders of the Congregational Church. While at Cambridge, he accepted dogmas of Puritanism, and though ordained as an Anglican pastor, criticized the church for too many similarities to Catholicism. These beliefs required him and his congregation to leave England for the Netherlands, which was initially more accepting of dissenters. It’s likely that the Symonsons joined his congregation in Leiden. Robinson intended to join the Pilgrims on their journey to the new world, but became sickly and died in 1625. He is buried in Leiden.

Leiden, Netherlands: Pilgrims’ Base For About 15 Years Before Boarding Mayflower

Leiden has a small American Pilgrim Museum, which gets mixed reviews on Trip Advisor. If you do your homework in advance, reading some of the many articles posted online before your visit, you will have a more enriching experience. The advice is to come to the museum with questions prepared.

The Leiden American Pilgrim Museum opened on Thanksgiving Day in 1997 to “commemorate the Dutch-American heritage and the forgotten episode in American history. Several hundred Leiden residents who descended from Pilgrims who never left gathered in church to remember their famous ancestors who helped changed the world,” reported Laurin Comiteau, an American freelance journalist based in the Hague, in an article titled “The Dutch Connection.”

“The museum, founded with the support of the Mayflower Society, the Pilgrim Society and the New England Historic Genealogical Society, occupies a typical 16th century one-room house in the old side of town and is filled with period pottery, furniture, and other artifacts. Such houses later would turn up in New England occasionally and be considered distinctly Pilgrim.”

The museum was the brainchild of Jeremy Bangs, former curator of the Plimoth Plantation in the Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Mass. Now 75, he remains a leading Pilgrim scholar, with numerous books, interviews, and lectures available online by following the hyperlink to his name.

Thanks to the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg in the 15th century, Pilgrim separatists were able to read the sermons, treatises and religious commentaries of a French theologian by the name of John Calvin (1509-1564), one of the key figures in the Protestant Reformation. He rejected both Catholicism and the established national churches of Europe, and followed his own conscience when it came to religion. Calvin was based for most of his life in Geneva, Switzerland.

But Calvinism was considered treasonous in most of Europe because it refused to obey higher religious authorities. The Protestant Reformation helped shape modern notions of individualism and freedom of conscience, so even though modern minds may find Calvin’s religious interpretations too rigid and puritanical, we owe him a debt of gratitude for helping to lay the foundation for freedom of conscience in the West.

I never before saw my fate determined by the rise and fall of empires until now. The Netherlands was part of the kingdom of Spain until 1585. But Spain over-extended itself, and after the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the British in 1588, its debt grew to be overwhelming. It withdrew from the center of European life.