Jack Tyler wrote:

> Like another poster here, my ancestors were "pilgrims", but came over
> later than the Mayflower.

Yes, we are probably about ninth cousins. I'm related to both Adams,
Pierce, Grant, and the Bushs and Taft, but I haven't looked up Tyler.

The term "Pilgrim" has been widened to include both the Separatists
("Saints") and other passengers ("Strangers"), who travelled on the
Mayflower, and those Mayflower passengers have been confused with the
Puritans, who didn't want to establish a whole new church, they just
wanted to remove all Roman Catholic ritual and influence from the
Church of England.

> There aren't very many accounts of exactly what was brought over and
> what was eaten in 1621, but some things are known from letters, etc.

One site said that the most successful English crops that first
Thanksgiving was barley, from which they made their ale. Some of my
earliest relatives opened up the first public house in Duxbury,
Massachusetts, and one of them was put into the stocks after he engaged
in an act of drunken horsemanship. He rode his horse into a Puritan's
parlor...