John Alden

  General Notes:

~Burke's Presidential families of the United States of America, London, 1975., pg. 74

~Mayflower Descendants and their marriages for two generations, Baltimore, 1977., Landis, John T., pg. 7

~The Mayflower Miracle, Melbourne, 1986. , King, Jonathan, pg. 16

  Noted events in his life and other information:

• Web Reference: More information on from the Pilgrim Hall Museum.

John Alden in Records

Mayflower Families, Vol. 16

• He emigrated on the Mayflower and signed the Mayflower Compact. ^120,121

• Family Background Information: ⁹⁸
--Extensive research has been done into the ancestry of John Alden, but nothing has conclusively been found. There are two major theories that have been presented over the years.

--Charles Edward Banks, in his book The English Ancestry and Homes of the Pilgrim Fathers, 1929, puts forward a theory that John is the son of George Alden and Jane (---) and grandson of Richard and Avys Alden of Southampton, England. Since Bradford says John Alden was hired in Southampton, this would be a logical place to start looking for Aldens.

No other supporting evidence has been found, and it has been noted by many researchers that the names George, Richard, and Avys do not occur anywhere in John Alden's family. Naming children after parents and grandparents was an extremely common practice in the seventeenth century, and the absence of such a name is nearly enough evidence to disprove this theory.

The currently popular theory is that John Alden came from Harwich, Essex, England. There was a sea-faring Alden family living there, who were related by marriage to Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower. It has been suggested John Alden may be the son of John Alden and Elizabeth Daye, but this is not fully proven either.

• He worked as a Cooper. ⁷⁵

• Information: ⁴⁴⁶
According to Bradford, "John Alden was hired a cooper at Southampton where the ship victualled, and being a hopeful young man was much desired but left to his own liking to go or stay when he came here; but he stayed and married here" [Bradford 443]. In his accounting of the Mayflower families in 1651, Bradford stated under William Mullins that "his daughter Priscilla survived, and married with John Alden..."

John Alden was frequently a member of the committee on the Kennebec trade. He had actively participated in the trade himself, and in early 1634 he became involved in an incident in which a party of Plymouth men led by himself and John Howland became embroiled with a group of men from the Piscataqua settlement which would grow into Dover. One man on each side was killed, and in the aftermath Alden was detained at Boston as security against the final resolution of the conflict. [Bradford 262-268]

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. (New York 1952)

John married Pricilla Mullins, daughter of William Mullins and Mary Alice, about 1623 in Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts. (Pricilla Mullins was born about 1602 in Dorking, Surrey, England and died on 1 Dec 1680-12 Sep 1687 in Duxbury, Plymouth, Massachusetts ¹¹⁵.)