Plymouth, Schlymouth...Virginia had the first Thanksgiving! by Leah St. James

If you were taught the same history lessons I was, you learned that Thanksgiving is the commemoration of a shared meal between the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Mass., and their neighboring Native Americans (the Wampanoag) in 1621. As the quick version of the story goes, the settlers were low on food, the “Indians” came by with some of theirs, and they sat down to a shared meal and gave thanks.

I have fun memories of sitting down in a classroom to our pretend Thanksgiving meal, half of us dressed in Pilgrim garb and the other half in “Indian” garb, all somehow crafted from construction paper.  (Teachers are amazing, aren’t they?)

Mixed in was the romantic story of “Indian” Princess Pocahontas who pleaded with her father, Chief Powhatan, to save the life of the captured Englishman Cpt. John Smith.

As a kid, I never quite got it that that famous incident with Pocahontas and John Smith happened about a decade earlier, and hundreds of miles away. In fact, they had nothing to do with Thanksgiving, other than the fact that both took place in southeastern Virginia near the Jamestown settlement.

What’s that? Jamestown? Thanksgiving?

You read that right. If you have a chance to travel to southeastern Virginia, to the site of the Berkeley Plantation on the James River, you’ll find a slight variation to the story. In fact, you’ll find a plaque claiming bragging rights as the “first official Thanksgiving” in the New World.

So how did that happen? A group of 38 English settlers, led by Capt. John Woodlief, made ground about 20 miles upriver from the Jamestown settlement in a plot of land now known as Berkeley Plantation (home of two U.S. presidents, btw). The group’s charter called for an annual observation of thanks to mark their safe arrival. This from a Wikipedia article: "Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

The date was December 4, 1619.

Take that, Plymouth!

Oh, okay…I cede the point to the Plymouth contingent that their later celebration is probably the root of our traditional meal. And I acknowledge that the Spanish explorers probably did the same as the Jamestown settlers about a century or so earlier, not to mention the custom of many Native American peoples to give thanks for a successful harvest (and more).

But as a Virginian from the Tidewater area (albeit one transplanted from New Jersey), I feel duty bound to uphold my region’s claim. (And if I could find that photo I took of the plaque, I'd post it here....)

In the meantime, here’s a link to Berkeley Plantation’s website where you’ll find the following illustration:

You can read more about the real “first” thanksgiving here and here.

You can read more about those other upstarts here:

Whatever side you fall on, if any, I wish you a joyous day of giving thanks with loved ones, full bellies, and, of course, that most American of pastimes—football.

Pilgrims, Indians, and the Dutch

by Diane Burton

We all know about the Pilgrims who sailed from England and landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. In grade school, we made Pilgrim hats and Indian headdresses and performed skits about the First Thanksgiving when the Indians saved the early settlers from starving.

But there was more colonization during the early 1600’s that we (at least in Michigan) didn’t learn about in school. The influx of Dutch into New York and along the East Coast—then known as New Netherlands.

A story that has been passed down through my dad’s family shows a connection to those early settlers—a royal connection. According to the family story, Dad’s mother was a direct descendent of a woman named Anneke Jans who was the daughter of the King of Holland and that, for reasons unknown (or she disobeyed him), he disinherited her through seven generations. Since my grandmother’s generation was the seventh, her cousins decided they would all inherit money. To that end they hired a genealogist to research the connection. What Dad remembers is the genealogist continually coming to his mom and her cousins for more money for the research. The cousins paid him because, by golly, they had to prove they were due an inheritance.

Well, sorry to tell you, I’m not royalty and Anneke probably wasn’t either. Her story is one of the legends that persisted through time. Now there really was a woman named Anneke Jans. She and her husband Roeloff Jansen immigrated to America in 1630 and settled in New Amsterdam (New York). He died and she married Everardus Bogardus, a minister. It is through her children with Bogardus that my family is descended. To me, being able to claim that my family has been in America for over 500 years is better than being royal. Okay, maybe not. 

I often wondered if the story about Anneke being the daughter of a king was one she perpetuated. I mean, who would know? In those days, they didn’t exactly have the means to check her credentials. No Google. No Bing. No Wikipedia. It took months to travel from The Netherlands (then part of Norway) to New York. People could change their names, their life histories, start over. Maybe I malign her, but it makes sense to me.

In the late 1970s, Hubs and I decided to research our family history and we're still doing it. What fun we've had discovering where our families originated. We reached dead ends very quickly on some lines and were able to make connections much further back on others. Along the way, we learned more about the history of the United States and Canada. And I learned more about my Dutch connection. Too bad the royalty thing didn’t pan out.

I blog here on the 8th and 30th of each month and Mondays on my own blogsite http://dianeburton.blogspot.com  The early immigrants to our country are the basis for  my Outer Rim series, where people could start a new life with new names and new life histories out on the frontier of space.