How the More children ended up on the Mayflowerįour siblings travelled on the Mayflower as wards to other families. It would have been very crowded, living conditions were bad, it was a place for young people because the death rate was so high, and the population would have kept getting reproduced by those migrating to the city. London would have been a 'house of death'. It's just the high child mortality rate that gives people the impression that people were dying at an earlier age.Īlso, it would have been different if you were a country person, where the air is better and the living circumstances are better, you're likely to live longer. It was actually a time where statistics lead us astray, that many people were living full lives.īut because we statistically look at the length of life, the high infant mortality rate - when many children were dying at the age of between 10 and 12 months during times of teething and high fever - that brings down our age of life into the thirties. Many people nowadays think, 'they lived such short lives back then. Average life expectancy in the 17th century The average age of marriage for a middle-class woman in England during that period would have been anywhere from 21 to 23 years old. This would have been anathema to a middle-class English person within that period, but the circumstances here were so dramatic. In fact, when she married John Howland, it is suspected that she may have been as young as 14 years old. When the deaths became dramatic and swift, girls like Priscilla Mullins and Mary Chilton were left along in the world and subsequently taken in by other families.Įlizabeth Tilley saw her entire family die around her, and she went on to be involved in one of the earliest marriages in Plymouth. Arriving in Americaĭuring the winter that greeted the new colony in America, around half of the 102 passengers died during the harsh conditions.Īs a result, many of the surviving children sadly became orphans. When Dorothy and William Bradford sailed, their child, John, was left behind in Amsterdam - though historians are not certain who cared for him. Some families - like the Bradfords - had chosen to leave a child behind for safety's sake. Many of the households who boarded the ship brought with them servants and children of various ages, from teenagers to two- and three-year-olds. When the Mayflower sailed, three of the women on board were in varying stages of pregnancy.Įlizabeth Hopkins gave birth to her son, Oceanus, during the voyage Susannah White gave birth to her son, Peregrine, while the ship was anchored in Provincetown Harbour and Mary Allerton sadly gave birth to a stillborn child in February 1621. Richard Pickering, Deputy Director of Plimoth Patuxet Living Museum, explores more about the children of the Mayflower. However, others went on to live long and prosperous lives. Tragically, many died during the first winter the ship landed in Cape Cod. Some were children of the passengers, while others were servants or wards. It is thought that there were around 30 on board the ship when the group departed Plymouth. Little is known about the children who sailed on the Mayflower some 400 years ago.
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