From Wales to Boston to Utah

Dear Editor,

Paul Revere’s famous ride on April 18, 1775, is described by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The City of Boston honors this historic event. Boston is a city that extends for 26 miles. If you cross the Charles River, you will end up in Cambridge, Mass.

Boston and Plymouth, Mass., both played important roles in the lives of my ancestors, the Adamses and the Hancocks.

Thomas Hancock was a sea captain who was born in western England in 1533. He brought cargos of pelts back to western England in addition to lumber and explored the coastline in the vicinity of Boston.

William Blackstone, a British clergyman lived at Shawmut, later Boston, in the 1620s.

John Winthrup, a Puritan, arrived in Shawmut in 1630 and named it Boston. (The Hancocks were Puritans.)

John Adams arrived at Plymouth, Mass., Nov. 9, 1621, on the ship known as the Fortune, and the Pilgrims established their colony at Plymouth Dec. 21, 1620.

In 1623, the ship Mary Anne reached Plymouth. A young widow, Ellenor Worden Newton and her father, Peter Worden, were passengers on it.

It appears that John Adams and Ellenor Worden knew each other back in western England (Wales). They were married shortly after she arrived at Plymouth. Their children were John, James and Susanna.

As more ships came, they brought livestock. There were records that John and Ellenor owned a goat and a small cow in common with another family.

John and Ellenor obtained land at Scituate, Mass., an extension of the Plymouth colony. Unfortunately, an epidemic hit in the summer of 1633.

John died and Ellenor was widowed again. She married Edward Winslow, a settler of the Plymouth colony.

John Adams (our second president) was descendent of Henry Adams, a Puritan from Somershire, England.

Our family connection to the Adams family is through Susanna Adams, a descendant of Henry Adams.

The Hancocks and Adams families married others.

My great-grandfather was Isaac Adams Hancock. The Hancocks and Adams families traveled via the Erie Canal to the Chagrin River in northeast Ohio and along the Mormon Trail to Utah.

Helen Ruth Arnold,

Trenton, Neb.