John Alden wasn't even supposed to stay. He was hired in Southampton as the Mayflower's cooper — the barrel-maker responsible for keeping the ship's water and provisions sound — with the option to return to England once the voyage was done. He was about twenty-one. He chose to stay.

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Priscilla Mullins had no such choice to make. She was only seventeen when she boarded the Mayflower, and by the end of that first brutal winter in Plymouth she had lost her father, her stepmother, and her brother — she was the only member of her family left in the New World. She spent that first year spinning wool and flax for the colony, teaching children, and helping with the cooking — the quiet, unglamorous work of survival.

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John and Priscilla married around 1623, likely the third couple wed in Plymouth Colony — a small, hard-won hope in a settlement that had buried so many of its own. By the 1660s they had raised ten children together, and John went on to serve the colony for decades as an assistant to the governor, colony treasurer, and one of the founders of Duxbury. When he died in 1687, he was the last surviving signer of the Mayflower Compact.

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You may have also heard the other story about them — that Myles Standish asked John to court Priscilla on his behalf, and that she turned to John and said, famously, "why don't you speak for yourself, John?" It's a wonderful story. It's also almost certainly not a true one — it first appeared in print in 1814, was popularized by Longfellow's poem decades later, and there's no record of any such rivalry in the actual Plymouth Colony documents. I like knowing both versions: the legend we tell, and the quieter, harder truth underneath it. That tension feels like genealogy in miniature.

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Our line runs through their son David Alden, born in 1646 in Duxbury, who married Mary Southworth in 1674 — carrying the Alden name forward into the generations that eventually became ours.