♂John Tilley

John Tilley (baptised 19 December 1571 – early 1621) was an Englishman from Henlow^W in Bedfordshire, described as a silk-weaver, who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 with his wife Joan and their youngest daughter Elizabeth, and died in the first winter at Plymouth. He and his younger brother Edward were both among the ten men of the exploring party that set out along the coast under Captain Myles Standish^W on 6 December 1620, a few weeks before the sickness that killed them both. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Elizabeth Tilley (1607–1687).

Early life and family

He was baptised at Henlow on 19 December 1571, the son of Robert and Elizabeth Tilley; his brother Edward Tilley^W was baptised there in 1588. Their English origin was worked out by the genealogist Robert Leigh Ward in 1976, and Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins follows him. Elizabeth Pearson White’s volume on John Howland in the Mayflower Families series calls John Tilley a silk-weaver.

On 20 September 1596, at Henlow, he married Joan (Hurst) Rogers, the widow of Thomas Rogers. Susan E. Roser’s Mayflower Increasings (1995) notes that no connection has been found between her first husband and Thomas Rogers of the Mayflower. John and Joan had five children baptised at Henlow between 1597 and 1607. The four older ones were baptised between 1597 and 1604, and nothing further is recorded of any of them; the youngest, Elizabeth, was baptised on 30 August 1607. She is the only one recorded as crossing with her parents.

By 1620 the family had joined the English separatists living at Leiden^W in Holland, and Anderson gives Leiden as the place from which John Tilley emigrated.

The Mayflower

Governor William Bradford’s list of the passengers names “John Tilley and his wife, and Elizabeth their daughter”, and next to them his brother Edward Tilley with his wife Agnes Cooper and two young cousins, Henry Sampson and Humility Cooper. John Tilley’s name appears among the signers of the Mayflower Compact^W made at Cape Cod on 11 November 1620, as printed in a Brewster family genealogy of 1908.

When the ship lay at Cape Cod, the settlers sent out small parties to find a place to build. On 6 December 1620 ten men set out along the coast in the shallop under Standish, and both John and Edward Tilley were among them. The voyage was bitterly cold; the contemporary account says Edward “had like to have sounded with cold”. It was this party that found Plymouth harbour, where the ship came to anchor later that month.

Death

John Tilley died in the first general sickness at Plymouth, in the winter and early spring of 1621, when about half of the Mayflower company died. Bradford wrote that “John Tilley and his wife both died a little after they came ashore. And their daughter Elizabeth married with John Howland and hath issue.” Edward Tilley and his wife died at about the same time. No record of the exact dates or of the place of burial survives.

Their daughter Elizabeth, then thirteen, was left an orphan. The 1885 history of the Howland family, quoted by White, places her afterwards in the household of Governor John Carver^W, where John Howland had crossed as a servant; she later married Howland, and outlived him by nearly fifteen years.

Notes

Anderson gives the year of his death as 1620, reckoned in the Old Style calendar, in which the year began on 25 March; in the modern reckoning the deaths of that first sickness fell between January and April 1621. White names Henlow as being in “Huntingdonshire”; it is in Bedfordshire.