Description
It was repeatedly said throughout the tercentenary year that many of the people who sailed on the Mayflower had come from the region of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. Lancashire was not home to a large number of the Pilgrims, but it could boast of being home to one of the most famous of the Mayflower men: General Miles (or Myles) Standish. Widespread tradition connected the Mayflower’s Miles Standish with the Standishes of Duxbury Hall in Lancashire. However, as the tercentenary became an ever hotter topic, there was an effort to establish the real extent of Miles Standish’s connection with the area around Chorley, Wigan, and Ormskirk – what one local historian, a Dr Nightingale, dubbed “Standish Country”.
Nightingale delved into the evidence for the connection, searching through Standish’s will and the parish register for clues, but he uncovered something of a historical mystery. In his will, Miles Standish had made reference to lands to which he had title but had been unjustly deprived. According to Nightingale, when Standish’s American descendants attempted to recover the lands in the 1840s, their search for a birth certificate led them to the same parish records as Nightingale was consulting in 1920. However, the records for Miles Standish’s birth year, which could have been either 1584 or 1585, had been rubbed out with a pumice stone. This has the effect of destroying any definitive evidence either for Miles Standish’s connection to the area or for his claim to ancestral land.
Despite the lack of certainty, Nightingale opined that even this mystery was “sufficient to show that at our very door is a district rich in historic associations such as it would be difficult to surpass in any other part of the country...”.