Scholars team up to dispel 400-year-old fake news about U.S.

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4. This program could be an outgrowth of that older effort

I know I was taught all the usual myths about the glorious Pilgrims and the Plymouth colony. But when I got into genealogy I found out that there were effectively three classes of settlers - the monied class that was allowed to buy shares in the colony corporation and become Freemen, the people with skills who had scraped together enough money to pay their passages but not enough to buy into the corporation, and the indentured servants who worked to pay for their passage and maybe to earn enough to get some land.

My ancestors were members of all three classes and some, such as Anne Hutchinson, were troublemakers who were thrown out for not adhering to the tenets that the Pilgrims required everyone to believe. From the lives of their descendants, it looks as though those with skills that were passed along to their children were most successful.