My Family Was At the First Thanksgiving

On this episode of Our American Stories, Joy Neal Kidney has always loved Thanksgiving, and it makes perfect sense why. Her family was there at the first one. One branch survived a fall from the Mayflower in the middle of the ocean, and another began with a child who lost both parents before being taken in by a family whose story led straight to that early gathering. Joy shares why the holiday has always felt personal to her.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories.
All season long, we're playing Thanksgiving Stories. It's one of
our favorite holidays, and so much of the tradition surrounding
it concerns things we value here on this show, family, faith,
and food. It's also Joy Neil Kidney's favorite holidays. She's

(00:30):
one of our shows regular contributors and listeners out in
Des Moines, Iowa, where she records stories about her family's
life and her life that can often be heard here.
She also listens to us on ten forty who one
of our very best and earliest affiliates, and keeping with

(00:51):
the spirit of the holiday season, today Joy shares the
story of the first Thanksgiving and how that relates to
her own family.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Take it away, Joy, We all know the story of Thanksgiving.
One hundred pilgrims came over on the Mayflower, stepped out
on Plymouth Rock with their buckled shoes, and were greeted
by Indians who proceeded to teach them to plant corn

(01:22):
with fish. They had a big Thanksgiving dinner with turkey,
cranberry sauce, and pump compie with cool whip. Right. A
newspaper once noted that Thanksgiving is a holiday that has
no religious affiliation, and that the whole tradition centers around food.

(01:43):
School children are taught that it celebrates how nicely the
Pilgrims and Indians got along, but the Pilgrim's faith in
God is why we celebrate any of it. John and
Joan Tilley believed that the Church of England did not
teached God's word, as they founded in their Bible. They
were required to attend Anglican services, but they also met

(02:08):
with other believers to study the Bible, which was against
the law. So when their daughter Elizabeth was a toddler,
they fled to Holland with other English separatists. Though the
Dutch were tolerant, they were more body and did not
observe the Sabbath, and the English children, like Elizabeth Tilly
started speaking Dutch and becoming more like them. So after

(02:31):
a dozen years in Holland, a band of Pilgrims decided
to establish an English colony in the New World. Two
ships set sail in August of sixteen twenty, but one
of them began to leak, so they turned back. That
ship was left behind forty separatists, including the Tillies, and

(02:52):
sixty some others recruited by London businessmen, crowded on to
the Mayflower, finally embarking on September twenty. During the sixty
five day trip, they ran into a storm. When the
crowded conditions became unbearable, John Howland, an indentured servant, climbed

(03:15):
to the deck for fresh air. He was washed overboard.
Luckily for US descendants, John Howland got caught in the
halliards and was rescued. By the time the tired band
finally spotted Land, one person had died and a new
baby was born. One hundred two souls arrived. The Mayflower

(03:39):
dropped anchor off Cape cod where forty one men signed
the Mayflower Compact, the first agreement for self government and
rule of law in the New World. Our nation's foundations
are undergirded by the faith of this handful of hearty believers.
That first winter, about half of them died while they

(04:02):
were anchored off Massachusetts. Both parents of thirteen year old
Elizabeth Tilley died, so did her uncle, Edward Tilley and
his wife. Now an orphan, Elizabeth moved in with Governor
and Missus Carver, along with two other girls, but before
summer arrived, the carvers had also died. No one knows

(04:22):
who took in the girls next. When the Mayflower returned
to England in sixteen twenty two, just half the original
number of Pilgrims watched the ship disappear from sight. Of
the eighteen pilgrim wives and mothers who had left England,
only a few survived. By October, when the Pilgrims invited

(04:43):
the Wampin of Wogs to the harvest feast, four women
and five teenage girls, three of them the sole survivors
of their families, cooked and served what we now think
of as the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving. Elizabeth Tilley was fourteen.

(05:06):
When I was fourteen, my family Aford, drove a few
miles on Iowa's world gravel roads to a clan Thanksgiving
dinner bad grapha on Gramma Eels, twelve grown ups and
thirteen cousins. My only duties the Thanksgiving of nineteen fifty
eight were to help carry things in from the car
and to help my cousins do the dishes Afterwards. The

(05:29):
rest of the time was spent in cousin talk about
junior high band and basketball. I taught cousin can to dance,
rock and roll in the farmhouse's unfinished basement, next to
rows and rows of glass jars of Grandma's summer canning.
Every Thanksgiving morning we were awakened by the aroma of

(05:52):
warm yeast. My mother's specialty for the feast were her
clover leaf rolls with pecan's good to the bottoms with
brown sugar and butter. We'd find our aproned mother in
the kitchen with her hair and rollers, standing over a
huge tupperware bowl of smooth, blonde dough, ready to form
the blob into nice, neat rolls. With oiled hands, she'd

(06:16):
deftly pinch off a perfect quarter sized ball, working her
left thumb and forefinger. Pushing up from below with her
other hand, she'd nestle it into the cup of a
muff and tin onto a bed of whole pecans, melted butter,
and brown sugar, leaving room for two more little orbs
of dough. Her swift and effortless pluckings, squeezing and pinching

(06:40):
soon had filled all the sections in four muffin tins.
While the four dozen rolls were left to rise. Mom
had time to clean up in the kitchen and herself
but spending every Thanksgiving morning standing in the kitchen was
getting to be a job for a snowhaired woman in
her eighties. I e and tried making them, but they

(07:01):
were certainly an anemic version of my mother's. Back to
ancestor Elizabeth Tilly's Thanksgiving. When she was fourteen, she helped
cook and serve a harvest feast venison, wildfowl, Turkey's Indian
corn for forty eight Englishmen plus ninety wampin'wogs. That's what

(07:23):
we call the first Thanksgiving feast in America, and it
lasted three days. About three years later, Elizabeth Tilly married
John Howland, the man who survived being washed overboard and
who was the thirteenth signer of the Mayflower Compact. John

(07:45):
and Elizabeth Howland had ten children. Their descendants, including us Nils,
are scattered all over the globe. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday,
among many other things, we thank God for so many blessings,
including family, even for that long ago ancestor who, as
a teenager helped serve the first Thanksgiving feast four hundred

(08:08):
years ago, and.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
A terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by
our own Monty Montgomery and a special thanks to Joy
Neil Kidney who's sharing this story with us, and she's
a listener in ten forty who in Des Moines, one
of our very first affiliates, all the way back in
twenty sixteen. It's been that long. A special thanks to

(08:37):
the folks there and to Joy, who's done any number
of terrific stories for us. And by the way, share
your stories with us. Go to our American Stories and
click the your stories tab. Write up something, send it
to us, and who knows, maybe your story will make
it to our American Stories. And by the way, what's

(08:57):
remarkable about Joy's stories not just that she connects that
fourteen year old who had prepared that food during the
First Thanksgiving to her own story as a fourteen year
old preparing for Thanksgiving with her family. But her family
were descendants of the Mayflower. And we hear that story
over and over again on our History stories, the connection

(09:20):
between our past and our present, my family at the
first Thanksgiving here on our American Stories,