Title page for Thomas Dekker’s A Rod for Run-awayes, a 1625 pamphlet.
How often do we think, “I’m lucky to be alive”?
Every once in a while, when I’m out walking especially, I’ll suddenly be struck with how amazing it is that I’m alive. I’m guessing we all take this fact for granted most of the time. But for me, thinking about car accidents I’ve been in, the pneumonia I had as a child, the mountains I’ve hiked where I lost the trail, in snow, and momentarily panicked, it strikes me that I might not be alive. Any number of things could have ruined me.
Like COVID-19, just for one example.
It’s been about four years since the pandemic fully came to reshape our existence. It was in March of 2020 that the lockdowns in Louisville began, the closure of schools and businesses, and eventually the layoffs, the empty grocery store shelves. Think for a moment how long ago that may or may not feel. Remember, too, that it lasted a while. Remember how afraid people were, especially at the beginning, when it felt like no one knew anything.
We should remember, too, that people died. And that frightened us even more. It certainly frightened me.
Let’s think back three years. Does that feel like a long time ago? We were only then beginning to emerge from the worst of it, though there was still a lot of anxiety. Now that you have that time frame in mind, let’s go back nearly four hundred years to seventeenth-century London.
In March of 1625, disease had begun to spread through the suburbs of London. It is thought to have been the bubonic plague, a strain of Yersinia pestis spread by fleas. At first, the bacteria spread undetected, but by summer, deaths numbered in the thousands. By year’s end, close to 70,000 lives were lost across England, with more than half of those deaths in London alone—the records of the time show 35,428 burials from the plague, more than ten percent of the city’s population at the time, and even then, that’s likely an underestimation.
One parish struck particularly hard was Stepney, where many of the docks and wharves of the Thames were located, home to a community of mariners. Among them, and importantly among the survivors, was William Lock and his wife, Elisabeth.
Little is known of either. William may have been born in Middlesex, in perhaps 1602, to Edward, the only name apparently extant in this line. Elisabeth may have been born in 1604, in December, in the Stepney Parish, though for her there is a longer list of names that came before her, including the Salters and the Brocketts. But I can’t attribute this material accurately, and much of it may be circumstantial.
What is most incredible is this: William and Elisabeth survived a devastating plague. This is enormously important because, had they not, they would not have had their son, who came to America. Remember that three year increment: that’s the time that passed between the outbreak and the birth of their son, who would soon be orphaned.
We know the names of William and Elisabeth from a baptismal record in the Stepney parish archives, dated the twentieth of December, 1628: William, a mariner, and his wife Elisabeth, were the parents of the younger William, born seven days earlier.
The only other record following is this: “Buried Elisabeth, wife of William Lock, mariner, 27 June, 1631.” Why she died is anyone’s guess. Her son, William, was not yet three years old.
What happened to the father, the elder William, is also unclear, though I did find a date of death online of August 31, 1634; but another webpage says he died sometime before 1634—the latter is likelier, given what was to happen soon afterward, as we’ll see. (Like so much material submitted by users of these genealogy sites, they are rarely cited. As my father would say, when he showed me a genealogical chart that linked us to the English king, Edward I, also known as Edward Longshanks, “Take it with a grain of salt.”)
The son, William, apparently traveled on the ship Planter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634 or 1635 (again, confusing dates with little attribution), at the age of six; his name and age were recorded on the ship manifest on March 22, 1634 and it sailed apparently in April. For context, the Mayflower had landed in America only fifteen years before. When he arrived on the new continent, William is said to have lived in Woburn, just a few miles west of Boston.
Much of what was known as “The Great Migration” had to do with the persecutions against the Puritans, who were driven from England beginning in 1620, in the reign of James I. Year after year, the Puritans embarked for New England. William was one of them, but why he came remains obscured by history.
We only know that he escaped the plague and survived the trans-Atlantic crossing.
If you are reading this, you survived many things. However far your descendants extend into the future, it will be because you survived long enough to parent a child who themselves survived. You’ve survived accidents, wars, and plagues. You’ve avoided death itself, and that’s something you might hope someone years from now will be grateful for.
Therefore, it is equally right that we should be grateful for the survival of all of our ancestors. For me, even recently, I realized how my own mother survived her childhood; she was born with her duodenum (if I remember right) sealed, so that she could take no milk—she projectile vomited and eventually her skin began to turn ashen—an operation saved her. Her father survived World War II, and barely—he was wounded by a rocket at Anzio Beach. And one of his ancestors survived, though wounded in both, two major battles in the American Civil War, at Perryville and Stones River. One wrong move would have cost not only his life, but mine. And my daughter’s.
Why do I study ancestry and heritage? Why pore over genealogy? Because I learn how resilient human beings are. How fortunate we can be in the face of disaster. Many of the ships that came from Europe sank in the Atlantic, but the ones my ancestors were on did not.
We are incredibly lucky to be alive at all.
What is even luckier for me was how I found this information. I came upon it with some luck, but much of it owed, too, to my father.