We publish the Illinois Mayflower News newsletter twice per year for our membership. Recent copies of our newsletter may be viewed here.

Winter zoom meeting

Sunday, february 2, 2025

Zoom - Time TBA

Meetings

newsletters

New york Mayflower society -annual debutante ball

Held in early november each year

The University Club of New York

One West 54th Street

New York, NY

Our Spring Luncheon will be at the Maggiano's Little Italy Restuarant in Oak Brook, Ilinois, on Saturday, May 10, 2024.

The specific agenda is still to be determined

All members are invited to attend, along with their guests and children. Prospective members who have started the official membership process are also welcome.

Invitations will be sent via postal mail to members about three weeks before the meeting. Reservations are required.

Our Winter Zoom presentation will feature a presentation titled "Mayflower Compact: The Original Social Contract" by Richard Pickering.

Richard Pickering is the Deputy Executive Director and Senior Historian at Plimoth Patuxet Museums, a living history museum dedicated to 17th-century Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag Homeland. He oversees the Museum's research, educational, and theatrical programs. Richard has spoken at the United Nations, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and universities nationwide. He has also appeared on C-SPAN, NPR, PBS, History Channel, NECN, NBC News, and the Smithsonian Channel.

Mayflower Compact: The Original Social Contract

Plymouth Colony was a place of political creativity and improvisation. It was a birthplace of self-government in the British Atlantic World and played a critical role in this country’s constitutional tradition. The Mayflower Compact was only the beginning of a groundbreaking seventy-year experiment in civil government and individual spiritual liberties. It is an experiment which can shine a light for us today.

Historian Pauline Meier characterized our Nation’s founding documents as American Scripture. Certainly, the Mayflower Compact takes chronological priority in the sacred text of America’s civil religion. In the absence of a royal charter, faced with mounting dissension because Mayflower landed north of the colony’s legal destination in northern Virginia, key passengers initiated organization of a government and legal structure by formulating a self-declared "combination" in which the necessity of forming a "civil body politic” was set forth.

This combination was signed on November 11, 1620, by 41 adult men of the original settlers, and it provided a first step toward setting up a government which could claim legitimate authority to impose constraints on the colonists. Later Plymouth Colony declarations would cite this combination, the land patents received from the New England Council (a private corporation established by the Crown), and the settlers' pursuit of the greater "glory of God" as the foundations for the Plymouth government's authority in issuing laws to govern the colony and manage an expanding settlement over the years.

Illinois Mayflower society

spring luncheon

saturday, may 10, 2025

Maggiano's Little Italy Restaurant

240 Oakbrook Center, Oak Brook, Illinois, 60523

The New York Mayflower Society’s Annual Debutante Ball is held in early November each year in New York City.

All members of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants and their friends and family are invited to attend, as well as all former debutantes and their families, as we celebrate the presentation of this year’s debutantes.

All Mayflower Society Members may sponsor the presentation of a debutante who is a bloodline female descendant between the ages of 18-24. Most debutantes are presented in their first year of college.

Please contact the New York Mayflower Society for more information, or to sponsor a debutante.

https://mayflowernewyork.org/annual-ball/