Wire-drawing, water-wheel factories, and a shipyard boast
Recalled but not checked against any source. Treat everything here as a first draft awaiting correction.
Pauline Wickwire Whitson's family, and the most affluent of the three lines. The name is said to derive from the manufacture of metal wire — a valuable and difficult skill before mechanization, requiring repeated drawing of metal through progressively smaller dies.
They owned factories at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in the water-wheel phase before steam. And by family record one of them owned the shipyard where the Mayflower was built.
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Not as a point of pride in the voyage. It was recorded as a status boast — mocking the Puritans, who were regarded as something close to heretics, as they fled. The family was on the other side of that transaction and thought it funny.
A family record that preserves its ancestors sneering at the Pilgrim Fathers is more credible than one that claims a share in their glory, because there is nothing in it to flatter the descendants.
On the underlying fact: the Mayflower's build location is not documented. Harwich in Essex is the usual answer because her master Christopher Jones was based there and the ship was registered there, but no building record survives. The Wickwire claim is therefore unverifiable rather than disproved.
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“Grandma” — an MFA from Berkeley, and the trailer below Sequoia
Open →one of the three booksHare, Whitson, Wickwire — three families, three lineage records, one tradition
Open →another of the threeEnglish gentry in Ireland, a move to Belfast, and a folk etymology
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