You may be paranoid, but ...

Once again, I have searched a branch of the family back as far as it goes on Family Search, but this search led to more of the sort of deeper dive into history that I hope to base these musings on. 

Family Search allows me to find documents associated with a particular family member, which makes my research easier. Searching for many names that have no associated documentation usually winds up resulting in a list of genealogy sites that all contain the same basic information. But generally I will find something in documents provided that can send me into the course of history.

Thomas Parker, a great-great-to-the-x grandfather, came to America in 1635 as part of what is known as "The Great Migration," an influx of Puritan settlers to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s and 40s.

You may remember that the Puritans arrived a couple of decades earlier, mostly fleeing religious persecution. The Puritans were "non-conformists," just one sect of Christianity that had problems with the beliefs and practices of the established Church of England. For some, the difference between the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church was too small to fret about, and they were thorough-going Protestants. As you might expect, Anglican leaders had a problem with this view.

In 1625, Charles I became king of England. Charles held sympathies for Catholocism, and he married a Catholic. This meant the Catholic church would hold the favored position in England, and dissenters would probably be even less welcome. 

John Winthrop led a group to what is now Boston in 1630 and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It quickly became the most lucrative and successful of the colonies. You would think that would be a good thing, right? But King Charles decided to appoint William Laud as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the top guy in the Anglican Church, and he was no great friend of the nonconformists. The Puritans decided they needed to get out of Dodge, or England and began a much larger exodus to America than had been seen previously.

Again, you might be tempted to think of this as a good thing -- get the troublemakers out of your hair. But these Puritan folks tended to hold Republican ideals, their loyalty to king and country was often suspect. And you don't want a bunch of rabble rousers who might not support the king taking over your best colony. 

So, Laud established a commission to put some rules about immigration into place. In 1634 the commission told English ship captains that anyone seeking passage on their ships had to take oaths of allegiance and supremacy and that all religious services held on board had to follow the Book of Common Prayer. 

They also stipulated that the male passengers who were "subsidy men" -- wealthy enough to pay a tax subsidy, which was a tax on possessions instead of property -- had to have a special license from the commission allowing them to leave. Anyone below that level of income had to have affidavits from two justices of the peace and a local minister attesting to the traveler's loyalty to the king and the Anglican Church. 

This disrupted the captains' other endeavors, and they put up a fuss. Officials released the ships. One of the officials charged with enforcing the commissions demands put the word out that anyone thinking of emigrating should "bring him any certificate from minister, churchwardens, or justice that they were honest men, and he would give them their pass." As for the license for subsidy men, "he answered that he could not tell who were subsidy men and would discharge them (from having a license)" if they could provide a certificate from a minister or justice." [1] Despite the commission's efforts, the rules continued to be rather laxly enforced.

Thomas Parker is listed on the manifest of a ship called the Susan and Ellen -- to use modern spelling -- that left for American in 1635. The heading for the section he is listed under is titled "These parties hereunder have brought Certificates from the Minister of Justices of the Conformitie [sic} and that they are no Subsidy Men. 

Another heading contains similar wording but adds that the listed passengers are conformable to the orders of the Church of England.

Thomas would later move to the town of Reading, Mass. and become a founder of the Congregational church there and one of its first deacons. Maybe. I should note that one of the notes attached to his listing in the family history takes some pains to point out that Thomas Parker is a fairly common English name, and the writer of the note cautions that there's no proof that the Parker all the documents talk about is in fact the same Parker whose line becomes part of that part of the family tree. 

But it gave me a good run through some history I did not know. 

[1] John Winthrop, America's Forgotten Founding Father, Frances J. Bremer, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 235-236, accessed through Google Books.

Image: "Ships coming to America, 1633-1635" from: www.geni.com/projects/Great-Migration-Passengers-of-the-Susan-and-Ellen-1635/15966