when was captain miles standish born?

Answer 1

1584

PLYMOUTH, Mass. -- In 1620, Miles Standish led 101 other Mayflower colonists ashore here. He battled Indians, took part in the first Thanksgiving and inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's classic poem about his unrequited love for a Pilgrim maiden.

Although historians recorded much about the bantam old soldier, he took one piece of vital data to his grave 348 years ago: the whereabouts of his birth.

By all accounts, the Pilgrim was an Englishman, but because his birthrecords can't be found, it's unknown precisely where he was born inabout 1584. Multiple branches of the Standish family lived in England then. Now, researchers and Standish descendants are fighting over which one produced Miles in a battle featuring DNA tests, suspect church records and the plotting of a commemorative golf tournament.

Helen Moorwood, a genealogist who has researched the matter for years, maintains the Pilgrim patriarch hailed from Lancashire, the northwest English county where she grew up. There, in what is now the small town of Chorley, one branch of the Standish family had an estate called Duxbury Hall. Miles Standish eventually built his own home in Duxbury, Mass., a town he co-founded.

"I have never been able to come across any reason why he should name it Duxbury unless he was related to the Standishes of Duxbury," declares Ms. Moorwood, who supports an effort by Chorley to use the Standish legacy as a tourist attraction.

That doesn't wash with retired chemist Norman Standish, a 10th-generation, direct descendant of Miles and owner of the Standish Bed and Breakfast, in Lanark, Ill. Known for dressing up in Pilgrim garb for local Thanksgiving events, he grew up believing that Miles was a Manxman -- as natives of the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea, call themselves. Miles Standish's will mentioned a place by that name, and old land records show a Standish family lived on an island farm, Ellenbane, around the time of his birth.

"There is no question his mother and father lived in Ellenbane," says Mr. Standish, a former president of the North American Manx Association, who has led a long-running effort to buy Ellenbane and turn it into a monument.

The man at the center of the wrangle was a more complex character than the awkward suitor described in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," Longfellow's fictional 1858 poem. The poem, and accounts written in Standish's time, praise his military prowess and devotion to fellow colonists.

But the pint-sized Pilgrim is also said to have invited an Indian who had insulted him to a feast and then used the warrior's own knife to kill him. "A little chimney is soon fired; so was the Plymouth captain, a man of very little stature, yet of a very hot and angry temper," wrote William Hubbard, a clergyman who arrived in Massachusetts a few years after the Mayflower.

"He was a crusty, bad-tempered old guy," says Caroline Lewis Kardell. She spent 15 years as chief genealogist of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, in Plymouth, Mass., whose 26,000 living members can trace their lineage directly back to one of the original colonists. When someone applied to join the Mayflower society, it was up to Ms. Kardell to review the files and make a ruling.

After retiring in 2002, Ms. Kardell volunteered to head an experimental DNA project for the Mayflower society to track down the birthplaces of Miles Standish and a half-dozen other Pilgrim men. Male members of the Mayflower Society directly descended from such colonists were asked to submit swabs from their inner cheeks to test for certain chromosomes that are passed only from father to son. The plan was to conduct such testing among Englishmen with the same last names, looking for matches that might link the Americans to a particular location.

But by last year, Ms. Kardell had turned up only three Standishes in this country who could trace their lineage, father-to-son, all the way back to Miles. And when asked to volunteer a DNA sample, one of them told her to get lost.

Then, in the fall of 2003, a letter arrived from John Cree, the Anglican rector of Chorley, a faded market town of 20,000. The Rev. Cree had a church pew used in centuries past by members of the Standish family, an unknown number of whom are buried in a crypt beneath his altar. Because local tradition had it that Miles Standish had been born in the area, Chorley was hoping to hold some sort of commemoration.

Sensing an opportunity to jump-start her Standish search, Ms. Kardell replied to the rector, asking whether there were any Standish men from Chorley willing to part with a tad of tissue from their cheeks. Mr. Cree went to the local newspapers. "DNA tests set to prove Pilgrim Father's heritage," read one headline in the Chorley Guardian last December.

Soon there was talk of a Miles Standish heritage trail, a commemorative festival and maybe even a golf tournament. "I'm the rector of the church that is sitting on this," says Mr. Cree. "I'd be negligent if I didn't stir it up."

Actually, Chorley had been stirred before. Convinced they had a claim to lands in town, some of Miles's U.S. descendants sent a representative in 1846 to establish a definitive link. The man returned complaining that local church records had been ripped out or effaced until they were unreadable, perhaps by locals seeking to thwart a Yankee land grab.

Miles's will mentions claims to several plots of ancestral land. Many are in the Chorley vicinity, including acreage now occupied by a golf course that was once home to Duxbury Hall, a sprawling estate owned by one group of Standishes. But the will also refers to claims to property at an "Isle of Man." That is the name of a large farm that still exists in Lancashire -- but also the name of the island where another branch of the Standish family lived.

The Standish boosters in Chorley aren't ruffled. "We've got a pew, a few dead bodies under a church and a defaced record," says Chris Mellor, cultural services manager for the Chorley Borough Council. "That's more than the Isle of Man."

Still, Chorley's campaign has run into hurdles. Some English branches of the Standish family have simply died out. Most male Standishes who have volunteered to take DNA tests can't document their heritage.

One exception is Benjamin Standish, a 46-year-old Benedictine monk who lives near Reading, in the south of England. As a boy, Father Standish says, his parents told him ancestors lived in Chorley. The monk can document part of his family tree, albeit only as far back as 1780, more than a century after Miles Standish died.

A sample of his DNA shows close kinship to the two samples gathered in the U.S. by Ms. Kardell. The specimens from the three Standish men are not exact matches but are close enough to indicate with a high degree of probability that the trio had a common ancestor, says Max Blankfeld, a vice president of DNA Family Tree, the Houston lab that tested them. But if that common forebear came generations before Miles Standish, all three men might be only distant cousins of the Pilgrim.

Benjamin Standish will be among the honored guests at a five day festival in Chorley in March commemorating the signing of Miles Standish's will. It will include plays, lectures and concerts -- as a warm-up for a bigger celebration in 2006 to mark the 350th anniversary of his death. There's also talk in town about trying to open the Standish family crypt to gather additional DNA samples, although Mr. Cree thinks that may involve getting the permission of the Pilgrim's nearest living relative, whoever that might be.

Answer 2

It was a good question and here is the answer. Standish was born about 1584 (though some put his birth later around 1587, [add] according to his age 37 and the date on the only known portrait, painted on his return visit to England in 1625)

Answer 3

Capt. Miles Standish was born in 5184.