THE DELAWARE SOCIETY

The Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of Delaware welcomes you to its website. We are one of fifty-two societies in the United States and Canada formed under the auspices of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants which was founded at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1897. Our membership consists of individuals who have proven their descent from one or more of the passengers who sailed from Holland and England to New England in the fall of 1620 aboard the ship Mayflower, and established an English colony there at a place they named Plymouth, located in what is now Massachusetts. Twenty six men and three women of the original 102 passengers aboard the Mayflower have descendants, and genealogists estimate that today, almost four hundred years later, there are over twenty million living persons who descend from those twenty nine pilgrims.

The Delaware Society was formed in 1958, by a group of Mayflower descendants living in the State of Delaware, to preserve the memory and history of our pilgrim ancestors. Our Society works to honor those brave pilgrims by keeping their memory alive through education, disseminating information about our pilgrim heritage through the distribution of books to our libraries statewide, through the distribution of educational materials to our public and private schools and the presentation of programs in the classrooms of younger children, and through the sponsorship for the general public of various programs about our pilgrim heritage.

The Society has two regular meetings each year, a Compact Luncheon in November, which commemorates the signing of the Mayflower Compact on November 11, 1620, and a second meeting held in May, generally at one of Delaware's historic houses. We have approximately 200 active members, and we have had almost 400 members since our inception in 1958. The Society is a charitable and educational non-profit organization, all of whose funds are raised from private, tax deductible contributions from our members and friends, and are used for our educational mission.