Some history

I came across an English tourist venture, called "The Jamestown Adventure: Begin Your Adventure Where Your Ancestors Began Theirs." It's apparently run out of Lincolnshire, and is trying to attract descendants of the Jamestown colonists. This strikes me as charmingly modest in comparison to US-ian marketing campaigns, which go after anyone who has or can get his/her hands on the requisite money.

There is a place on the Website of The Jamestown Adventure for people to post their stories. There are a bazillion posts there, including an interesting debate amongst some descendants of a man named either Kellam Throgmorton or Throgmorton Kellam on what the ancestor's actual name was. There is certainly a case to be made for either name, since it's being conducted by people surnamed Kellam AND Throgmorton.

I don't find that as intriguing as the fact that the his descendants are arguing about his name centuries later.

But what I was going to complain about this morning was that this outfit is claiming that Jamestown was the "first English speaking settlement in the United States of America." In fact, Jamestown was NOT the first English-speaking settlement in what eventually became the USA. There's Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke (1585), which is well known enough to have an annual play about the lost colony, and Popham Rock, 1607, which was one of two settlements chartered in 1606 to a joint stock company. The other site in that charter was Jamestown.

Roanoke is old news, but Popham Rock was only discovered in 1994, when archaeologist Jeffrey Brain matched up a local story of a lost colony where he was vacationing in Maine to a 1608 map of Fort St. George discovered in Spanish government archives in 1888. It's still being excavated.

I am off to see if I can find other early failed-or-forgotten English colonies.