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Priscilla Mullins (Alden)

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Adventurer

The Resume

    (1602-1685)
    Born in Dorking, Surrey, United Kingdom
    Famous member of Massachusetts's Plymouth Colony of Pilgrims
    Wife of Plymouth's assistant governor John Alden (m. 1621)
    Founding settler of the town of Duxbury, Massachusetts
    Best known for figuring prominently into Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's romantic poem 'The Courtship of Miles Standish' (1858)
    Portrayed by Dawn Addams, opposite Van Jones, in the Spencer Tracy film 'Plymouth Adventure' (1952)

Why she might be annoying:

    Her date of death has been disputed (officially listed at 1685, some put if around five years earlier).
    Her last name turns up in some historical documents as 'Molines' (as her father frequently signed it).
    Her family had the idea to move to the New World not out of religious persecution but because her shoe-maker father saw it as a ripe business opportunity (not many shoe stores out in those colonies).
    Most of what people know (or think they know) about her come from a poem about a (most likely fictional) love triangle between her future husband and Myles Standish.
    There are some historians who try to claim that the triangle 'could have happened' because Standish and Alden were roommates and Priscilla was one of the only available women in the colony, but no record exists of Standish ever begging Alden to 'propose for him.'

Why she might not be annoying:

    She lost both her parents and her younger brother during the Mayflower's long voyage.
    She was one of the few women to survive the first year at Plymouth Colony.
    She and John Alden may have been the third couple to be married in the Colony.
    Her eldest son narrowly escaped being hanged on witchcraft charges, after being jailed in Boston during the Salem Witch Trials (the nine others imprisoned were executed).
    She and her husband's family remained close with the family of Myles Standish for several generations, even moving together to Duxbury, Massachusetts in the late 1620s (they are also buried in the same plot).
    The origin of the story incorporated in the Longfellow poem was that it had apparently been handed down in the Alden family (and had been published by her and John's great-great-grandson, in 1814).
    The poem inspired a Charlie Brown special annually aired around Thanksgiving, in which the triangle is repeatedly referenced by Linus and Marcy ('He's all yours, Priscilla!')
    Her descendants include John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Marilyn Monroe, Orson Welles, J. Edgar Hoover, and (fittingly) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Credit: BoyWiththeGreenHair


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 4 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 8 Votes: 62.50% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 4 Votes: 75.00% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 6 Votes: 16.67% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 2 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 8 Votes: 37.50% Annoying