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PILGRIM OR PURITAN
The terms "Pilgrim and Puritan" may be used sometimes interchangeably in
some printed sources, but this is incorrect. English Separatists,
including Pilgrims and Puritans, were those people in England, who, during the reign
of Queen Mary, refused to conform to the public services of the Roman
Catholic Church.
Separatists worshipped in defiance of the established Anglican Church of
England. By the close of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, there were three
kinds of Separatists:
1. Those who believed in the established church having connection with the
state were wrong and unscriptural. The local church should manage its own
affairs. These were the Pilgrims.
2. Those who would have a state church under Presbyterian form of
government.
3. Those who desired a purified worship but still remained in the Church of
England. These were the Puritans.
Thirty-five of the Mayflower voyagers who landed in Plymouth in 1620 were
Pilgrims, the other 65 were not separatists, but were sent by the Virginia
Company to work. New Pilgrims arrived in 1621, Salem became a successful
second town, and by 1640 there were eight towns in the Pilgrim colony in
the New World.
The Puritans were part of a group called the Massachusetts Bay Company who
originally were destined for Salem, Massachusetts, but who settled in
Boston in 1630. Although religious freedom was an influential cause of Puritan
settlement, economic betterment and land acquisition was on the minds of many new
arrivals.
Eventually, the Pilgrims were outnumbered in Salem. In 1691 the King
appointed a new governor who joined Maine and the Plymouth Colony to the
Massachusetts Bay Colony and Salem became a Puritan Town.
Taken from "The Family Tree" 2/1998
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