Researching the Bishop and Cummings Family Lines

From the time I could reason, I was told that our relatives had come to America seven years after the Mayflower.  And when Mom and I started our research, that’s what we went with.  Have a close look at the two ship record facsimiles pictured here.

Acquired by Mom somewhere along the way, the first indicates the presence of a Bishop passenger on the Abigail arriving to Salem in 1628 and the second indicates a Cummings passenger on the Ambrose arriving in 1630.  

Mom and I never questioned the accuracy of these documents.  They coincided with the lineages that our distant Bishop cousin, Bud Harvey, had given us in the mid 1970’s.  And when I recently took up the research again, I found that they matched up with current historical findings, such as this Winthrop Fleet document, which shows the Ambrose as the second ship to arrive as part of Winthrop’s Fleet in 1630.  And further records tell of the Abigail’s arrival two years earlier, carrying a small group of passengers to prepare the way for the Winthrop Fleet that would bring over 1000 Pilgrims to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  

So it all made wonderfully perfect sense:  
Our Bishop ancestor was an early scout on the Abigail for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which our Cummings ancestor would join on the Ambrose two years later.  Mom would have liked that.

Our first Cummings ancestor, Isaac, didn’t set foot in the New World until 15 years after the Mayflower.  He arrived in 1635, five years after Winthrop’s Fleet.  And even though he was not among those first colonists, he was very much a part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony experience, serving as a church deacon, a constable and a grand juryman in several of the colony towns.  He’d inherited substantially from his father and was able to purchase numerous properties, the last of which was in Topsfield – where first his grandson and then great grandson would marry first the niece and then the granddaughter of Mary Easty, convicted and hung in the Salem Witch Trials. 

I also got my answer as to how the Bishops ended up in New York: Some five generations after they had first settled in Virginia, John Bishop VI moved to Long Island to marry Mary Reeve.  Their son John Armstrong would then marry Elizabeth Smith, the granddaughter of Revolutionary War hero, Col. Josiah Smith. Here’s Mom at his grave in East Moriches, Long Island. (Photo to come.) Three generations later, in 1863, Lola’s father – Leroy Smith Bishop – was born in Sag Harbour, Long Island, New York.  

We still don’t know why the Bishops moved from Sag Harbour to Sauk Center, Minnesota in 1875. But the rest is history when Leroy marries Estelle – the daughter of our Methodist minister great grandfather,  Albert Webster Cummings.