General Notes

John Alden appears to have originated from an Alden family residing in Harwich, Essex, England, that was related by marriage to the Mayflower's master Christopher Jones.  He was about 21 years old when he was hired to be the cooper, or barrel-maker, for the Mayflower's voyage to America.  He was given the option to stay in America, or return to England; he decided to stay.

At Plymouth, he quickly rose up from his common seaman status to a prominent member of the Colony.  About 1622 or 1623, he married Priscilla, the orphaned daughter of William and Alice Mullins.  They had their first child, Elizabeth, around 1624, and would have nine more children over the next twenty years.  John Alden was one of the earliest freemen in the Colony, and was elected an assistant to the governor and Plymouth Court as early as 1631, and was regularly re-elected throughout the 1630s.  He also became involved in administering the trading activities of the Colony on the Kennebec River, and in 1634 witnessed a trading dispute escalate into a double-killing, as Moses Talbot of Plymouth Colony was shot at point-blank range by trespasser John Hocking, who was then shot and killed when other Plymouth men returned fire.  John Alden was held in custody by the neighboring Massachusetts Bay Colony for a few days while the two colonies debated who had jurisdiction to investigate the murders.  Myles Standish eventually came to the Bay Colony to provide Plymouth's answer in the matter.

Alden, and several other families, including the Standish family, founded the town of Duxbury in the 1630s and took up residence there.  Alden served as Duxbury's deputy to the Plymouth Court throughout the 1640s, and served on several committees, including the Committee on Kennebec Trade, and sat on several Councils of War.  He also served as colony treasurer.  In the 1650s, he build the house at left, in Duxbury, which still stands today.  By the 1660s, Alden's frequent public service, combined with his large family of wife and ten children, began to cause his estate to languish, so the Plymouth Court provided him a number of land grants and cash grants to better provide for his family.  Throughout the 1670s, Alden began distributing his land holdings to his surviving sons.  He died in 1687 at the age of 89, one of the last surviving Mayflower passengers.