The Mayflower voyage in 1620 and the cold December landing at Plymouth Rock, then the hard dangerous first year in which half the passengers became ill and died, but the final success of their Plymouth settlement with Indian help and their celebratory banquet, have all achieved legendary status. School children learn to recognize the plain black and white clothes of the Pilgrims. Their harvest feast ultimately became our national holiday of Thanksgiving in November. In fact, having an ancestor among the Mayflower passengers became a mark of high honor. 
Like all legends, this one of the Pilgrims exceeded reality. Though the history of their search for religious liberty is real, the Pilgrims themselves gave no one else religious freedom to worship in a different style from the plain, stern Calvinism they followed. They banished and sent out all those who differed, such as Roger Williams who had to found his own settlement in Rhode Island to practice his different style of worship and to express his views dissenting from the Pilgrims on their treatment of the Native Americans.
Also, not all who sailed on the Mayflower were religious pilgrims. Some were sailing to the new colony in America to make their fortune. They were called "the Strangers" because they had not lived among the Non-Conformists in England and later in Holland. In fact, the cost of the sea voyage for so many passengers was paid by London merchants who had to be repaid from profits the Pilgrims hoped to make with crops they would grow on the new land they would take over. So in a sense all of the passengers were under contract to London business interests. Yet they remain as champions of liberty in the general American consciousness.
In 1897 was founded the General Society of Mayflower Descendants with its stated purpose "to perpetuate the memory of the Pilgrims, to maintain and defend their principles of civil and religious liberty, to honor their unfailing strength, undying courage and abiding faith, to which they committed their lives." The Society has been foremost in fostering the genealogical study of Mayflower ancestry and has set high standards of evidence and proof of descent. Their studies are being published in the series Mayflower Families through Five Generations, with a volume divided into Parts 1-3 for each of the passengers who had issue. The volumes are colloquially called the "silver books" for their silver-colored hard covers. For our ancestor, Henry Samson, his books are Vol. 20, Part 1, 183 pp. published in 2000, and Vol. 20, Part 2, 634 pp. published in 2005.
Our ancestor, Henry Samson, was found and identified as a Mayflower passenger by descendant Bertren Langford, official and unofficial genealogist of the Langford family of Utah, Nevada and Idaho. For a while he also had a pedigree claiming to show descent from William Brewster, the kindly theologian of the Pilgrims. As Bert’s widow once told me, after he had thrown out the Brewster descent as a fake, she saw him chuckling to himself. Answering her question "Why the chuckle?" he explained, "I was just imagining how old William up in Heaven must be amused at people arguing over whether they descend from him!" Bert especially focused on the maternal lines of his own mother, the Dalley and Allen lines into which the Hillman family brought the Mayflower Samson line. Bert’s work is shown in the pedigree of Mandana Hillman LINK TO HER PED, who married William Dalley, and in the Dalley family charts that show both Dalley wives of Isaac F. Langford LINK to Dalley page.
This Hillman pedigree is important to us for several reasons besides its value as our Mayflower descent. It also gives the maternal line of Susannah Mayhew, wife of Silas Hillman and thus great-grandmother of Mandana Hillman Dalley. In Susannah’s line, her 3Xgreat-grandfather "Governour" Thomas Mayhew was almost a unique figure in Massachusetts history in that he founded a medieval fiefdom that he named the Manor of Tisbury with himself as Lord of the Manor, though he took for himself the unusual title of "Governour." The Manor as such lasted even after his death in 1682, and the last Mayhew to claim hereditary rights died in 1760, according to Charles E. Banks. The only son of Gov. Mayhew had different interests and became a clergyman. Rev. Thomas Mayhew is considered the first English Christian missionary to the Native Americans, learning their language, treating them with respect, and letting them govern themselves. Rev. Thomas died young, lost at sea in 1657, and a monument stands where his ship departed. It must be said in the father’s favor that he then took upon himself his son’s preaching to the tribes on the island of Martha"s Vinerard and for years replaced his lost son until his grandson could replace him..
Of Rev. Thomas’s three sons, the youngest one John (great-grandfather of Susannah Mayhew) followed in his clergyman father’s footsteps, though he was only five years old when his father was lost at sea. Having grown up with the language, he became public preacher to the Wampanoag tribe on the island. Here Susannah’s line leaves the missionaries as her grandfather became a farmer and her father farmed and also was a master mariner. The Mayhew family mission continued with Rev John’s eldest son, Experience Mayhew, who translated the Psalms and St John’s Gospel into the Wampanoag tongue and published them in parallel columns. He also wrote biographies of numerous converts and "Christianized Indians," and his son Zacchariah became the last of the "Missionary Mayhews." For more detail see Charles E. Banks’s three-volume History of Martha’s Vineyard, the highly esteemed basic genealogical source for Henry Samson’s family, the Mayhews, and related families living on the island. It is still in print from its publication in 1911, cataloged in most public libraries, and given in various verbatim forms on the Internet as is easily shown by a Google search of Banks’s name.
The Mayhew who became the most famous and most influential of all, was our cousin, not our ancestor. Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, youngest son of Experience Mayhew, was interested in the political status of the colonies, not the Indians, and became minister of the old West Church in Boston. Banks says "his sermons regularly delivered at the weekly services were full of his reflections on the social and political tendencies of the times and they kept alive the revolutionary spirit of the people." Banks also cites President John Adams, who said that Rev. Jonathan "seemed to be raised up to revive all the animosity of the people against tyranny within Church and State and at the same time to destroy their bigotry, fanaticism and inconsistencies. This transcendent genius threw all the weight of his great fame into the scale of his country" (Banks, Vol. III). Rev. Jonathan became ill and died young before the American Revolutionary War began, but he had strongly resisted the Stamp Act of 1765 and is credited with coining the slogan No taxation without representation (Wikipedia). Thus he gives us at least a small genetic share in the heritage of New England Revolutionary patriotism.
Finally, the line from Henry Samson turns out to be very complex in still another way. Besides its Mayflower ancestry and the interesting Mayhew relation just described, we probably also received from Henry Samson a long noble ancestry back to the Norman Conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066. This ancestry was suggested by researcher Robert Leigh Ward but as an unfinished study requiring further research into the primary sources of medieval English genealogy. Therefore, our pedigree of Mandana Hillman LINK AGAIN gives only the maternal line of Henry Samson’s great-grandmother Elizabeth Page and stops with his 3Xgreat-grandmother Edith Latimer, daughter of Sir Nicholas Latimer of Duntish in County Dorset during the fifteenth century. See the Notes to the Mandana Hillman Dalley pedigree for details and sources for this long and varied ancestry.
