S01:E07
The sentence the family kept for three centuries was that Edward Colver sailed from London in 1635 aboard John Winthrop the Younger’s ship. The ship is the one thing the record cannot give us — no name, no master, no port, no year. This episode walks the vessel plank by plank anyway: the standardized English merchant ship of the Great Migration, the ‘tween-deck world where families lived stooped for ten weeks, the biscuit and the beer, and the wheelwright who was worth his passage. Along the way a name pulls taut — a Reverend Edward Culver, vicar of Harmondsworth on the ground where Heathrow now stands, whom the family’s Maryland branch has long claimed as the immigrant’s grandfather: possible, not provable, and the parish that would settle it lies under the runways.
Music: an original theme in the manner of the 18th-century singing-school tunes the Collver family sang.
Full text, images, and sources: https://history.collver.biz/the-ship-that-never-was/
From The Collver Family History Project — https://history.collver.biz
