Family Life In Plymouth Colony Summary

While writing A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, John Demos dealt with an unbelievably difficult task. Even though Plymouth Colony existed more than 300 years ago, he had to make his book relevant and appealing to those of his time during the 1960’s. In the past, many historians that have researched Plymouth and its inhabitants have fallen short when it came to appealing to a much newer audience. This was so because a lot of them were using the same bland sources; the ones that gave the basic information about Puritan society and the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. In other words, all of the stuff that everyone already knows! Therefore, John Demos decided to use a much different strategy while doing his research. In order to compile information about the physical setting of Plymouth Colony and the structure of households, Demos focused on obtaining evidence from the words of actual Mayflower descendents, the Plymouth Colony records
This was so because of his elaborate use of sources from the 1600’s throughout his book, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. In order to make old evidence worthwhile to readers of the 20th and 21st centuries, Demos compiled information on the physical setting in Plymouth Colony, as well as the structure of the colony’s households. He was able to effectively relay the messages of his research to the minds of others by using sources from the words of actual Mayflower descendents, Plymouth Colony court and transaction records, and primary sources that he studied while directly visiting Plymouth himself. All in all, I thought A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony by John Demos was a great read and it truly taught me numerous facts about life in Plymouth Colony during the 1600’s that I never had heard