The first Pilgrims who settled Massachusetts Bay came overwhelmingly from England, specifically from a belt of East Midlands and eastern counties: Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and Norfolk. The Mayflower passengers of 1620 were mostly Separatists who had lived in Leiden, Holland, after fleeing Scrooby, Nottinghamshire. The 1630 Winthrop fleet drew from the same English regions plus London and East Anglia.
The two migrations behind the question
The phrase "Pilgrims that went to Massachusetts Bay" merges two distinct events that historians keep separate. The Mayflower landed at Plymouth in 1620, outside the Massachusetts Bay Colony's later boundaries. The Winthrop fleet arrived at Salem and Boston in 1630, founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony itself. Both groups were English, but their origins, motives, and legal status differed.
The Plymouth settlers were Separatists. They wanted to leave the Church of England entirely. The Massachusetts Bay settlers were Puritans. They wanted to reform the church from within and believed they could build a model godly society under a royal charter. That charter, granted in 1629, gave the colony legal standing the Plymouth group never had.
Geography explains the confusion. Plymouth sits about 40 miles south of Boston, and the two colonies merged politically in 1691. Modern tourists and search queries often treat them as one story. The origins of the people, however, trace to specific English counties and to a Dutch exile that shaped the Plymouth group before any ship sailed.
How the Leiden exile reshaped the Plymouth contingent
The Scrooby congregation formed around 1606 in Nottinghamshire, near the boundary with Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Its members met illegally, because Separatist worship violated English law. Pressure from church authorities pushed them to Amsterdam in 1608 and then to Leiden in 1609.
Leiden was a working city. The migrants took jobs in textiles, printing, and the cloth trade. They lived there roughly 11 years. Their children began speaking Dutch and serving in Dutch militia companies, a cultural drift that alarmed the parents. Economic strain also hit the congregation, which was small and not wealthy.
The group obtained a land patent from the Virginia Company and negotiated with London merchants for financing. A minority of the congregation sailed on the Mayflower in 1620. The majority stayed in Leiden, and some later migrated to other destinations. The people who boarded were therefore English by birth, Dutch by residence, and legally bound to a Virginia patent that storms and navigation redirected to Cape Cod.
One counterintuitive detail: the Leiden years, not the English childhoods, produced the group's organizational habits. They ran their own church governance, negotiated contracts, and managed a transatlantic supply chain. That experience, more than regional origin, shaped how Plymouth operated.
Quantified context: who sailed, and from where
The Mayflower carried 102 passengers in 1620. About half were Separatist congregation members; the rest were hired hands, servants, and strangers recruited by the merchant investors. Roughly 41 passengers died during the first winter of 1620–1621. The survivors numbered about 50 by spring, a mortality rate near 50 percent that reflects disease and starvation more than any single cause.
The Winthrop fleet of 1630 comprised 11 ships and roughly 700 passengers. It arrived across the summer, with the Arbella carrying John Winthrop and the charter. Between 1630 and 1640, an estimated 20,000 people migrated to New England in what historians call the Great Migration. Massachusetts Bay absorbed the large majority.
County origins for the Great Migration have been reconstructed from probate records and ship lists. The leading source regions were Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk in East Anglia, plus London. Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Nottinghamshire supplied the Plymouth core and continued to send migrants. Kent and the West Country contributed smaller shares through ports like Southampton and Bristol.
[Figure: Passenger flows by origin region, 1620–1640 — bar chart showing East Anglia and London dominating post-1630 numbers, with the East Midlands concentrated in the pre-1630 Plymouth cohort.]
Origins by settlement wave
| Wave | Years | Origin regions | Approximate size | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leiden Separatists | 1620 | Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire via Holland | 102 on Mayflower | Virginia Company patent |
| Dorchester adventurers | 1623–1626 | Dorset and West Country ports | Small fishing and trading posts | Merchant charters |
| Winthrop fleet | 1630 | London, East Anglia, East Midlands | About 700 in 11 ships | Massachusetts Bay charter of 1629 |
| Great Migration | 1630–1640 | East Anglia, London, Yorkshire, Kent | About 20,000 total | Charter plus town grants |
| Later arrivals | 1640–1660 | Mixed English, some Scots and Welsh | Several thousand | Colony admission rules |
The table shows why "first" depends on the definition. The first permanent settlement was Plymouth in 1620. The first settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony proper was Salem in 1628, followed by Boston in 1630. Both trace to England, but to different English networks.
Edge cases: who gets left out of the story
Several groups complicate any clean origin story. The Wampanoag, Nauset, Massachusett, and other Indigenous nations were already resident, and their presence shaped every landing. Framing the migrants as "first" erases populations with thousands of years of history in the region.
The Mayflower also carried passengers with no religious affiliation. These "strangers" included craftsmen and soldiers hired by the investors. Their home counties are harder to trace because they left fewer records.
Not every Leiden congregation member sailed west. Some remained in Holland, and others returned to England. The Plymouth group was a faction, not the whole church.
Enslaved Africans appear in Massachusetts records from 1638 onward, brought by colonists from the Caribbean and directly from Africa. Their origins lie outside the English migration story entirely, and any account of who came to the Bay must acknowledge this.
Red flag: treating "Pilgrim" as a synonym for all early Massachusetts settlers erases Puritans, servants, and non-English people. Red flag: assigning a single English county to every Mayflower passenger overstates the record, which is incomplete for hired hands. Red flag: dating the colony's founding to 1620 ignores the 1628 Salem settlement and the 1629 charter. Red flag: assuming religious motives alone drove migration ignores land, trade, and debt incentives documented in town records.
Misconceptions that persist
First misconception: the Pilgrims landed at Massachusetts Bay. They landed at Cape Cod and settled at Plymouth, which lay outside the Bay Colony's charter area. The two colonies were separate for 71 years.
Second misconception: the Pilgrims came directly from England. Most adult Plymouth passengers had lived in Leiden for a decade or more before sailing. Their departure point was the Dutch Republic, not an English port, for the final leg.
Third misconception: all migrants were fleeing persecution. Some were. Many Puritans during the Great Migration moved for economic opportunity, family reunification, or the chance to own land. Probate inventories show farmers and artisans with modest means seeking better prospects.
Fourth misconception: origins can be pinned to a single county. Migration networks were fluid. A family might move from Yorkshire to London to Essex before sailing, and records often capture only the last residence.
Practical actions for tracing origins
If you want to determine where a specific ancestor came from, work through documented sources in order.
Start with the Great Migration Study Project, published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, which profiles migrants to New England between 1620 and 1640. Match names, ages, and family groupings against its entries.
Check town and colony records for freeman admissions, land grants, and church membership lists. These often name the English parish or town of origin.
Consult probate inventories and wills, which sometimes name English relatives and the places they lived. Use the Mayflower passenger lists maintained by the General Society of Mayflower Descendants for the 1620 cohort.
Cross-check against English parish registers using the county record offices for Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk. Expect gaps, since many registers are incomplete before 1600.
Treat any single-record identification as provisional. A threshold rule helps: accept an origin only when at least two independent record types agree, such as a will plus a ship list plus a parish register entry.
Limitations of the evidence
Passenger lists for the Mayflower and the Winthrop fleet are incomplete and were compiled later from multiple sources. Some names appear on more than one list, and some people are omitted entirely. County-level origin statistics for the Great Migration rest on sampled records, not a complete census, so percentages carry wide uncertainty.
Records for servants and hired laborers are especially thin. They rarely left wills and seldom appear in church registers. Any claim that a specific group was "mostly from" a county should be read as a reconstruction from surviving documents, not a precise count.
The article also cannot resolve which wave counts as "first," because the answer depends on whether you mean Plymouth, Salem, or Boston. Each has a defensible claim, and each traces to England through different networks.
For genealogy, legal, or heritage claims tied to specific descent or land title, consult a professional genealogist and the relevant archival office. This article is general educational information about historical migration patterns, not a genealogy report or legal opinion.