In the steps of Francis and Hester Cooke

Do you remember visiting the home of our ancestors Francis and Hester Cooke in Plimoth Plantation on our family reunion tour and interacting with the actors playing their parts? Our ancestor John Thomson married one of their daughters. Before Francis and his son came over on the Mayflower, they lived in Leiden in the Netherlands. Here are some pictures of places they knew quite well since they lived there for almost seventeen years. In fact they had been living there for six years before joining the "separatists" or pilgrims when they came over from England in 1609. Before that they belonged to the French Walloon Protestant church.

Here is a guide to the pictures below.
1. The main canal with boats and a windmill.

2. A canal one over from where the Cookes lived. Their canal has been covered over to use as a wide street but what they saw walking into the town center was probably much like this. The church in the background is Pieterskerk, finished about 40 years before the Cookes lived nearby.

3. A street that we know the Cookes walked many times. Notice Pieterskerk in the background. A plaque on a wall says that William Brewster, a pilgrim leader, had a printshop here.

4. The church tower in the middle just above the bare trees marks the entry to the Walloon Church where Franchoys Couck and Hester le Mahieu may have married in 1603.

5. I'm entering the Pilgrim Museum. Pilgrims probably didn't live here but the house was there at the time they were in Leiden and is being restored to fit into the time period of when Francis Cook lived nearby. Notice the type of windows they had.

6. The main room of the museum. Note the cubbyhole like bed in the center. People then slept curled up or sitting up. See the bedwarmer hanging nearby?

7. Caroly is enjoying a typical setting for a meal of the time. The dishes are the same kind that have been found in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

8. This is a typical fire hearth from the time. Note the pile of peat on the right that they used for fuel. They used peat since it didn't set off sparks to catch nearby wood on fire, as could happen with wood fuel.