The Last will and Testament of Captaine Myles Standish Exhibited before the court held att Plymouth (the 4th) of may 1657 on the oath of Captaine James Cudworth; and ordered to bee recorded as followeth;
"I give unto my son & heire aparent Alexander Standish all my lands as heire apparent by lawful Decent in Ormstick Borsconge Wrightington Maudsley Newburrow Crawston and the Ile of man and given to me as right heire by lawful Decent but surreptitiously Detained from mee my great (G)randfather being 2cond or younger brother from the house of Standish of Standish.
March 7th by mee Myles Standish"
This clause (Myles' will) acted like a map of buried treasure on his American descendants, and for generations they have pursued the Lancashire claims. In the process they have pieced together a genealogy of remarkable length and distinction.
Yet their search for Myles himself in it has led only to a page in the baptismal register of Chorley parish church for 1584, which they found had been rendered illegible with pumice-stone just at the place where the registration of Myles' baptism might conceivably have been. Equally negative have been all their legal efforts to recover lost lands in Lancashire.
Or was he from Duxbury?
His name is a household word in New England, but he is barely known in Lancashire outside the Chorley (Duxbury) and Wigan (Standish) area, and even less in the rest of Old England. He is commemorated locally only by two unobtrusive memorials in St Wilfrid’s, Standish (a modern stained-glass figure in a crowd and some framed quotations in the vestry), and by an American flag over the Standish pew in St Laurence’s, Chorley, donated by U.S. soldiers stationed nearby during the Second World War.
