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From:
Douglas Burnett <[log in to unmask]>
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Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 18 Dec 2019 09:04:51 -0500
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Actually I don't think the first Thanksgiving was St Augustine and the
Spanish but just north of Jacksonville and with the Huguenots.

Some historians argue that while America’s first Thanksgiving indeed took
place in Florida, it actually occurred 40 miles further north and one year
earlier than the one in St. Augustine when French Protestants
(Huguenots)—Calvinists like the Pilgrims—held a service of thanksgiving and
feasted with the Timucuans to celebrate the June 1564 establishment of Fort
Caroline along the St. John’s River in present-day Jacksonville. “We sang a
psalm of Thanksgiving unto God, beseeching him that it would please his
Grace to continue his accustomed goodness toward us,” French explorer Rene
Goulaine de Laudonnière wrote in his journal.

Unfortunately, divine blessings were fleeting for the French colonists.
Less than two weeks after landing in the New World, Menéndez led an attack
on Fort Caroline that resulted in the slaying of 130 French Huguenots, whom
the Spaniards saw as heretics and interlopers. Weeks later the Spanish
colonists massacred an additional 200 French shipwreck survivors at an
inlet near St. Augustine that was eventually dubbed “Matanzas”—the Spanish
word for “slaughters.”

The bloodshed helped to wash away historical memory of the thanksgiving
ceremonies held by both the French and Spanish settlers in the 1560s until
their rediscovery in recent decades. But Florida isn’t the only state that
began in the 20th century to stake a claim on America’s first Thanksgiving.
An historical marker erected by the Texas Society of the Daughters of the
American Colonists outside Canyon, Texas, states that Father Juan de
Padilla conducted a thanksgiving service there in May 1541 for an army of
1,500 accompanying Spanish conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado.
Virginia and Maine have also put themselves forward as hosts of the
nation’s first Thanksgiving in the years before the arrival of the
Mayflower.

On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 12:00 AM VA-HIST automatic digest system <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> There is 1 message totaling 21 lines in this issue.
>
> Topics of the day:
>
>   1. Florida vs. Jamestown
>
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Date:    Tue, 17 Dec 2019 08:12:45 -0500
> From:    Jon Kukla <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Florida vs. Jamestown
>
> Maybe they did Thanksgiving, too.
>
>
> https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2019/12/16/american-slavery-traces-roots-st-augustine-florida-not-jamestown/4205417002/
>
>
> Jon Kukla
>
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> End of VA-HIST Digest - 16 Dec 2019 to 17 Dec 2019 (#2019-112)
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-- 
Douglas Burnett
Satellite Beach
FL
As a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG), the
National Genealogical Society (NGS), the Florida State Genealogical
Society(FSGS) and the Virginia Genealogical  Society(VGS), I support and
adhere to the APG's Code of Ethics.

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