A view of Plimoth Plantation as it looked in 1627 (minus the tourists). (AP Photo/Hillary Rhodes)

Historical interpreter B.J. Rudder chops wood in front of his house at Plimoth Plantation. (AP Photo/Hillary Rhodes)

Phillip Wynne, a Wampanoag, sits by the fire and tells visitors about life for his people when the European settlers began to arrive. (AP Photo/Hillary Rhodes)

Austin Collins asks touring female visitors if they are married. Single women are hard to come by in the village, he says. (AP Photo/Hillary Rhodes)

Wampanoag Komi Wildhorse. (AP Photo/Hillary Rhodes)

Melanie Deetz talks to Plimoth Plantation visitors about what life was like for the Wampanoag people in the 17th century. (AP Photo/Hillary Rhodes)

Pilgrim history carries such weight here that it's easy to forget it's history at all.

A chatty 21st-century tourist eagerly tells the man playing Mayflower immigrant Edward Winslow that she's from Bedford, near Plymouth, and he responds, "Oh, in Essex." To him -- or the character he's playing -- places like that are in England and haven't yet been adapted as town names for the New World.

The tourist, a resident from Bedford, Mass., fumbles, and asks, "Wait, am I role-playing too, now?"

Winslow pretends not to know what she's talking about. This is 1627, seven years after the first Pilgrims arrived in Cape Cod. The tourists' cell phones and North Face jackets mean nothing to the town full of new immigrants, going about their everyday business chopping wood, tending to animals, talking about their land, their cows and the lives they left in England or Holland.

From here, many have descended.

If you're a Cooke, a Priest, a Tilley or a White, if you can trace your family roots to a Winslow, a Brewster, a Warren or a Browne -- your ancestors may have gotten here via Mayflower.

Although the original English Pilgrims are all, of course, dead, their progeny continues to spread across the nation today. Now, about 14 generations later, estimates of the number of Pilgrim offspring in our midst range from the tens of thousands to the millions.

At Thanksgiving that kind of ancestry should certainly earn you the right to a second helping of mashed potatoes and gravy. But for some it counts as more than just a family connection to a traditional American holiday: It's a source of pride that illuminates their part in the history of a nation.

To honor the annual event, we tracked down some descendants from the Mayflower and American Indian tribe that legend says met here at Plimoth Plantation, where some of the first New England Pilgrims first settled. Today, historical interpreters dress up in authentic clothing as Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians.

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PILGRIM PROGENY: Gladys Thayer Schaeffer

Schaeffer, 101, still runs her own business -- a marina and picnic grounds -- and lives in Waterford, Mich.

About a year ago, she saw a newspaper article about a man who looked up his heritage and subsequenty joined The Mayflower Society. She showed it to her daughter, Margaret Schaeffer Larsen, 79, who then helped prove their own family lineage.

It took a lot of work, but it was worth it, Larsen says. Her mother was delighted to make that connection to history for her family, and a 100-year-old (as she was at the time) with a large family means dozens of new members, including great-great-grandchildren.

"My mother is so thrilled about it," Larsen says. "She says, 'I always wanted to do that but I never thought I ever could.'"

Of her centenarian Mayflower descendant mother, Larsen says she must get her longevity from the family's stalwart Pilgrim blood.

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WAMPANOAG: Melanie Deetz

Deetz, 28, from New Bedford, Mass., works at the Plimoth Plantation home site as a historical interpreter and wardrobe supervisor.

She's from the Wampanoag nation, so her people have been here for at least 15,000 years, she says. They're from Martha's Vineyard Island but migrated to New Bedford in the mid-1700s and have been there ever since.

"For a lot of Wampanoag people, we ... don't really celebrate (Thanksgiving) but recognize it as more of a day of mourning," Deetz says. "That's the only time a lot of people in the U.S. think of native people, and even at that, it's in the past, how people USED to be and USED to live."

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PILGRIM PROGENY: Edgar Sherman

The sales and marketing consultant from Greenville, S.C. says it's not just Thanksgiving that reminds him of his lineage.

"The thing I think about the most, almost 365 days a year, is the incredible, incredible hardships those Pilgrims faced when they landed in Plymouth," Sherman says.

Sherman, 67, descends from three Mayflower passengers because Frances Cooke's son married Richard Warren's daughter, and eventually a product of that union married a woman from the William Brewster line.

"There were no roads, there were no stores, no traffic lights, no nothing. There was absolutely nothing but dirt, trees, water and beach," he says. "When people these days read about Thanksgiving, they're in their warm homes with televisions and computers and all the food they can eat. They show pictures of Pilgrims with buckles on their hats, and that's not how it was. I mean, it was bad."

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WAMPANOAG: Phillip Wynne

Wynne, 18, works as a historical interpreter at the home site at Plimoth Plantation and says he's good at making jewelry.

"Nobody had specified jobs," Wynne says. "A man's job would pretty much entail anything that involves taking life or altering life. Altering life of rocks, shells -- that's jewelry-making. A woman's job would be anything that involved giving life or preserving life."

He got involved working at the plantation because he was "tired of doing teenager jobs," and this provided him more meaning, offering insight into his own family history.

"I view my heritage the same way anybody else would theirs: with a sense of pride," Wynne says. "It gives me a sense of where I come from so that I can figure out where I go."

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PILGRIM PROGENY: Neil Watson

Watson, 67, was inspired to find his Mayflower connection after his mother died, in 1987.

In looking through her things, he found an extensive genealogy her sister had done, which carried their family line back to William White, a Mayflower passenger.

White was one of many passengers who died during the first winter. But his son, Resolved, was 5 when he came over on the boat with his parents, and he ended up living a full life and passing on the family lineage.

Watson is among them: He was a photographer in the Navy for 21 years and then worked in the appliance repair business for 23 years, from which he recently retired and lives in Medford, Ore.

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Hillary Rhodes is an asap reporter.

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