From the Mayflower to the Freedom 7

by Connie Riley 8th cousin, twice removed.

NASA Johnson Space Center/ S70-55387/ PD-USGov-NASA ALAN SHEPARD (1923–1998) astronaut

In the autumn of 1620, Richard Warren, a merchant from England, crossed the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower. He signed the Mayflower Compact and helped establish Plymouth Colony, laying down roots that would shape American history for centuries. Warren could not have imagined that his descendants would one day explore not only new continents, but entirely new worlds.

Among Richard Warren’s children was Nathaniel Warren, born at Plymouth in the 1620s. From Nathaniel flowed a line of quiet persistence and steady courage—qualities passed from generation to generation as the family moved outward from the rocky shores of New England. Nathaniel’s daughter Mercy Warren married Jonathan Delano, linking the Warrens to another early Plymouth family. Through the Delanos, the line continued across Massachusetts and beyond.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Warren’s descendants were farmers, mariners, and builders of growing towns. That same lineage eventually reached Rosina E. Johnson, whose son Frederick Johnson Shepard carried the family name into a new century. Frederick’s son, Alan Bartlett Shepard, Sr., raised his family in New England—still within sight of the Atlantic that had first drawn Richard Warren westward.

On May 5, 1961, Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr., a direct descendant of Richard Warren through Nathaniel Warren and the Delano family, became the first American in space. Seated atop the Freedom 7 rocket, Shepard was continuing a family tradition over three hundred years old: stepping into the unknown with resolve and faith. His famous pre‑launch prayer echoed the unspoken hopes of the Pilgrims who had once entrusted their lives to wind, wood, and sea.

From Richard Warren of the Mayflower to Alan Shepard of NASA, the thread is unbroken. The vessels changed—from wooden ship to spacecraft—but the spirit did not. This family story is one of exploration, endurance, and belief in a future beyond the horizon, whether across an ocean or among the stars.