The Pilgrim Pendant

By Anna Alden-Tirrill

Join thirteen-year-old Annie as she finally returns to the United States. Now in New England, she studies the settlement of America's first colonies based on freedom of religion and the American Revolution based on escaping England's unjust rule. Annie serves as a positive role model for middle school and young adult readers, asking questions that need the answers provided by her parents and others. The fictional settings and circumstances contain interesting segues into history lessons that make them unforgettable and fun to learn. In this adventure, home-schooled Annie's history lessons spark her interest so strongly that she starts dreaming she is back in colonial America and meets Priscilla Mullins, a passenger on the Mayflower in 1620. She has several more dreams, moving ahead a generation in time with each one, and learning things that meld with reality, until she begins to feel these are spiritual dreams designed to lead her somewhere God wants her to go. New information results in her traveling to Europe again in search of a piece of historic jewelry that's tied to an ancient treasure with biblical connections. She once again flirts with danger as she follows her leading to locate this item and return it to its rightful owner with the help of her family. In this book, Annie learns the importance of courage and trusting God to guide her so she can accomplish what she feels is a special mission. And to her great delight, she finds out that God has brought her through an adventure that leads right back to her own family!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anna Alden-Tirrill
• Release date: Oct 28, 2014

Book preview

Introduction

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Meet Annie

My name is Annie. I’m thirteen years old. I’m an only child. Mom and Dad say I’m special because they adopted me. They chose ME out of all of the other kids they could have adopted. Wow! I guess that does make me special.

There are also a few other things that make me special. First is that I’m homeschooled. I love all of the field trips we take and all of the adventures. Most of all, I’ve learned that learning is fun and exciting. And I also enjoy getting together with other homeschooled kids.

Another thing I think makes me special—or maybe unique—is that I love hats. I think they’re fun to wear, and also practical. They shade my face from the sun. I like my freckles, but I have enough already!

Up until recently Dad taught Astronomy at the local college. He also worked at an observatory—a planetarium—where he searched for stars. Sometimes at night, he’d take me there and we’d look together. Now he’s an exchange professor that takes us all around the world.

Dad calls me his sun-kissed girl. That’s because I have freckles. He gave me the nickname of Sunny. It always makes me smile when he calls me that.

We pray about everything and ask God to help us. From the time I was little, Mom, Dad, and I have eaten breakfast together everything and ask God to help us. From the time I was little, Mom, Dad, and I have eaten breakfast together every morning, and afterward we have what we call Talk-up.

That’s when one of us reads from the Bible, and then we talk-it-up and see how we can make it a part of our everyday life. Then we pray for God to help us do what pleases Him, and we ask Him what we can do to please each other.

Dad says the Bible is our manual for life, so that whenever we want to know how to behave, we can find the answer in the Bible. Together we wrote some family rules to use as guidelines for how to live.

I sure didn’t know that my normal life was about to change. All of our lives were going to change in ways that we’d never imagined. There was a fun and exciting adventure just around the corner.

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Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.

(Joshua 1:9 NIV)

Be on guard. Stand firm in the faith. Be courageous. Be strong.

(1 Corinthians 16:13 NLT)

Wait patiently for the Lord. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the Lord.

(Psalm 27:14 NLT)

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New England Ahead

Finally! Dad’s exchange professorship for the University of Sydney in Australia finished the end of last week, and we’ve just moved back to the United States. I didn’t realize it until now, but it seems to have been way too long since I really felt at home. So once again, I’m unpacking, but hopefully longer than just a school semester this time. I feel really glad to be back here and closer to my American friends.

We recently got off the plane at Logan Airport in Boston, Massachusetts. Since I’m being homeschooled, I’ve come to think of every move—and there have been a lot of them—as just another learning adventure where I can explore new places and meet new people.

We’ve never lived in New England before, but I know from my lessons that Fanueil Hall, a historic market and meeting place in Boston, is known as The Cradle of Liberty. I hope we’ll get to see that soon.

For a thirteen-year-old girl, my life is full of fun and adventure, but sometimes I miss not having real roots and always being on the move. Still, even though I sometimes feel like we’re gypsies because of Dad’s teaching career, I think it makes us closer as a family.

Our new home here in Boston is an old nineteenth century townhouse called the Newbury Guest House, located on the banks of the Charles River in an area called The Back Bay.

Right in the middle of historic Boston, this neighborhood has elegant colonial-era architecture. Some areas have red brick sidewalks, cobblestone streets, and antique gas street lamps showcasing rows of distinctive Victorian brownstone townhouses The brownstones are apparently made of a building material originally used by the early Quakers in Pennsylvania.

We moved to Boston because this will put us near Cambridge, Massachusetts for Dad’s next job at Harvard College. Dad isn’t only an exchange professor in Astronomy at Harvard, but he’ll also be working at the Harvard College Observatory. The college itself was the first college started by settlers in the New World and is currently the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States.

Harvard was founded in 1636 as New College, with its original charter being to train clergymen. It is as rich in history and historic architecture as Cambridge itself, with several buildings in Harvard Square and the historic neighborhood of Old Cambridge that dates back to the 1600s. Cambridge itself was a Puritan settlement founded as Newtowne in 1630.

Now the area is rich with cultural offerings that range from art museums, eclectic dress shops, and coffee houses, to having one of the largest number of bookstores per capita in the world. Cambridge and Boston are nearby cities, with Cambridge located directly north of Boston and right across the Charles River from it. I wonder if Dad could take a boat to work?

I love our new home. The guesthouse has a genuinely historic feel. And on the first floor there’s a neat little restaurant to have our meals, and even an outdoor terrace where we can eat that overlooks the Charles River and many of the historic buildings.

In our suite we also have a kitchenette with a wide counter and high-back upholstered stools where we can make breakfast and have our morning Bible reading and Talk-up. We always end up staying in such lovely places that as much as I may not want to leave just about everywhere we’ve lived, I’m always excited to move because it seems each new place is more wonderful than the place we left.

Being homeschooled is so much fun that I couldn’t imagine going to regular schools like some other kids do. And Mom and Dad are such good teachers, they make learning fun. I think sometimes I should pinch myself to see if my life is really real.

The field trips Mom and I take to museums and historic landmarks are so terrific. Mom makes sure that each time we visit a place, I have a special lesson about it, so in addition to the fun, I get school credit for doing all these things. Who could ask for more? It’s like living the history books, not just reading them.

Not only is each field trip a fabulous adventure, but so often we make friends with unique and interesting people as well as exploring intriguing historical situations. I’m sure I have more excitement in one day than my public school friends have in a whole school year!

Tomorrow we’ll probably just start with trips around Boston. They have a Metro system called the Mass Bay Transit Authority or MBTA for short that goes all over the city and even out into the suburbs with special rates for students.

Mom loves New England already and said she hopes eventually, we’ll get to all of the major cities and towns around here, but we’d need a car for that. I’d love to visit all of the New England states and learn about their colonial history.

And I’m really eager to have some authentic New England clam chowder, Boston baked beans, and maybe a Maine lobster roll on some of our field trips really soon. Yum!

I could hardly wait to taste the famous Boston Baked Beans. But more than that, I was eager to visit the many famous places where our Liberty as a nation began. I knew this was going to be a lot of fun and if this was like the other places we’d lived, there would be many twists and turns along the way on our journey.

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Fun in Beantown

On our first field trip today in Boston, lovingly called Beantown, Mom decided the simplest way to start our history lessons about Massachusetts was to walk The Freedom Trail, which is part of the Boston National Historical Park. The Freedom Trail is an actual red brick-walking path that goes through downtown Boston and right by seventeen historic sites. It’s about a two-and a-half-mile walk from the Boston Common to the USS Constitution in Charlestown, but many landmarks are within the first mile.

There are ground markers all along the walking path with information about events, graveyards, buildings, and churches, and other historic stops along the way.

Our first stop along The Freedom Trail was Paul Revere’s three-story colonial wooden home built in 1680, located at 19 North Square in Boston’s North End, now a nonprofit museum.

Paul Revere was a silversmith and was also employed by the Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety as an express rider during the American Revolution to carry news, messages, and copies of resolutions by horseback to as far away as New York and Philadelphia.

On April 18, 1775, he rode through the area to warn the people that the British were arriving, and then on to Lexington to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British troops were coming to arrest them.

A famous painting hangs in the Paul Revere house called The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere depicting the event. We looked at a map, and it was no short distance from Boston to Lexington and Concord. He was a true American patriot.

In 1861, over forty years after Revere’s death, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made this event the subject of his famous poem Paul Revere’s Ride.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;

Hardly a man is now alive who remembers

that famous day and year.

Mom bought me a small color copy of the painting with Longfellow’s poem printed below it for my school notebook. We had fun walking through the house, and then we moved on to other famous landmarks on our walking tour. It’s a good thing I was wearing my sneakers because we were on our feet for hours.

When it was time