Special Guest Blogger: Rev. John Lothropp

Many people think that Australia was the only nation founded by a bunch of criminals but it wasn't only those in the land down under who were the recipient of the less than law abiding British population, over 55,000 prisoners of the limey persuasion were also shipped off to colonial America before the yanks got up-tight about Britain ruling over them and started chucking the tea into harbours.
I was one of them when the British started emptying their prisons into the New World, as a Church of England Curate, my crime was to renounce the CoE as it was not religious enough and attempt to set up my own Independent Church for which i was sentenced to prison and after 12 months i was given the offer of staying in prison or being sent to the New World so my six children and i packed our things and six months later 200 of my fellow passengers and us landed in Massachusetts.
In a nation created by religious fanatics, my views were embraced more enthusiastically and i tried to set up another Church but we had a bit of a falling out, where as England was not holy enough, the crackpots in the New World were much too religious even for me so i stayed at home which explains how i ended up fathering 13 children but whereas it never really happened for me, my legacy is not so much what i did but what my great, great great etc Grandchildren did.
Britain may have got rid of me but my revenge was that my direct descendants include 4 Presidents, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush as well as Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Wild Bill Hickock, Clint Eastwood and Kevin Bacon.
Benedict Arnold would have called me Grandad and although my Church was a busted flush, my descendents had better luck and created the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons as they became known, the fruit of my loins coming to a doorstep to depress you soon.