The man who founded Eastman Kodak Company in 1892 and made photography available to the masses was a descendant of William Bradford, the influential, longtime governor of Plymouth Colony whose journal, later published under the title “Of Plymouth Plantation,” is the main record of Pilgrim life.

As a young man, Bradford, an orphan, was part of a group of Separatists who rejected the Church of England and in 1608 fled to Holland in search of religious freedom, eventually settling in the city of Leiden. Within a decade, though, the Separatists, concerned their children were becoming too assimilated to Dutch culture and losing their English identity, decided to found their own settlement in America.

After the Mayflower anchored at present-day Provincetown Harbor, Bradford, who’d worked as a weaver in Leiden, was a member of the exploration party that chose Plymouth as the site of the Pilgrims’ home. However, while he was scouting locations, Bradford’s wife, Dorothy, fell from the Mayflower and drowned. In 1623, he wed Alice Southworth, a widow who’d come to Plymouth earlier that year. Bradford became governor in 1621, after John Carver, the colony’s first elected governor, died. For much of the next three decades, until his death in 1657, Bradford served as governor and played a critical role in the colony’s growth.

The woman who taught Americans the art of French cooking likely would’ve been underwhelmed by the dining options aboard the Mayflower (ship goers of that era typically subsisted on such items as salted meats and dried grains) but she did have a number of relatives, including William and Mary Brewster, who as passengers aboard the vessel would’ve had no choice but to eat up.

William Brewster, who studied at Cambridge University and served as an assistant to Elizabeth I’s secretary of state, was jailed for his involvement with the Separatists before they fled to Holland. In Leiden, he worked as a printer and was an elder in the Separatist congregation. The Brewsters journeyed to Plymouth with their sons Love and Wrestling, while also caring for two young children named Mary and Richard More. The Mores, along with two of their other siblings, had been put on the Mayflower without the permission of their mother, Katherine, by her husband, Samuel, who claimed the children were the product of an affair Katherine More had with another man. Three of the More children perished shortly after the Mayflower reached Plymouth; only Richard survived. In Plymouth, William Brewster served as the colony’s religious leader for many years (the Separatists’ Leiden pastor had remained in Europe) and also was a close adviser to Governor William Bradford.

Born into poverty in an Ohio log cabin, James Garfield hoped to leave his family farm and seek his fortune on the high seas. At 16 he took a job driving a team of barge-pulling horses near Cleveland. But soon illness struck, forcing the young man to return home and carve a new path. He reluctantly went off to boarding school, paying his way by chopping wood, doing chores and, by 1849, teaching in rural classrooms during his vacations. Garfield’s first teaching post brought him $12 a month plus board, but it wasn’t until a violent brawl with a troublemaking pupil that he earned his students’ respect.

Garfield went on to attend college and teach at a series of institutions throughout the 1850s. For a brief period of time, he served as a penmanship instructor at North Pownal Academy in Vermont, where his future vice president, Chester Arthur, had taught several years earlier. Garfield left education in 1859 and studied law until his election to the Ohio state senate. Perhaps it was his first career that inspired the 20th U.S. president to write, “Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.”

When John Adams graduated from Harvard College in 1755, the 19-year-old Massachusetts native found himself at a crossroads. As a child, he’d considered formal education tiresome and yearned to be like his father, a farmer. Now, however, he was torn between the ministry career his parents hoped he’d choose and his growing interest in the law. While he weighed his options, the future second U.S. president taught a dozen boys and girls in a one-room schoolhouse in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he boarded at the home of a local doctor.

Not the most devoted schoolmaster in history, Adams would reportedly entrust his leading students with conducting the class so he could read or write at his desk. Still, he learned from his “little runtlings” and made profound observations about education and human nature, noting that encouragement and praise yielded better results than punishment and scolding. In a letter to a friend in which he fancifully described himself as his school’s “dictator,” he wrote, “I have several renowned generals but three feet high, and several deep, projecting politicians in petticoats.” Adams left teaching to study law and was admitted to the bar in 1758.

It’s fitting that the 20th-century painter and illustrator known for his portraits of American life could trace his roots to Mayflower passengers. In fact, one of Rockwell’s forebears, Stephen Hopkins, is thought to have been to America before 1620. In 1609, Hopkins reportedly left England for the Jamestown Colony in Virginia, but wound up shipwrecked on Bermuda. There, after participating in an attempted mutiny, he was sentenced to death. However, Hopkins’ life was spared and he eventually made it to Jamestown, where he spent several years before returning to England.

On the Mayflower, Hopkins was part of the non-Separatist passenger group recruited for the journey by the Merchant Adventurers. He made the trip with his second wife, Elizabeth, and three children. During the voyage, Elizabeth gave birth to a son, the appropriately named Oceanus. In Plymouth, Stephen Hopkins acted as an emissary to the local Native Americans and served for a time as an assistant to the colony’s governor, but also ran into legal trouble for such offenses as allowing people to drink alcohol at his house on a Sunday.

The Hollywood star (“Casablanca,” “The Maltese Falcon”) was a descendent of John Howland, who traveled aboard the Mayflower as an indentured servant. Howland almost didn’t make it to America: During the voyage, he was swept overboard in a storm; he managed to grab hold of one of the ship’s ropes and was pulled to safety.

Howland was the servant of John Carver, Plymouth Colony’s first elected governor. After Carver died in the spring of 1621, Howland became a free man. He married fellow Mayflower passenger Elizabeth Tilley, whose parents, aunt and uncle all died soon after the colonists got to Plymouth. Elizabeth and John Howland had 10 children and John became a prominent member of the colony.

Zachary Taylor won the presidency after leading U.S. troops in the Mexican-American War, but it was during the War of 1812 that he first won fame as a soldier. In September 1812, Captain Taylor was commanding a 55-man garrison at Indiana’s Fort Harrison when it was attacked by some 450 Native Americans allied with the British. The natives set the fort’s blockhouses on fire, and the blaze quickly spread after it ignited the whiskey supply. Taylor later wrote that his citadel descended into chaos amidst, “the raging of the fire—the yelling and howling of several hundred Indians—and the cries of nine women and children.” As the natives poured against Fort Harrison’s outer walls, Taylor mounted a frantic defense. After ordering the majority of his forces to return fire with muskets, he instructed a few others to tear shingles off the roof and use well water to snuff out the blaze. Taylor and his men then built breastworks to plug the burned out gap in their wall. The makeshift defenses managed to hold off the attack until daybreak, and Taylor and his beleaguered garrison later survived a 10-day siege before being relieved by U.S. reinforcements.