Until this year, I was unaware that there was such a thing as "Religious Freedom Day". However, it was that very thing that brought at least one of my ancestors to this country and may have been at least partly instrumental in the choice others made to leave their native lands and come here. More below the orange baroque.
The one I know most about is the earliest of my ancestors to arrive on these shores, one Pieter van der Meulen, late of Amsterdam and Leyden, a.k.a. "Peter Mills, the Dutchman". The story handed down to me is that young Pieter, the son of a prosperous burgher who had been knighted by the Dutch crown for his work on the dykes and canals of Amsterdam, had somehow gotten deeply involved with a group of English "theological students" in Leyden. Those of you who know your history will know that a certain group of Englishmen had established themselves in Leyden prior to hiring a small tubby ship called the Mayflower to take them to Virginia (though they went badly off course and ended up in Massachusetts instead). Apparently there remained some sort of English colony/divinity school there, and young Pieter took up with them, much to his father's dismay. Papa thought his son should return to Amsterdam and assume his proper place in the family business. Pieter would not, saying his faith was more important to him, and this precipitated a huge fight which led to his father disowning him. At some point afterward, Pieter took passage on a ship for the colonies and eventually ended up in Windsor, CT, where he settled down, changed his name to Peter Mills, married a woman named Dorcas Messenger, and sired a large family, a couple of whom became clergymen. There are more than a few clergymen early in that line, including one who was rather locally famous, Jedediah Mills. He was the minister of the Windsor Congregational Church for nigh onto 40 years and died in 1776 (or, as his tombstone says, "fell on sleep"). I was brought up to admire Pieter van der Meulen/Peter Mills for his courage and steadfastness, and I suppose I still do, but at the same time, I find religious fanaticism pretty unappealing and I wonder if he wasn't rather humorless and sort of a crank. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.
Bryan (or Brian, spelling being fluid in those days) McDonnell is another ancestor whose religion played somewhat of a part in his decision to emigrate from England, the major reason being that he was suddenly out of a job. Bryan had been a lieutenant in Col. Francis Toole's regiment in the cause of James II of England. James, although Catholic, was quite tolerant of Protestants in his army and believed they should be treated equally with the Catholics. When he went into exile in France, he appointed a Lord Deputy, Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell, who also happened to be his brother-in-law, to manage his armies. Talbot was instructed to treat Presbyterians and Catholics equally. He didn't. Instead, he purged the army of Protestants and replaced them with Catholics. At this point, it appears that Bryan, who by this time was a married man with children, decided it might be a better deal to leave County Wicklow, and he took his wife and children and fled to Delaware, arriving there in 1685.
On the other side of my family are the Hottels (my branch later became Huddle), whose origins are a wee bit murky. Some say they were originally Swiss, but Hottel is not a Swiss name. My father, who was an amateur linguist and made quite a study of the origins of surnames, particularly Germanic ones, theorized that the name may have originally been something more similar to Hödl and could conceivably have been Tyrolean. He further pointed out similarities between pictures of natives of the Tyrol and various members of that side of our family, which were quite striking. We aren't able to trace the family back past the father of the immigrant Johannes Hottel (the name that appears on the ship's passenger list). Johannes' father is found in the province of Westphalia, which was known as a haven of at least moderate tolerance, but we can't trace him any further back. The baptisms of Johannes' seven children are all duly recorded in the local Evangelisch (Lutheran) Kirche. However, within a generation or so of their arrival in America, a goodly number of his descendants had converted to other faiths, many of Baptist or Anabaptist nature, others Methodist. Whether this relates to the Great Awakening in some way, or to a deeper strain of ancestral religious rebellion, is a matter of conjecture. My personal theory is that they may have come from the Tyrol and been Protestants, possibly anabaptists or sympathizers in an area where it wasn't particularly healthy not to be Catholic, and have left there for the Palatinate (Westphalia) where they found it expedient to be Evangelisch, going along to get along. When they came to this country it was apparently not for religious freedom at all, but for economic reasons (they were part of the Palatine migration of the 18th century and were actually some of the last of my ancestors to arrive), but they did take full advantage of all the freedoms the new country offered.
I'm pretty sure almost all the rest of my ancestors were economic refugees, most of whose stories don't make for nearly such good tales, but are probably interesting anyway. I just don't have them all. I wish I did. I keep digging.