Louise Frances Bickford – Descendant of second Mayflower voyage?

I was exploring my sister-in-law’s ancestors and found she
has a first cousin, once removed, that was an opera star.  I found several articles about the cousin, but one excited me like a dog chasing a Frisbee in the spring. Now, it isn’t often that I encounter something
that makes me giddy with the excitement of the chase but this article did.  I asked my sister-in-law if she knew about
the cousin and what the story said.  She
remembered the cousin but didn’t know the tidbit in the article.  She didn’t know where her cousin had got that bit of information, because it wasn’t in her oral history.  I know
that newspaper articles get things wrong and that sometimes things are made up for the papers,
but this tidbit is too exciting to pass up. 

The August 15, 1959, article in Lewiston Evening Journal runs
two pages in the magazine section and provides information about “Luisa
Franceschi,” the stage name for an opera star whose birth name was Louise Frances
Bickford. According to the article,
Louise’s ancestors “Date back maternally to the early sailing days, while
on the paternal side go back to the second voyage of the Mayflower, 1632.”