Mary Perkins was born in England in 1615, and came to Massachusetts with her family in 1631, on the same ship as Roger Williams (my 10th great-grandfather and the founder of both Providence, Rhode Island, and the Baptist Church in America). She married Thomas Bradbury, who had come to the New World from London in 1635.
What makes Mary among the more notable of my ancestors is her conviction of witchcraft in Salisbury, Massachusetts, at the age of about 77. She was one of the very few convicted women who escaped being hanged; just how is not known.
GenealogyMagazine.com has published an article on Mary Bradbury. I'm not completely confident of its accuracy—it says, for example, that she was convicted at the age of 72, but that is not reasonable given that she could not have been born after her baptism in 1615. Still, it's an interesting article and pulls together some stories that I had not heard before.
Here is the article: The Witchcraft Trial of Mary Perkins Bradbury.
