Sisters woman traces her descent to the Mayflower

Who was William Bradford?

Susan Wilson's many-times-great-grandfather was a remarkable man, whose life was scarred by tragedy, yet who played a critical role in the establishment of English settlement in North America.

William Bradford was born in 1590 in Austerfield, Yorkshire. His father died when he was barely a year old; his grandfather took him in, but died when he was 6, followed by his mother a year later. He and his orphaned sister were raised by an uncle, Robert Bradford.

In his teens, Bradford was drawn to the Separatist religious movement of the era. Puritan believers, who had serious issues with the Church of England, were repressed, and many migrated to Holland in search of religious toleration. Bradford sailed to Amsterdam in 1608 and thence moved with his church to Leiden, Holland. In 1613, he married Dorothy May, another English separatist refugee in Holland.

Bradford became a silk weaver in Holland, though economic opportunity was not as great there as the migrants had hoped. In 1620, at the age of 30, Bradford determined to join a company of his fellow churchmen who planned to sail to North America, sponsored by commercial investors known as Merchant Adventurers. Dorothy accompanied him, but they left their 3- or 4-year-old son behind to spare him the rigors of the Atlantic crossing.

The crossing on the Mayflower was hellish, lasting two months before landfall at Cape Cod in September 1620. The company spent another month on board sailing about the area exploring for a place to settle. While exploratory parties searched for a site, tragedy struck again. Bradford's wife, Dorothy, fell overboard from the Mayflower and, weighted down by her woolen skirts and layers of petticoats, she drowned.

The Pilgrims faced a winter no less hellish than the crossing. Forty-five out of the 102 immigrants died of various illnesses during that first winter. The tiny colony's governor, John Carver, died in April 1621, and Bradford was elected governor to succeed him. It was a post he would hold for three decades - evidence of the esteem in which his people held him.

Bradford would preside over a three-day harvest feast in the fall of 1621 (see related story, page 18), celebrating the bounty of the Pilgrims' first successful crops. Gradually the precarious colony stabilized and began to grow with new immigrants.

In 1623, Bradford married the widow Alice Southworth, with whom he had three children - all of whom, remarkably for the time, survived into adulthood.

Bradford ably presided over the colony, conducting a generally peaceful foreign policy with the local Wampanoag tribes, dealing with sometimes-fractious neighboring colonies that sprang up quickly along the New England coast.

The colonists were required by contract to produce revenue for their backers among the Merchant Adventurers. The fur trade, specifically in beaver pelts, became Plymouth's economic lifeline, launching the English settlers into the trade that would be a primary economic engine through the first 250 years of the exploration and settlement of North America.

In 1630, Bradford began writing a history of the Plymouth Colony, which would be published as "On Plymouth Plantation." It was and remains the critical source for the early history of the colony.

Bradford fell ill in the winter of 1656-57 and died on May 9, 1657, at the age of 68. Thus ended the remarkable life of one of the key figures in early American history.