Capt. Thomas Bradbury

Bef 1611 - 1695  (> 84 years)

• Name	Thomas Bradbury  [1]
  Prefix	Capt.
  Birth	Bef 28 Feb 1611  [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
  Baptism	28 Feb 1611	Wicken Bonhunt, Essex, England   [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
  Gender	Male
  Death	16 Mar 1695	Salisbury, Essex, Massachusetts   [2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9]
  Person ID	I35243	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others | Ancestor of JDM
  Last Modified	29 Jan 2024

  
  

  Father	Wymond Bradbury,   b. Bef 16 May 1574   d. Abt 1649, Whitechapel, London, England (Age > 74 years)
  Mother	Elizabeth Whitgift,   b. Mar 1574, Clavering, Essex, England d. 26 Jun 1612 (Age ~ 38 years)
  Marriage	Abt 1605  [2, 3, 8]
  Family ID	F20709	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Mary Perkins,   b. Bef 3 Sep 1615   d. 20 Dec 1700, Salisbury, Essex, Massachusetts (Age > 85 years)
  Marriage	Abt 1636  [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10]
  Children	+ 1. Mary Bradbury,   b. 17 Mar 1643, Salisbury, Merrimack, New Hampshire d. 29 May 1724 (Age 81 years)
  Family ID	F20705	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	25 May 2021

  
  

• Notes

  Arrived in 1635; first at York, Maine, then in Salisbury by 1640. He was initially a business agent for Ferdinando Gorges, to whom it has been said he was related. Obviously the beneficiary of a fine education, he held many public offices in his long life, and numerous samples of his excellent handwriting have survived to the present day. Over time he has had several descents from the Plantagenet kings attributed to him, but most of them have been disproved. (The exception is a descent from Edward I for which Marshall K. Kirk made a very persuasive but not conclusive case in "A Probable Royal Descent for Thomas Bradbury of Salisbury, Massachusetts", NEHGR 161:27, 2007.) Nevertheless, Thomas Bradbury's proven ancestry extends far back into the Middle Ages. One of his great-uncles was an Archbishop of Canterbury; a 3XG-uncle, also named Thomas Bradbury, was a mayor of London. As Marshall K. Kirk wrote, "Unlike most immigrants to seventeenth-century New England, Thomas Bradbury's ancestry rates an entire book. Given his social standing as a member of the gentry and his business dealings with Sir Fernando Gorges, it would stand to reason that a royal descent from a Plantagenet king should be provable for Thomas Bradbury. Many of his siblings and aunts and uncles married people with such descent." John Brooks Threlfall's The Ancestry of Thomas Bradbury (1611-1695) and His Wife Mary (Perkins) Bradbury (1615-1700) of Salisbury, Massachusetts, of which we have the second of three editions, traces for him a descent from Charlemagne through the Marmions of Checkingden, Oxfordshire, which seems to us sufficiently well-argued. But whether or not this descent is valid, the sheer number and variety of Thomas Bradbury's proven medieval forebears seems to us to earn him the title of "gateway ancestor" for his descendant JDM.

  
  

• Sources

  [S5807] The Cilley Pages by Mark Cilley, at cilley.net, via the Wayback Machine at archive.org. [S5810] Mary Lovering Holman, "The Bradbury Family." The American Genealogist 18:220, 1941; 19:36, 1942. [S5811] Robert Charles Anderson and John B. Threlfall, "Ancestor Table for Thomas Bradbury of Agementicus and Salisbury (1611-1665)." The American Genealogist 55:1, 1979. [S5817] Marshall K. Kirk, posthumously edited by Martin E. Hollick, "A Probable Royal Descent for Thomas Bradbury of Salisbury, Massachusetts." The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 161:27, 2007. [S145] Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America Before 1700 by Frederick Lewis Weis and Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr. 8th edition, William R. Beall & Kaleen E. Beall, eds. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2004, 2006, 2008. [S5818] Bradbury Memorial: Records of Some of the Descendants of Thomas Bradbury of Agamenticus (York) in 1634 andof Salisbury, Mass., in 1638, compiled from the collections of John Merrill Bradbury by William Berry Lapham. Portland, Maine: Brown Thurston & Company, 1890. [S101] The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633, Volumes 1-3 and The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, Volumes 1-7, by Robert Charles Anderson. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1996-2011. [S5861] The Ancestry of Thomas Bradbury (1611-1695) and His Wife Mary (Perkins) Bradbury (1615-1700) of Salisbury, Massachusetts by John Brooks Threlfall. 2nd edition. Madison, Wisconsin, 1995. [S5818] Bradbury Memorial: Records of Some of the Descendants of Thomas Bradbury of Agamenticus (York) in 1634 andof Salisbury, Mass., in 1638, compiled from the collections of John Merrill Bradbury by William Berry Lapham. Portland, Maine: Brown Thurston & Company, 1890., date only. [S101] The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633, Volumes 1-3 and The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, Volumes 1-7, by Robert Charles Anderson. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1996-2011., "By 1637".