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- From The Friend, volume 69, no. 33, 7 Mar 1896, p. 258:
Earliest Friends in America.
While engaged upon a family genealogy I have come upon some items relating to very early Friends in this country. I send these to The Friend hoping not only that they will interest its readers, but also that some among them may be able to add to our store of information, and thus help to determine who were the earliest Friends in America.
Mary Fisher and Anne Austin landed in Boston in Fifth Month (now Seventh), 1656 and were supposed to have been the first Friends to visit this country. After five weeks of imprisonment they were banished to Barbadoes, without having had any liberty or been allowed to converse with any one except their persecutors. Two days after they sailed for Barbadoes, still prisoners, eight more English Friends landed at Boston, and these also were cast into prison, where they remained for eleven weeks, when they were sent back to London. These are the first Friends of whom history tells us; but that there were Friends in fact if not in name, in the town of Sandwich, Mass., before that time there appears no doubt.
In the year 1653 Edward Perry of Sandwich, was married to Mary, daughter of Edmond Freeman, by Friends ceremony. The exact date we do not know, as the leaf upon which it was afterwards recorded in the record book of Sandwich Monthly Meeting, by the clerk (Edward Perry himself), is gone from the book. But this marriage is indexed as the first in those records. The record of the marriage of the sister of Edward Perry to Robert Harper is still to be found in this old book. It reads as follows:
"Robert Harper and Deborah Perry took one another in marriage in ye third moneth of ye yeare one thousand six hundred and fiftye and foure: 1654".
The wording of this record would indicate that they took each other after the custom of Friends, and that they were not married by either minister or magistrate.
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