52 Ancestors: #5, Ann (Bradbury) Kirkpatrick

On 3 Jan 1736, in ancient Falmouth (now Portland) in the Province of Maine, the third of nine children of Rowland and Elizabeth (Oliver) Bradbury was born, and named Ann.¹ In the summer of that same year, a new settlement, the "Upper Town of St. Georges Plantation", was started at the head of the tide waters of the St. George River in the Waldo Patent, roughly 70 miles up the Maine coast as the crow flies.²

Record of births of Rowland and Elizabeth Bradbury's first four children, Falmouth, Maine

In 1743, war with France appeared imminent. In anticipation of possible French-encouraged attacks by the local Indian tribes, the settlement's fort was enlarged, and Capt. Jabez Bradbury – Rowland's older brother and Ann's uncle – was appointed commander of the garrison,³ a post he held throughout much of the ensuing French and Indian Wars.

Ten years later, during a period of relative peace, General Waldo recruited a new group of settlers for St. Georges amongst the Scots of Stirling and Glasgow. Among the new emigrants was a 19-year-old unmarried cooper named John Kirkpatrick.⁴

No sooner had the new settlers built their initial log huts than hostilities with the Indians resumed, and the townspeople took refuge in the newly enlarged fort. The attacks, scalpings, kidnappings, and other depredations continued throughout the next few years. Eventually, though, there must have come an occasional lull in the hostilities, because sometime before Capt. Bradbury resigned his commission in August of 1757,⁵ two of his nieces – Ann and her older sister Mary – paid a visit to the settlement.

In the course of that visit, the two young ladies "became acquainted with two young men in the garrison," John Kirkpatrick and John Boggs⁶ – well enough acquainted to marry them both and settle down in Upper St. Georges (incorporated in 1776 as the town of Warren) to raise their families.

John Kilpatrick and Ann Bradbury marriage, 1758

And that is how Ann Bradbury and John Kirkpatrick became my great-great-great-great-grandparents. Marrying in Falmouth on 11 Dec 1758,⁷ they had 11 children, all of whom lived to adulthood. Two sons were lost at sea, two daughters died unmarried, and two daughters and five sons married, providing Ann and John altogether with at least 52 grandchildren. One of those married sons, also named John, was the father of Jabez Bradbury Kirkpatrick (who shortened the family name to Kirk), who in turn was the father of my great-grandfather Silas Kirk.

Ann outlived her husband by nearly 32 years, and four of her children, dying 19 Jan 1817 in Warren.⁸ Her burial place is unknown, but it may possibly be in the Old Settlers' Cemetery where John is supposed to be buried. (Most of the graves are unmarked, or marked only with a fieldstone; the handful of stones with inscriptions are now mostly worn to unreadability.)

Ann Bradbury was the great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Bradbury, who had come to Maine from England in 1634 as the land-agent of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and Mary (Perkins) Bradbury, who was convicted of witchcraft in 1692 but never executed.⁹ Somewhat coincidentally, Ann was also a first cousin twice removed (through her paternal grandmother Mariah Cotton) of Rev. Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan minister who was considered a major instigator of Salem witch trials.¹⁰

(Note: This post is in response to Amy Johnson Crow's "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" challenge at No Story Too Small.)

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SOURCES

1. “Records of Falmouth (Now Portland), Maine”, The New England Historical and Genealogical Register (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1860), 14:143; database and digital images, New England Historic Genealogical Society, AmericanAncestors.org (http://www.americanancestors.org : accessed 31 Jan 2014).
2. Cyrus Eaton, Annals of the Town of Warren, in Knox County, Maine, Second Edition (Hallowell [Maine]: Masters & Livermore, 1877), p. 58; digital images, Google Books (http://books.google.com/books : accessed 11 Dec 2010).
3. Eaton, p. 71. 
4. Eaton, pp. 90-93. 
5. Eaton, p. 114. 
6. Eaton, p. 115.
7. “Maine, Marriage Records, 1705-1922,” database and digital images, Ancestry.com (http://search.ancestry.com/search : accessed 12 Jan 2014), John Kilpatrick [sic] and Ann Bradbury, 1758.
8. Eaton, p. 566.
9. John Brooks Threlfall, The Ancestry of Thomas Bradbury (1611-1695) and his wife Mary (Perkins) Bradbury, 2nd ed. (Madison, Wisconsin: the author, 1995), p. 1.
10. John Wingate Thornton, "Genealogy of the Cotton Family," The New England Historical and Genealogical Register (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1847), 1:164-166; database and digital images, New England Historic Genealogical Society, AmericanAncestors.org (http://www.americanancestors.org : accessed 1 Feb 2014).