♀Judith Gater

Judith Gater (christened 19 March 1588/9; living in 1654) was a Warwickshire woman who left the village of Hillmorton at about the age of forty to cross the Atlantic with her husband, John Perkins, and five of their children, and spent the rest of her life in Boston and Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Thomas Perkins (died 1686).

Hillmorton

Michael Gater had nine children christened at Hillmorton between 1576/7 and 1592, and Judith was the eighth. Four of the nine were buried there, three of them within two years of their christening.

Judith was christened at Hillmorton on 19 March 1588/9 as the daughter of Michael Gater, and her mother was probably Isabel Smythe, who had married him there on 13 November 1576. The village lies about two miles from Rugby, near the point where Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire meet. On 9 October 1608, at about nineteen, she married John Perkins, a Hillmorton man about five years older than she was. Six children were christened at Hillmorton between 1609 and 1624: John, Elizabeth, Mary, Anne, Thomas and Jacob. Mary, the third, married Thomas Bradbury of Salisbury in New England, and by the family genealogy she is the Mary Bradbury^W who, as an old woman, was condemned as a witch at Salem in 1692 and escaped execution.

New England

On 1 December 1630, by the family’s histories, John and Judith Perkins sailed from Bristol on the ship Lyon with five of their children, among fellow passengers who included Roger Williams^W. The voyage was stormy and took sixty-seven days; the ship made land at Nantasket on 5 February 1630/1 and entered Boston harbor the next day, carrying provisions to a colony close to famine. Early in 1631 the couple joined the church at Boston, entered in its book as “John Perkins and Judith his wife”, its 107th and 108th members. Their youngest child, Lydia, was baptized there on 3 June 1632, when Judith was about forty-three. In 1633 the family moved up the coast to the new settlement at Ipswich, where John received grants of land and built a house.

Widowhood

John Perkins made his will at Ipswich on 28 March 1654, being “sick and weak in body”. He left cattle to their children and grandchildren and the house and lands to their son Jacob, but only after Judith’s death. Everything else went to “my dear wife Judeth Perkines”, whom he made sole executrix, and he left it to her to share out some of the increase among the children of their son Thomas and of their three daughters. John died before 26 September 1654, when the will was proved, and Judith survived him. Where and when she died is not known.

Notes

Hillmorton dates

Her parents, christening and marriage come from Walter Goodwin Davis’s The Ancestry of Dudley Wildes (1959), which abstracts the Hillmorton parish register (it begins in 1564), and from Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins, which follows Davis. Both are printed genealogies. Melynie Moody’s article “Who Was Isabell Baylie?” (New England Historical and Genealogical Register 180, Winter 2026, pp. 88–93) prints the register entries word for word: the christening (“Judeth gater daughter of michaell gater”), the 1576 marriage of “Michaell Gater and Isabell Baylie”, and the marriage entry “John Pyrkyns and Judith Gater”. Davis and Moody give the wedding as 9 October 1608; Anderson gives 8 October, and this page follows Davis and Moody.

The christening entry names only Michael as father. Isabel is named as mother at three of her siblings’ baptisms (Michael, Francis and Margaret, 1583 to 1587), and she married Michael in 1576 and was buried as Isabell Gater in 1617 (Michael is last seen alive in October 1594; no death date for him is known), so she is taken as Judith’s mother. Her birth surname was Smythe. The 1572 entry for her first marriage reads “Isabell Smithe”, and the 1576 entry calls her “Isabell Baylie” from her first husband, William Bailey. A Chancery suit of 1594, Beridge v. Gater (The National Archives C 2/Eliz/B25/38), is what ties Isabel Bailey to Isabel Gater in Moody’s argument.

Davis adds that an Ann Gater who married Thomas Wright at Hillmorton on 29 July 1600 was probably Judith’s older sister. Moody’s list of the nine christenings has no Ann, so that suggestion has no christening behind it. Anderson lists the children’s christenings: John in 1609, Elizabeth in 1611, Mary in 1615, Anne in 1617 (no further record of her), Thomas in 1622 and Jacob in 1624.

The voyage and Boston

The sailing of the Lyon, the voyage and the move to Ipswich are told by Davis and by George A. Perkins’s The Family of John Perkins of Ipswich (1889); Anderson also places the family on the first voyage of the Lyon. The church admission and Lydia’s baptism are cited by Anderson from the records of the Boston church; he places the admission in early 1631.

Where the family came from

The 1889 genealogy, written seventy years before Davis’s book, repeated a tradition that John Perkins came from Newent in Gloucestershire. Davis, in 1959, placed John and Judith at Hillmorton, and Anderson accepted his finding.

Mary Bradbury

The 1889 genealogy gives Mary’s story and prints her answer to the charge, her husband’s statement and a testimonial signed by 117 men and women of Salisbury. It records that she was convicted, that her execution was delayed by the efforts of her friends until the panic passed, and that she was then discharged. It gives her death at Amesbury in 1700.

The will

The will is quoted as Anderson prints it from the Essex probate records. The 1889 genealogy prints the same bequest to Judith as “my deare wife Judith Perkins”.