♀Sarah Reder

Sarah Reder (died 1616) was the first wife of Robert Cushman (1578–1625), the deacon of the English congregation at Leiden who later arranged the Pilgrims’ voyage of 1620. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Thomas Cushman (1607–1691).

Her parents are not known. She married Robert Cushman at Canterbury on 31 July 1606, and their son Thomas was baptized at St Andrew’s, Canterbury, on 8 February 1607/08. The family later lived at Leiden, in Holland, where her husband served as a deacon of the English congregation. A compiled genealogy of the early New England settlers gives her burial at St Peter’s church, the Pieterskerk^W, in Leiden on 11 October 1616, and records two children of the family buried there the same year. Her husband married again at Leiden in June 1617. In 1621 he took Thomas to Plymouth on the Fortune, and Thomas stayed in the colony, where he later served the church as its ruling elder for more than forty years.