Mary’s Letter to Bacon

Mary appears to send this heartbreaking letter from the “Read Home,” but she seems to threaten to “Return & againe Spedely for Releife…” We know that she enjoyed Ralph Reed’s hospitality for a month, but that was a year earlier. We also know that Ralph Reed was a prominent citizen of Woburn and a sometime legal adversary of Michael Bacon. The explanatory tag (below) asserts that she wrote from Rhode Island: did the Reeds have another home there? Or was there more than one Reed family? Or were the microfilmers simply mistaken?

Click on the transcription (or return to the previous page) to see the original.

Francis Brayton, on the other hand, who carried the letter to Bacon, was clearly a Rhode Islander. Diane Rapaport says that Mary’s “Watertown cousin, Joseph Peirce, married a Brayton woman from Portsmouth [Rhode Island], whose parents still lived there.”* *New England Ancestors 7 (2006) 2: 55.