Gov. William Bradford
William Bradford was baptised at Austerfield in England in 1589. He was a son of William Bradford of Austerfield and Alice Hanson, who had married in 1584. His sisters Margaret and Alice were baptised in 1585 and 1587. His grandfather, another William Bradford, was also of Austerfield.
He came to New England in the Mayflower in 1620 with his wife Dorothy May. Their son John came with them. He became governor of Plymouth Colony and its historian. His history, Of Plymouth Plantation, is the founding account of the colony. It holds his list of the Mayflower's passengers, to which he added notes thirty years later on who had died and who had children.
In the first weeks ashore, in December 1620, he walked into an Indian deer trap. The colony's own journal, printed in London in 1622, tells it. Stephen Hopkins, who had been in America before, had just explained the bent sapling and the scattered acorns, and Bradford, coming up last, was "immediately caught by the leg."
On 14 August 1623 he married Alice, the widow of Edward Southworth and a daughter of Alexander Carpenter. She had come out in the Anne only days before. Their children were William in 1624, Mercy in 1627, who married Benjamin Vermayes, and Joseph in 1630. Alice's two sons by Southworth, Constant and Thomas, followed from England in 1628, and the Plymouth Company's accounts paid for Constant's passage and food.
On 2 March 1640 he surrendered the colony's patent, its legal title to the land, to the freemen of Plymouth. The fifty eight men listed with it as the Purchasers had bought the colony out of its London debt.
In the 1640s he wrote to his wife's unmarried sister, Mary Carpenter, at Wrington in Somerset, after her mother's death, and told her how to come over. He died in 1657, after thirty four years of marriage to Alice. She survived him by thirteen years and in her will left sheep to "Captain William Bradford," their eldest son.
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Cite: Heirology, "Gov. William Bradford (1589-1657)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/gov-william-bradford-1589-1657-6d03d9.