Roger Williams had a Wife:
Writing Mary Williams née Barnard Back into the Historical Record

An early twentieth-century biographer of Rhode Island’s Roger Williams wrote, “Who was this lady is not known; and, save that her name was Mary, and that she proved to him a true and loyal wife, the record is meager.”

Mary Barnard married Williams in 1629, and for the next 50 years, followed him from England to New England, moving from Boston to Plymouth to Salem, and ultimately, with a toddler and infant in tow, to Providence, the town her husband founded when he was exiled for his “new and dangerous” opinions. But who was Mary Williams?

In this talk Charlotte Carrington-Farmer, Associate Professor of History at Roger Williams University, will explore multiple ways of discovering more about Mary Williams and the lives of seventeenth-century women.

women’s history