Wikipedia, "Richard Mather"

Encyclopedia article on Rev. Richard Mather (1596-1669), drawn largely from the 1911 Britannica. Born at Lowton in the parish of Winwick, Lancashire, “to Thomas Mather and Margaret Abram”; master of the new school at Toxteth Park, Liverpool, from 1612, and its preacher from November 1618; suspended for nonconformity in 1633 and 1634, when the visitor, hearing he had never worn a surplice, said “it had been better for him that he had begotten seven bastards.” On 4 June 1635 “Richard, wife Katherine, and children Samuel, Timothy, Nathaniel, and Joseph” sailed from Bristol in the James, which rode out the great hurricane off the Isles of Shoals and reached Boston on 17 August 1635. Teacher of the Dorchester church from August 1636 until his death on 22 April 1669; buried in the Dorchester North Burying Ground. “In 1624, Mather married Katherine Hoult (or Holt) who died in 1655, then re-married the following year to Sarah Hawkredd (died 1676), the widow of the Rev. John Cotton.” Of his sons, “Timothy Mather (1628-1684). Also known as ‘The Farmer Mather’ as he was the only son who was not a minister … He died in 1684 after a fall in his barn.” With Thomas Welde, Thomas Mayhew and John Eliot he wrote the “Bay Psalm Book” (1640), “probably the first book printed in the English colonies,” and he drew up the Cambridge Platform. A woodcut portrait of him was made by John Foster, the Boston printer.