Mission for Life

by Joan Jacobs Brumberg

Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) was born at Malden and reared at Plymouth, Massachusetts, and was the first American to become a fully committed evangelical foreign missionary, first for the Congregationalists in 1812, but almost immediately for the American Baptists. He served chiefly in Burma, married three times (his first two wives died in mission field, and the third was a fiction writer who thereafter used her talents as a missionary publicist)--and was notable for his will- ingness to use popular cultural forms to push the cause of religion. Descendants lived in New York, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.