Parthena and her husband, Frank, were among those enslaved by the Reverend John Williams, the town’s first minister, who also performed their marriage. Parthena was killed, along with two of the Williams children, when French soldiers with their Indigenous allies attacked the town in a pre-dawn raid in February 1704. In his 1706 account of the attack, Williams referred to their deaths, writing “some were so cruel and barbarous as to take and carry to the door two of my children and murder them, as also a negro woman.”