[5] In 1833, Bugg established a relationship with an Aboriginal woman he called Charlotte, and from this union were born Mary Ann (1834), John (1836), Eliza (c1839), William (1841), James (1843), Jane (1845), Elizabeth (1847) and Thomas (1850).
[8] All that is known with certainty is that Mary Ann attended school somewhere in Sydney where she learnt literacy, numeracy, and domestic skills, before returning to Berrico when she was around ten years of age.
[8] On 1 June 1848, less than a month after her fourteenth birthday, Mary Ann married a man named Edmund Baker at the Church of England in Stroud.
[14] By mid-1855, Bugg had left Burrows and was living with ex-soldier James McNally, to whom she bore another three children: Mary Jane (1856), Patrick Christopher (1857) and Ellen (1860).
[15] McNally was a farmer at Cooyal north of Mudgee, and it was there in 1860 that Bugg met ticket-of-leave convict Frederick Ward (later to become bushranger Captain Thunderbolt).
[17] In taking Mary Ann to Monkerai, however, Ward was in breach of the ticket-of-leave regulations which required him to remain in the Mudgee district and to attend three-monthly musters.
[19] She swam the shark infested harbour delivering a file for Ward to remove his leg irons and then used a lamp to guide him to a safe landing on the foreshore.
[20][21] After the Rutherford toll-bar robbery, where "Captain Thunderbolt" first introduced himself,[22] Ward returned to Dungog and collected Bugg and her two youngest daughters, Ellen and Marina.
In February 1864 they travelled through the mountains west of Gloucester during what became known as the Great Flood of 1864, eventually ending up at the Culgoa River, north-west of Walgett, where Ward's brother William was working.
[23] They lived quietly for the remainder of the year, however early in 1865 Ward joined forces with three other miscreants and began to rob hawkers and stations in the north-western plains near Collarenebri.
[31] In the aftermath, Mary Ann settled again with John Burrows and had another four children who survived infancy: Ada Gertrude (1870), Ida Margaret (1874), George Herbert (1880).