>You wrote about a Pricilla Gould and a John Gould (turned in by John Wilde). I have a Patience Gould and a William >Gould. The Gould family is a web of accusers and victims (probably all victims actually) I looked through what I have and cannot find your Patience and William, but if they were in Mass!!!!!! You can bet your bottom dollar their ancestors were involved or their cousins were. Carol

> See <A > HREF="http://members.aol.com/WARLOCK92/">http://members.aol.com/WARLOCK92/</A> > > Thanks. I'm in the midst of trying to sort out the relationships of the Salem area families in my line (Goulds, Osgoods, Wildes, Jones, Martin, Baker, Raymond, Hoag etc.) so your website is very useful, definitely a keeper. You mention in yr website that the accusing families used their children as witnesses. Used is the right word for it. I'm thinking of the Goodwin girls Martha and Sarah who were very young children when they were used as evidence of possession by the accused "witches." Martha in particular had to go live with Cotton Mather for a time so he could study her case and I presume exorcise the witchcraft that she was supposedly afflicted by. But I surmise that they grew up to repudiate their innocent involvement because they both married the Hoag boys, Joseph and Jonathan, who like their father John Hoag (according to the Journal of Joseph Hoag John supposedly was an assize court judge at the time of the witch persecutions who lost his position because he opposed the persecution) and their grandfather John Emery (though he was a very well to do maker of fine furniture and a founding father of Newbury MA he was hauled into court on charges of giving hospitality in his home to Quakers though he was not one himself) were thorns in the side of the Puritan establishment. Joseph and Jonathan and their wives and their brother Benjamin my ancestor converted to the Society of Friends and their children began a migration pattern, intermarrying with other descendants of Salem area families even after the witch trials were a suppressed memory, my branch ending up (surprise, surprise) in c. 1900 in Whittier CA founded by Quakers and named for the poet who was descended from Susannah Martin and author of the poem "The Witch's Daughter." Here is a quote from the Journal of Tristram Coffin about the Hoag boys: > In 1704, > Judge Sewall thus writes. 'I told Mr. [Nicholas] Noyes of Salem of ye > quaker meeting at Samuel Sayers and of ye profaneness of ye young Hoags > professing that heresy.' These 'young Hoags,' were all sons of John Hoag, > and resided in the west parish of Newbury." Noyes and Sewall were two of the most rabid witch hunters. Sewall was a hangin' judge if I'm not mistaken. Leslie

Someone posted a query about complete lists of people charged with witchcraft. I came across a couple this afternoon. Margo Burns has a pretty complete list, from two sources, at her web site. Richard Weisman has several lists in his book, Witchcraft, Magic and Religion in 17th century Massachusetts (1984). List A is a list of witchcraft charges in Massachusetts before 1692. List B is a list of Defamation suits involving charges of witchcraft in the 17th century in Massachusetts Bay. List C is a list of persons from all towns charged in the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692. List D is a list of those who confessed. I saw another list like List C someplace, and I think one of them is one of the sources Margo got her list from. Enders in Salem witchcraft and Hawthorne's House of SEven Gables has a complete chronological list of all of the accused (not just from Salem Village). My impression is that his other book likely has such a chart too, or else Boyer and Nissenbaum do. Yours, Dora _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com

Someone recently posed a question about how based in reality is a book, The Diary of Dorcas Good. I haven't seen this book, and am mildly interested. But I'd say taht probably the girl never wrote a diary. It would have been one interesting diary if she had written it. Dorcas Good was imprisoned with her homeless mother, Sarah Good, when she was four years old. She was apparently coerced to testify against her mother. Her parents, William and Sarah, were destitute and homeless, and dependent on people taking them into their homes in exchange for labor. But Sarah "suffered from melancholly" though her spirit never broke during her imprisonment and jailing, and she had a very difficult personality, and muttered and ranted at people when refused charity, and repeatedly got herself thrown out of peoples' homes. It seems that her father, John Solart, was a successful tavern owner, I think, in Wenham, and the family were prosperous, until he committed suicide. It would appear that a tendency to depression ran in the family. There was an inequitable distribution of his estate, and it took Sarah a very long time to get even a small part of it, by which time she had made two unfortunate marriages and ended up losing what little she got, and the family were completely destitute, homeless, and dependant on charity. The girls making the accusations went after the small child Dorcas, too, claiming that her spectre was chasing children in the village streets and biting and scratching them. It is speculated that this excessive sadistic cruelty was the result of the psychological abuse the girls themselves had suffered. Dorcas was sort of transferred from one jail to another following her mother, and was kept chained at the insistence of the accusers, to keep her spectre from chasing them! Her mother was executed in June or early July, and Dorcas was kept chained in jail among the other women who were accused until the following winter when all the victims who survived were released. In that time, Dorcas turned from a healthy and hearty child into a palid, thin girl with wild, unkempt hair and a furtive manner. In 1710, when many of the families of the victims of the witch trials sought and got financial compensation, Dorcas's father William wrote that she never fully recovered her senses from that experience; in other words, she never had full mental health. One author wrote that she was permanently insane, though not having fully recovered her senses doesn't necessarily imply that degree of impairment. One has to wonder if she ever learned to write, or if her father ever had any interest in teaching her or having her taught. I don't know where she was living when her mother was arrested; she isn't described as with them in incidents involving her parents, and it seems as if if she had lived with homeless, destitute and rough-edged people dependent on being taken in by others, how could she have been a healthy and wholesome looking child. I guess it would be forgivable if someone wrote what they imagined that a child in that situation would have seen and thought if she had remained sane and been able to write. Yours, Dora _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com

It seems that William Morse and his wife, I think Elizabeth, possibly Mary (I won't be zeroxing again until Thursday, either) were involved in an earlier witchcraft case. I didn't learn any of this from any Morse or McKinstry (a Morse line) source or resource. The entire Morse clan must be the most excessively proper and silent family group I have yet dealt with, and they don't share genealogical information much at all, even on the Morse list. My brother in law belongs to them. The emigrant Morse, William, thought his house was the scene of incidents of witchcraft. A sea captain who lived nearby exposed these as the work of a youngster who lived in the house. This much is in the Morse genealogies, as a sort of quixotic tale. The fact that William Morse was so enraged by this diagnosis of the problem that he filed very serious charges against the sea captain is not in Morse family histories, and neither is the fact that his wife was charged with witchcraft and William at the least wondered if the charge was true. I don't even have the outcome of the charge, only the books and page numbers! But clearly Morse family life was not calm, and Morse life could get lively. I wonder if any Morse descendants are on this list. I vant to know more about these Morse's! Yours, Dora _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com

I spent the afternoon in the university library reviewing my sources. I still have to get to the downtown library on Thursday. Also, the law library, which has several of the best sources, not only of the trial documents, is temporarily closed because someone installing new carpeting on the third floor used a noxious smelling solvent, so they sheathed all the shelves and furniture in plastic (?). The best sources of discussion on the politics of the witchcraft trials are also with one exception the best sources on genealogy. Robinson Enders wrote two books about a year apart with similar titles. His book, Salem Witchcraft and Hawthorn's House of the SEven Gables (1992) is basically about the genealogy of the town, and full of genealogical tables showing how accusers and victims were related to each other. His book, The Devil Discovered: Salem witchcraft 1692, is as someone already posted, one of the two best sources on the politics of the situation, and he discusses in even greater detail how people were related than do Boyer and Nissenbaum in the other classic about the politics behind the situation, Salem Possessed. The Devil Discovered is also extremely clearly written. Boyer and Nissenbaum do macro demographic and geographic breakdowns on the situation and therefore support their argument in ways noone else did before. Two other books I found that examine the politics of the situation in some detail are Gragg, A Quest for Security: The life of Samuel Parris (1990), see esp chapt 3, and Hill, A Delusion of Satan (1995), see esp chapters 7 and 8. I suspect that also Gragg's The Salem Witch Crisis (1992) is along the same vein, but it is missing from the library. I looked everywhere and put a trace on it. There is also some genealogical information in Bernard (Bernie) Rosenthal's Salem Story (1993). (Bernie: I finally put it together what it is that you wrote - only the book with the excellent chapter, "June 10, 1692"!) DAvid Greene's articles in the American Genealogist, apparently three of them plus a correction, also seem to be chalk full of thoroughly researched genealogical information (I won't have the other three until Thursday). Incidentally, John Trask was apparently an inlaw of some sort to the Putnams, but I'm unable to discover from the Trask web page how William Trask the Putnam in-law was related to John Trask. Yours, Dora Smith _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com

I still need just one of my sources identified. It contains chapters by the following titles: "God will give you blood to drink" (contains pp 162-163), "If they are let alone we should all be devils and witches" (contains p 108), "The Evil Hand is Upon Them", and something like "What a Shame to See Eight Firebrands from Hell Hanging There". Yours, Dora _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com

Did either Bridget Bishop or Rebecca Nurse ever perform any nursing, healing or midwifing for the families who lived around them? I could swear I'd read something like that about Bridget Bishop, but after an afternoon of searching the library and the web, I can find no mention of this. I found that Elizabeth Proctor was a healer and midwife, and a vague reference to Rebecca Nurse doing something of the sort, it is possible I confused this with Bridget Bishop. Yours, Dora _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com

Sorry, folks: TAG is The American Genealogist. Dora-- Hi Dora, This may be a stupid question, but what is the TAG you are referring to? _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com

---------- From: "Paul & Barbara Thompson" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Alice Young - 1st "witch"? CT Date: Sun, Aug 8, 1999, 9:43 PM Hello, I've been lurking mostly for the past few months. My husband & I both have many ties to these families. Does anyone have info about Alice Young (wife of Simon Beeman)? Supposedly she was the first convicted witch in the NE colonies - CT to be exact. Barbara K-T ----------

See <A HREF="http://members.aol.com/WARLOCK92/">http://members.aol.com/WARLOCK92/</A>

Dora, Would you check your Raymond line for a Susannah Raymond who married Enos Benham in CT. On the Benham line, I have Winifred King marr to Joseph Benham who was accused of witchcraft in CT. Thanks, Linda Fitzmeyer

I've traced one of the "afflicted children" Mercy Lewis, from Salem Village to Greenland, New Hampshire where she lived with her aunt and uncle, Mercy and Abraham Lewis where she had an illegitament baby by Charles Allen Jr who later married her and the family moved to Boston. Has anyone been able to research and family tree Charles and Mercy and descendents, if any? No one has discovered for sure the fates of Mary Warren, Susanna Sheldon, Elizabeth Hubbard or Abigail Williams. John Hale's account hints that it might have been Abigail who died young and Arthur Miller stated there is a story or legend that Abigail ended up as a prostitute in Boston{haven't found anything stating that anywhere else--and if true it might have been Mary Warren who was chasing the real John Procter--who was sixty, twenty years married to wife number 3 and very well-to-do--but Mary might have been hoping to be wife number 4} The fates of these four might verify Robert Calef's accusation that some of the afflicted were "vile valerts" who lived sin-filled lives post-trials(and possibly before) and lists incest as one of the sins. I always wondered--how did Calef know--the charges he made would earn him a slander suit now if not true!

This all smacks of the Hitler School of Advertising, predated of course; tell a lie convincingly and often enough, people soon believe it!

I show that John Wilde turned in his brother-in-law for treason (John Gould) not his father -in-law (Priscilla Gould's father) Priscilla's sister Mary (Maria) lived next door to John Wilde and carried a grudge for years and in 1686 had spread rumors that Sarah (John Wilde's wife after Priscilla died) was a witch. The two husbands Redington and Wilde settled the problem, but the rumors continued once they had started. If you think this is strange calling other people a witch seemed to be a favorite pastime in those centuries. Carol

There is an extremely good recent analysis of the power struggle that underlay the beginnings of the Salem witch trials; Boyer and Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. This book completely breaks down the identities of the people involved in the witchcraft trials, as well as presenting a very good analysis of the history of the politics and the social economics of Salem and its immediate neighbors. This book charts the geography of the conflict (people who were accusers and people who were victims actually tended live on different sides of town). Another good book discusses in greater detail what was going on at the psychological level, this one might be The Devil's Dominion by Goodbeer, but I'm not sure about that. Boyer and Nissenbaum include alot of genealogical information. There may also be a separate book called Salem Witchcraft Genealogies, which is full of genealogical charts, and is very useful. I will straighten all of this out at the university libraries over the next couple of days. No single factor accounts for all of the charges or people charged; some of it was the product of the dynamics any "witch hunt" takes on once it gets going. Some people, like Sarah and Edw Jr Bishop, seem to have been charged because they had come up against or offended in some way the people who were in a position to make the accusations, or, it is argued, more directly, the girls who made the accusations knew these were people who perturbed their parents, their parents' sense of order and of right and wrong and whatever. The politics and economics of the situation are complex and operated on more than one level. It was basically the small farmers of Salem Village against the world. Society was changing rapidly, and these small farmers were being displaced, and ruined, by forces they didn't even understand. Salem Town and its merchants, some of the businesses on the road to Salem (the Ipswich Road), and John Willard with his land speculation, and the Osbornes, I think it was, with their efforts to contravene a parental will, all represented these countertraditional forces in the minds of the Salem small farmers. The Salem village church itself was the product of a long struggle between the small farmers in what became Salem village, and the merchants of Salem Town, and the political and socio-economic problems of the village tended to focus on the church and its minister. Along with the struggle of Salem village small farmers to defend their traditional world and their homes and livlihoods against the interests of rich international merchants in Salem town and the development of Capitalism, came a to be expected move by the merchants (a couple of whom actually lived in Salem Village) to be allowed to vote regardless of standing with the Puritan churches! The churches of course did wnat to keep their power, and that nowhere had more support than in Salem Village where there was a concentration of people opposed to societal change in general. The region had alot of trouble with Indians, and there were problems with England's willingness to properly support the colony, and major disruptions in the government of the colony. This contributed to a climate of generalized anxiety, and the Puritans saw it all as the work of Satan, because that is how they saw things. They thought developing Capitalism was the work of Satan, too. There were also teh usual local conflicts, and they fed the accusations, too. The Salem Villagers had recently had a conflict with the people of Topsfield over taxes and the town boundary lines. Again, they themselves thought they were doing battle against the rest of the world. A leader of the Topsfield men closely related to the other leaders of the Topsfield men happened to have had a conflict with the Putnams. John Wildes had married a daughter of the rich merchant, Zachary Gould, then turned in Zachary Gould as a traitor because he was lobbying hard for the right of merchants to vote, and he was executed. Then John Wilde's wife the daughter of Zachary died, and he remarried, a girl with a history of actually possibly psychotic behavior, and his first wife's sister started rumors that she was a witch. The Goulds were related to the Putnams! (Notice how this story twists the original theme.) To be accused, the one had to attract the attention of the girls who were doing the accusing. I went through as an adolescent things very similar to waht these girls experienced, and know first hand what the combination of parental abuse, societal uncertainty in a time of change, a climate of religious scrupulosity, and a severe anxiety disorder can do to the mind of a teenaged girl. The girls may have to some degree believed that the people they were accusing were evil, and probably genuinely thought they were possessed. I did. I also at one level knew a considerable amount of what frightened me was irrational and like Mary Warren, could at times admit it. These girls basically accused everyone they vaguely knew frightened their parents, and people they thought were evil. This is why some of the people accused were simply people not accepted by the community or people who had something wrong with them. The pattern of their accusations parallels the ways I thought as a teenager. Their parents, however, and assorted close friends like the Griggs', quickly picked up on the diabolical part of it, and pressured and drove these girls in every possible way to make and to maintain their accusations, just like a parent today who thinks their child has been sexually abused. Yours, Dora _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com

As I understand it, I now have David Greene's Salem Witches Part I, which is the 1981 TAG article about the Bishops, and a citation to two parts of Salem Witches Part III, in the fall 1982 and spring 1983 article. Can someone please give me the citation for Salem Witches Part II? Though I suppose it must have been in TAG sometime between 1981 and 1982 - shouldn't be too hard to pin down! I am going to the library on Thursday and will get all of these articles. Yours, Dora Smith _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com

Kathy: That's exactly where the plot starts to thicken. Christian was first cousin to Abigail and Elizabeth. It is on that big Woodbury/ Trask genealogy I posted. The Herricks and Kettels and Batcheldors and Raymonds were also immediate relatives. It rather looks as though Christian's extended family, beginning with her husband and possibly Hale's suspicions (though I don't know when Hale became suspicious) blamed Sarah Bishop for Christian's death, and for every subsequent death that happened in that family. I had thought that Elizabeth (Woodbury) Balch was simply a nasty relative who couldn't abide the fact that Sarah Bishop was abused by her husband, but the fact that Christian had such a severe case of depression suggests the possibility of mental imbalance in other members of her clan. Mood and anxiety disorders are strongly genetic (about 65% genetic component), some forms, like the manic depression that runs in my family, carry an 80% risk if you inherit the gene(s)! I have a list of currently known genes for unipolar depression and anxiety disorders on my web site, genes have also been found for manic depression but the condition is so strongly genetic that the medical community hasn't debated the fact in some time. I have mild manic depression, so does my mother, and so did her mother before her. People in most families with manic depression vary completely in how severely they are affected, and often some family members are unusually productive and successful. In fact, people with manic depressive temperament are exactly the sort of people the "Old Planters", such as the Balches and I think the Woodbury's and possibly the Trasks, and I think the Dodges, were. Intelligent, intense, stubborn, resourceful, and strongly motivated, with alot of drive and initiative. Like many genetic diseases, manic depression has a strong adaptive component. In fact, this facet of manic depression accounts for why it is the only form of mental illness disproportionately found in the upper social classes. I traced the manic depression down my Raymond line to where it crossed with a group of families who founded Sudbury. Serious mood and anxiety disorders run in the descendents of the members of the Balch family that Tabitha Balch who married Paul Raymond belonged to. She was the daughter of Freeborn brother to Benjamin who married Elizabeth Woodbury. I suspect that the Capt William Raymond line may always have had a tendency to mood disorders; why else would William marry a member of the Bishop family who quite clearly had mood disorders? Manic depression, particularly, is prone to masking behind not only other mental health problems and substance abuse, but certain lifestyles and occupations. Military leadership is one of them; these decisive, intense and action oriented people often make good military leaders, and William Raymond certainly fit that mold. I have vaguely noticed that the Dodges, too, seemed to have an awful tendency to mental illness atleast where they crossed with my Balch and Raymond lines which they did continually. The Dodges were extremely closely related to the Woodbury's. These genes actually get perpetuated in families less by the probability of any one gene being inherited by particular offspring, than by the overwhelming tendency of people who have them to marry other people who have them. My family history is a full chain of people with manic depression or family histories, as of a parent with manic depression marrying each other. Because some people with moderately severe manic depression get repeated depressions but not manias, it can take a very long time, generations even, to get a proper diagnosis! Christian may have committed suicide the first time she had severe depression, and clearly she and those around her thought she had a spiritual problem and if she had had milder "spiritual crises" previously we wouldn't likely be told about it, so we cannot know exactly what was wrong with her. People with mild manic depression have a real tendency to go on benders. For instance, one day when I was 32, I called my mother up and excitedly told her I'd talked to two distant cousins on the phone who my parents had found. I asked them for genealogical information. My mother took half a second to start screaming violently. I didn't have her permission to call my cousins! I messed up her's and my father's carefully worked out arrangements. This is FATHER'S family! BUTT OUT!!! At that time I didn't know that my parents' lifelong abuse of me and their failure to treat me as if I did in fact belong to their family was due to the fact that both of them have mental illness, so I said, OK, I WILL!!, hung up, and never spoke to either of them again. I also got heartsick ,and worried what the relatives would think about the family split, and gave up the genealogy. Over the intervening nine years, my mother's story grew. ALL of my father's relatives got angry at him and stopped talking to him,the story went, and I was responsible for all of this, because of whatever (it was rather vague, there were three things I was supposed to have done) alienated them. In particular, I was responsible for a bizarre fight my father had with his first cousin who I had never found or talked to. I hadn't been in touch with a single one of these people including my godparents with whom we were close in the intervening nine years. I called up all of my father's assorted family, and asked what was going on. I got one response from all of them. "Why, I haven't heard from your father in a LONG time, and I would LOVE to!" My parents are shy, antisocial people who have little to do with people. My father withdraws into his chair in the corner of the dining room and pretends he has relationships with people, and expects them to maintain that idea by sending him letters at intervals. They didn't hear from him, so they thought he wasn't interested! Noone was angry at him, and I had nothing to do with it. I go on benders too, usually shorter ones like running frantically around the grocery store looking for the bag of nuts that was in the bottom of one of my bags, where I couldn't find it when I frantically searched three times (picture what that search looked like), and screaming at the store staff ("I WANT MY MONEY BACK NOW!!!"). The ideas that underlie these bouts often literally could have come from outer space, for all there is any real way to explain how I came up with it. It usually takes me from half a day to a couple of days to realize I lost my mind. My mother isn't capable of realizing that because she won't admit that anything is wrong with her mind. She develops ideas that people wronged or tiffed her, and they turn into what in a former time would have been a full scale blood feud. Her mother was the same way. My great grandmother was hospitalized. I'm particularly prone to this sort of thing under stress. In every case where a Trask/ Woodbury developed this very aggressive and obsessive sort of irrational, intense hatred toward Sarah Bishop, he or she had just lost a spouse or a child. Yours, Dora Did Abigail and Elizabeth WOODBURY have a sister named Christian (Woodbury) TRASK? Kathy Buffington Willett [email protected] _______________________________________________________________ Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com

Carol, There are several lists of people arrested as witches and they do not completely overlap. Here are sources for two of them. Sarah Loring Bailey, "Historical Sketches of Andover," Boston, 1880. Paul Boyer & Stephen Nissenbaum eds., "Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England," Boston, 1993. If you are interested in complete documentation, it is now on line at: http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/texts Bruce Tyler

Hello list, Just wondered about the Goodwife Ayers of Hartford, CT. 1662 Does anyone have any information on her? Just wondered if she is related to the AYER of Haverhill, MA. Thanks, Shirley