Hi all, I'm fairly new to both the list and having "witches" in the family! It seems that Sara Averill Wilds was a 7th or so great aunt through my Averill line (William, William, John, Ebenezer, David, Ira, Freeman, Augusta), as were the Towne sisters through their brother Edmund. This is all new info to me, so when I have the details straight I'll post them, but in the mean time, I'd love to hear from other descendants from these lines!!! I'd also like to throw in my two sense about the name variations. I too have many varied spellings in all of my lines, and have found that it was very common. I doubt that the spelling varied so much because "they could", but rather because others "couldn't" - meaning the people in charge of recording a name, such as the census takers, could not always understand the broken English or heavy accents with which many of our ancestors spoke. In the cases of Wildes/Wilds, Averill/ Averell, Towne/Town, etc. these seem to be very obvious phonetic errors. HOWEVER, in my opinion, if the spelling of Nourse survived for six generations before evolving to Nurse, I'd say someone changed that one intentionally, whatever the reason! There are also Averys who are somewhere in my Averill line, but I have no idea if this change was before or after the trials, so I can't say if it's possible that this was intentionally done to hide the connection to the trials or not. When you look at names other than good old "WASP" names, many of those were indeed changed deliberately by the family, to hide ethnicity or religion to avoid discrimination or persecution. I would think that the percentage of our surnames NOT connected with Salem that were spelled differently at various stages, is probably no lower than those who WERE connected to the trials, IMHO! Thanks, Joan in Western NY