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YOUR ANCESTORS MADE HISTORY, INCLUDING THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS?

Nothing is more personal than finding out that your own ancestors were a big part of history. You’ll never see that event in the same way.

I’ve traced countless trees for clients that found ancestors who were in George Washington’s to Napoleon’s armies, were elected governors or senators, or were related to scores of major figures in American history. Some had relatives on both sides at Appomattox. Some had grandparents who accompanied major explorers, or founded cities themselves. Some fled the Irish Potato Famine, or England’s Protestant revolt against Catholics, or N**i atrocities across Europe. Many were pioneers, the very first person who achieved ...The list of true stories is endless.

But nothing quite grabs your attention like finding that your ancestors were involved in the Salem Witch Trials.

If your ancestors were living in Massachusetts anywhere near the late 1600s, get suspicious and track them further. In those days, the state’s entire population was only 50,000 people - which basically means everybody knew everybody and there’s a fair chance they were related to someone in the trials - or part of them.

The madness of Salem Village, in which innocent citizens were accused of witchcraft by their neighbors, was a contagion that lasted from February 1692 to May 1693. It spread to other nearby towns, so look for Salem Witch Trial relatives in those places, too — in Amesbury, ANDOVER, Boston, Beverly, Billerica, BOXFORD, Charlestown, Chelmsford, Gloucester, Haverhill, IPSWICH, LYNN, Malden, Marblehead, Peabody (then part of Salem), READING, ROWLEY, Salem Towne (nearby), SALEM VILLAGE (the historic witch trial village, now called Danvers), Salisbury, TOPSFIELD and Wenham.

I capitalized the towns in the list where I've found families with members who either were accused of witchcraft or accused others of being witches.

So far, all found on trees were the accused, not the accusers. The exception was a teenager briefly accused of being a witch who did accuse someone else in a panic; but that's not premeditated, as were the real culprits of Salem. If you think about it, since none of them were really witches who flew off and escaped, I'd hope for falsely accused witches in my family line vs the dishonest accusers who got them killed.

Accounts vary, but more than 150 were accused of being witches and 20 were killed, mostly women. Most of the accusers were Puritans.

Ironically, accused witches who denied that they were witches (and often affirming their Christian faith) were the ones who were hung by the Christians. Many historians believe the accused witches were victims of mob mentality, mass hysteria and scapegoating.

In your genealogy search, check the spouses and cousins on your tree, too. If you find one Salem tie, you're likely to find many. The horrific story of Salem often involves overlapping families — and multiple heroes who spoke against the injustices. The bravest clergymen and citizens stood up to save the accused, which sometimes got them accused as well. Strong, successful women who were land owners or who had important jobs, such as midwives, were particularly likely to be accused.

Although the "witches" soon were exonerated and government officials apologized for the witch trials, after 1693, many families involved changed their surname spellings. So you might not find exact surname matches. You might notice that in the 1690s, your Massachusetts family significantly or frequently changed the spelling of its surname. Those are trends I saw on trees.

Another trend is that witch-trial associated families moved away from there after the trials, seeking anonymity.

If you are related to a Salem witch, you are in excellent company. Reportedly, so are/were Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, astronaut Alan Shepard, Red Cross founder Clara Barton, suffragette Susan B. Anthony, Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Ellen DeGeneres, Halle Berry, Kit Harington, Richard Gere, Kyra Sedgwick, Edward Norton, Ted Danson, John Lithgow, Hugh Grant, Ethan Hawke, Claire Danes, Paris Hilton, Elizabeth Montgomery, Warren Buffett, Lady Di, Tennessee Williams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Laura Ingalls-Wilder, Noel Coward, Walt Disney, Georgia O'Keeffe, Roy Rogers, Hellen Keller, Robert E. Lee, the Wright Brothers, The Beach Boys brothers, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Anderson Cooper, Sandra Day O’Conner, Alexander Hamilton and U.S. Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Taylor, Fillmore, Hayes, Cleveland, Arthur, Harding, Taft, Hoover, Nixon, Ford, Carter, both Adams, both Harrisons, both Roosevelts, and both Bushes!

I have a direct-line grandmother - Ann Greenslade (aka Greenslit) Pudeator – who was hung as a witch, an aunt Sarah Towne Bridges who was accused and whose two sisters were executed. (They were the three sisters remembered in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible). Another Bridges aunt’s own uncle, Rev. Francis Dane, had been accused with his family of witchcraft because he spoke out early and often in Salem against the accusers and the concept of persecuting witches.

(Francis’ wife ties to author Laura Ingalls Wilder’s line of descent. Red Cross founder Clara Barton, a cousin on my tree, also is related to the Bridges family.)

I’m proud my relatives were on the right side of history at Salem and think of my ancestors there when, in a much more insignificant way, I try to fight injustice today.

There are good sources online to find names and biographical details of people associated with The Salem Witch Trials in 1692 and 1693, including the persecutors. If you cannot trace your ancestry back to the 1600s or even earlier, Find Family Trees can help. Just visit our website at www.FindFamilyTrees.com or call me, Leslie Myers, genealogist and owner of Find Family Trees.

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[Photo: Ann Pudeator’s memorial marker in Salem, Mass.]

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EPIDEMICS DWELL ON MOST EVERY FAMILY TREE

The COVID-19 pandemic is American history repeating itself.

You almost can be sure that your own family has lost loved ones, possibly many, to epidemic diseases to be found on your family tree.

Everybody died of something back in time, of course. But it can be jarring to find someone died in a dramatic exit, from epidemics to wars, from train wrecks to “Indian attacks.” As a genealogist, even I can get so swept away by people who I find on clients’ trees that I forget time and feel shocked for an instant when I find they died – of anything. These were lives lived, often very well lived.

Some of the contagious and deadly afflictions that swept America – long before the hope of vaccines – were smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, yellow fever, cholera, spotted fever (typhus or meningitis), Spanish flu (influenza), polio, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis (TB). I’ve found multiple victims on “ordinary” trees for every one of those diseases.

Finding your own family’s fate may change your view of history and your world. Every family has these stories. They often are missed, however, if death certificates are not found and carefully read.

The language changed, too, with the times. Consumption usually meant tuberculosis. Putrid fever was diphtheria. Camp fever was typhus. Variola was smallpox. Scarlatina was scarlet fever.

Sometimes, however, there were so many deaths from epidemics that death records were never made and even newspapers couldn’t list all of the deceased.

If you can imagine, at age 79, Mary Hardy McAtee gave up her safe life in rural Ralls County, Mo., to help strangers in St. Louis suffering in the Great Cholera Epidemic. She had raised a dozen children, including her stepdaughter/my fourth-great-grandmother, Elizabeth. But Mary never made it back home and died of cholera in 1849 from tending the sick. She is believed to be buried in a mass grave of cholera victims in St. Louis’ Calvary Cemetery.

Nearly one-tenth of St. Louis’ population died from the disease. Cholera ravaged the United States in waves, between 1832 and 1866. Mary’s selflessness never totally has left my thoughts since I put her on our tree..

When my dear grandmother was 7 years old, her 5-year-old sister Julia Ann Hardy died of diphtheria in 1908. Granny, who lived to be 96, mentioned Julia now and then over the years and you could sense a sorrow that never left her.

A tree I’m researching now has an epidemic death that tears your heartstrings. In 1848, Anna Hehr Oesterle and her six children (ages 3 and up) took a hard winter trip to immigrate from Germany to America. They joined her blacksmith husband, who had immigrated a year earlier, in Ohio. After that long trip in hopes of a new life, Anna died of cholera within that year, at age 33.

On another tree in 1832 in Amelia County, Va., Mr. and Mrs. Armistead T. Townes lost three children in 12 days to scarlet fever – Eliza, age 7, and twins Indiana and Louisiana, age 5.

In 1912, a 7-month-old baby girl from Pawnee County, Okla., took a train alone – along with her mother’s body – to be met by her maternal grandparents in Texas. Her mother had just died of typhoid fever. The father, who was hospitalized with the same disease, would die in Oklahoma three days after the mother.

The list goes on and on – on nearly every large tree you might research. The history of the world and of families unfolding rarely has been a simple or easy story.

Many notables throughout history are on the list of those lost to America’s epidemics.

Writer and visionary Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis, as did Eleanor Roosevelt and U.S. Presidents James Monroe and Andrew Jackson. President James K. Polk died of cholera. No hoax, Frederick Trump, the grandfather of President Donald Trump died of Spanish flu, a 1918 pandemic like COVID-19 that swept the world.

But better stories are of those on our trees who survived history’s waves of plagues. I’ve found many of those, too.

President Franklin Roosevelt most famously suffered from polio for decades, but technically survived it, dying of something else at age 63 in 1945.

In fact, young FDR had survived the Spanish flu in 1918, living to lead America to victory in WWII. Walt Disney, Mahatma Gandi, Amelia Earhart, writers John Steinbeck, T.S. Eliot and Katherine Anne Porter, actresses Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford, artist Georgia O’Keefe, and President Woodrow Wilson also survived the Spanish flu.

A cousin on my tree, American Red Cross Founder Clara Barton, not only was known as the “Angel of the Battlefield,” she nursed Americans through many epidemics – including dreaded smallpox. Barton herself had suffered from smallpox in her youth; she fought it with great difficulty. Barton, of course, survived and her determination changed the world.

By www.FindFamilyTrees.com

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PHOTO: Photo collage of actual posters issued for U.S. epidemics of contagious diseases.