Salem Witch Trials: Colonial America in 1692 Project

Do I detect Bloom County in here somewhere? Hmm... and I thought Salem was in Essex County. :)

Punny!

I've just made this one an MP:

Rebecca Nurse (Towne)

Rebecca Nurse

Cool thank you! I've added her to the Project.

Thanks! :-)

For curators:

I'm adding this Curator Note on profiles I make MP's and send off for merging:

This profile is important to the initiative: http://www.geni.com/projects/Salem+Witch+Trials%253A+Colonial+Ameri....
See the discussion: http://www.geni.com/discussions/6000000010215934624.

Please try and do the same, it drums up interest in the project to the collaborators on the profile, as well as explain what we're up to.

Yep, will do. Added that info to Rebecca's page.

Apparently, someone named Lance Bertola is holding onto an alternate profile for Rebecca Nurse. He has them connected by means of inclusion of the main profile in his Rebecca's birth date. I can't get in to remove this inclusion.

Anyone with magical curator powers want to pay a visit to the Bertola Rebecca Nurse and do a Lizzy Borden on the link?

http://www.geni.com/profile/6000000006517956849/events/600000000651...

Basically, it adds confusion to the profile timeilne....

The LDS baptised and endowed a hanged witch? That's pretty funny. Anyway, on the case. Thanks for the catch, Ben, I never would have noticed.

Fixed some of it already.

Thank you! I wasn't actually sure how to fix it. :)

YW, I'll finish it.

Sorry, keep getting distracted by the Naming Convention wars (it's like a car crashing in slow motion, I can't turn away)...

Is it possible that you could give alternative Rebecca Nurse a January 1621 date? Or just simply remove our Rebecca from his Rebecca's birth event?

Appreciate the "Lizzyfication", meanwhile...

I love this project but am not aware of any witches in the family. Although I think I'll do a Project on one of my families, maybe the Williams.

We're getting rid of anything LDS related at all, I think. Doesn't seem right. :)

Ben, I think I have everything fixed in the time line (let me know if you see anything else wrong there) except for one little thing which I don't know how to fix (the little arrow side bar still goes from 1621 to 1940 something).

Well, now it's different again. Something is wrong.

Just thought I would mention, if no one else has- Cotton Mather already has a profile on Geni, as does Susannah Martin who was hanged. I have no sources other than what I read on their profiles and Wikipedia.

Sorry, more distractions.

Yes, apparently Rebecca Nurse was a tail gunner in the bombing of Dresden. She was the first zombie witch to be awarded the medal of honor. Ceremonies took place at the French Resistance headquarters in Stalingrad, so it was very hush hush. I see that someone has found out about it, so I will have too track down the leak and terminate with extreme prejudice.

(okay, okay... back to work)

Thanks Tammy!

I'm drafting you for the project as a collaborator. Grab yourself a witch and accuser. If you want Cotton Mather I can help you find sources. When my father wanted to really insult someone, he would call him a "son of Cotton Mather."

Hatte,

My bet: you're going to turn out to be related to someone ... on the wrong side, like I am. Heh.

Added Sarah Cloyse (Towne) as an MP. She was a sister of Rebecca Nurse (Towne) and Mary Estey/Eastey (Towne). She was accused but not hung:

Sarah Cloyes

She needs to be added to the accused list on the project page as well.

Re: that last line above. Scratch that. She's listed (at the bottom).

Erica, you mean like this:

"Rebecca Nurse is your 6th great grandfather's wife's brother's wife's brother's wife's aunt."

Or maybe like this:

"Sarah Towne is Hatte Blejer's 6th great grandfather's wife's brother's wife's brother's wife's aunt! "

The relationships may be closer but I have added some new branches to my family and haven't finish various merges. Also it seems like a lot of the Wilbores (Wilbor Wilbur) men had multiple wives.

Lots of wives? The boys did get around then. :)

When the paths get all ... wordy ... like that I figure the geni-based really needs to be re-indexed.

The rest of us, keep posting URLs of our Witches / Accusers here. I'll scoop them up to get worked on if Kim O doesn't grab them first LOL.

And keep researching. The Salem Witchcraft Trials is well documented and a micro cosm of life in Colonial America. It really leads to so many different historical issues and complexities.

Microcosm of life in Colonial America? Seems to me they only got that crazy in the Puritan areas. And not even in all the Puritan areas, mostly just Mass Bay. Plymouth and Providence Island maybe to a lesser extent. Not remembering too many witch/Quaker burnings in Maryland, though they did hang a Kent Islander. Virginia - seeming underbelly. Rhode Island - refugees from the crazies up north. New York and Connecticut - all about kicking out the native tribes. Pennsylvania - Quaker "utopia" (no witch burnings there). New Jersey - not really sure, sort of an "other place" like the Carolinas - but not remembering too many witch burnings there either. New Hampshire - refugees from the crazies down south. And so on.

This is mostly a highly interesting study of fear gone too far. And we still haven't learned our lesson from it (Ground Zero Mosque, etc.). I sort of doubt we ever will. But getting stuff like this up certainly helps. At the very least, our kids may read about the trials and have a shot at getting the whole fear-mongering thing under control.

(Looking ahead - a good follow up project would be the witches of New Mexico. That and Popeh's rebellion. The one time that the native tribes kicked out the invading Europeans, if only for a single generation.)

I'm very interested in this project & will do what I can to help. Rebecca Nurse (Towne), who was the main subject of Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible", is my 8th great grandmother. Two of her sisters, Mary Easty (Towne) & Sarah Cloyse Town were also convicted of witchcraft, Sarah was hanged, but Mary somehow escaped hanging. I already have quite a bit of info on the three of them that I've pulled from the internet & Ancestry.com that I can share, but may take a few days to get it all gathered & scanned so I can post it.

Hey, just found this bit of info researching Nurse:
http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/polcrt/SalemTrials.html

Eighty-one Scottish witches were pardoned, in 2004, in Prestonpans. Most witches were convicted on the basis of spectral evidence [ghosts, apparitions, and other objects of dread) or evil spirits or voices were heard. The Prestonpans, a seaside resort in Scotland, east of Edinburgh, pardoned all "witches" were convicted, including the cats that were burned along with their owners.

I think this means that the North Berwick Witches were pardoned. Prestonpans was where Dr. John Fian (or Cunningham) was teaching when they hauled him and a bunch of others to court for using witchcraft to attempt to sink the reigning King of Scotland by conjuring up a storm while he was crossing back home from Denmark.

What they say caused him to be placed under suspicion was that a cow was apparently following him a little closely. The full story: he apparently was attempting to cast some sort of love spell that involved the collection of certain types of hairs, and he had pressed one of his students to collect said hairs from his older sister, his love interest. His mother caught younger brother in the act, and when he fessed up, the mother knew what was going on, and got said hairs from the earlier mentioned cow instead. I would suppose that the spell was effective.