Recording the Salem witch trials

Although parts of the Salem witch trial papers appeared in various printed forms (such as Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World), it wasn’t until the 1930s that the government-run Works Progress Administration (WPA) program transcribed the entire collection. To make the work more accessible, in 1977 Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum published the WPA transcriptions as a three-volume The Salem Witchcraft Papers (often referred to as SWP).

In 2009, Cambridge University Press published the Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt based on the original 17th-century documents. Bernard Rosenthal and his team of 11 editors—historians, linguists, handwriting specialists, a religious scholar, and an archivist—not only corrected serious transcription errors and added newly found documents, they finally put the papers in chronological order. And, as part of the process, the editors discovered more than 250 different people wrote sections of the witchcraft papers—everything from arrest warrants to trial verdicts—based on handwriting analysis, word usage, and phraseology.

So, we have 150 accused witches jailed, 250 court recorders, nine judges, members of the various juries, witnesses, and countless spectators. The numbers give us an overwhelming sense of how many people were intimately involved with some part of the witch-hunt and trials.

With all these active participants, it makes you wonder who was taking care of hearth and home, as well as the farm animals, crops, and businesses. How did the witch trials affect the everyday life of your 17th century ancestors?

Spelling variations in records

In many languages, dictionaries have existed for centuries but it wasn’t until 1604 that the first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, was written by schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey. Only one copy exists, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England, so it probably wasn’t in widespread use. Other dictionaries followed, but it wasn’t until Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), that spelling became more standardized.

It’s no surprise that surnames also lacked standardization. I’ve seen documents where a surname was written one way in the beginning and changed somewhere in succeeding paragraphs, or the signature didn’t match the previous paragraphs. Sometimes clerks phonetically interpreted the sounds of a name. Sometimes handwriting or signatures were illegible or hard to read.

Sometimes surnames changed over time. For example, the How family who in 1707 built the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, eventually added an E to their name, making it Howe. (Perhaps they didn’t want their surname confused with the word “how”?) Purportedly, author Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) added the W to his name to disassociate himself with his hanging judge ancestor, John Hathorne (1641-1717).

Sometimes names show up in various ways in early records. John Jepson (1610-1688) and his family are known in early Boston records as Jepson, Jephson, Jebson, Jipson, Gipson, and Gypson. However, in one published record he’s listed as John “Gibson” when he and his wife Emm were admitted as members to the First Church of Boston in 1670. It’s only one record, but that misspelling caused me to do many hours of research on what was really the Jepson line!

Always record the variable spelling in your notes. Keep a list of the different spellings you find to make it easier to check variations in indexes, databases, and documents.

Maine Genealogy site grows from one man's obsession

Five years ago, Christopher Dunham created the Maine Genealogy site to share some of the genealogy resources he had collected—and he’s been adding content ever since.

On the home page, you’ll find a search box for Maine people, with records for marriages, divorces, deaths, court records, cemetery records, passenger lists, enlistment records, pension records, obituaries, and death notices. The search box for Maine Places brings up matches in the Maine Resource Guide, the Legal History Database, and the USGS Feature Names. The site also includes a reference section for books, places, maps, and a census guide. Clicking on a book title within the book search leads you to the referenced tome in Google Books.

“Some of the databases—such as an index of Maine divorces from 1892 to 1903—are the product of days spent at the Maine State Archives, and can be found nowhere else on the web,” Dunham says. “In the past year, I've added a database of almost 23,000 burials in Maine's veterans' cemeteries and an obituary database that is updated daily, and is nearing 50,000 entries.”

Using Ning to create a social network, last summer Dunham “replaced an older genealogy forum with the Maine Genealogy Network, which allows visitors to post queries, upload family photographs and videos, and blog about their research. I'm hoping that it attracts researchers to the site willing to share their resources and expertise, and turn one man's obsession into a collaborative effort.”

Check out the site and help it grow!

John Harvard's statue

You would expect to find truth etched in stone at an institution of higher learning. Not so on the fabled grounds of Harvard yard. Sculpted in 1884 by the well-known artist Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), the John Harvard statue is known as the “statue of three lies.”

The inscription reads: “John Harvard, Founder, 1638.”

John Harvard (1607-1638) was living in England when the new college was founded in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. He and his wife immigrated to Charlestown, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1637 and shortly afterwards he became the minister of the local church. In 1638, he died at age 30 of tuberculosis. Since he and his wife had no children, in his will he bequeathed the fledgling college half of his estate (779 pounds) and his collection of 400 books. With the influx of needed capital, the college started building immediately. The following year, the college was renamed Harvard College to honor its first benefactor.

In 1764, fire destroyed the original college and all but one of John Harvard’s books. If you take an unofficial tour of Harvard led by current university students, you’ll learn how one book was saved (and why you shouldn’t rub the statue’s toe).

The fire also destroyed any known likenesses of John Harvard. According to my tour guide, the model for the statue was a student and descendant of former Harvard president Leonard Hoar (1672-1675), the only president not to have a house named after him.

History & Fiction

You can learn more about Harvard's history, its famous landmarks, and even take a virtual tour online. Or you can discover just as much Harvard lore and journey through 300 years of its history in Harvard Yard by William Martin (2003), a fictional mystery involving a missing Shakespearean quarto.

Further Research

If you have colonial New England ancestors, especially clergymen, find out if they attended the oldest American institution of higher education by searching Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts by John Langdon Sibley. These are available on Google Books:

Volume 1, 1642-1658 (published 1873)

Volume 2, 1659-1677 (published 1881)

Volume 3, 1678-1689 (published 1885)

Clifford Kenyon Shipton continued the series through 1774. You also can find a list of Harvard graduates 1642-1774 online. 

The Massachusetts Historical Society and the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) co-published a CD-ROM called Colonial Collegians, which includes almost 5,800 boys and men who attended American colleges through the class of 1774. It comprises all 18 volumes of Sibley's Harvard Graduates, Franklin Bowditch Dexter's Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, James McLachlan's Princetonians, as well as students of Brown University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Rutgers University, the College of William and Mary, among others. Members of NEHGS can access the Colonial Collegians database online.

New Hampshire births to 1900 available online

The FamilySearch site now offers a searchable name index to New Hampshire birth records from 1640 to 1900.

Don’t get too excited yet. Official NH birth records were created by town or city clerks. In 1866, New Hampshire passed a law requiring towns and cities to send copies of birth records to the state. However, some towns and cities didn’t comply until the 1880s, so less than half of the population has birth records at the state level. This online index is from the handwritten card index at the state level. If you don't find what you're looking for, remember that New Hampshire towns and cities have more births recorded than what's available on this statewide card index.

The cards may include child’s name, date and place of birth, name of parents and their place of birth, occupation and ages of parents, name of attending physician or midwife, gender, color or race, living or stillborn, and place recorded. With this information, you will be able to order the original record from the birthplace or state.

For example, the FamilySearch index lists Martha (b. 1654), Ann (b. 1658), and Nathaniel (b. 1660), children of John Huggins (1609-1670) and his wife Bridget (d. 1695) of Hampton, NH. When you click on the individual names, you can view the transcription and the card image. These three cards were created in 1906, and list only child’s name, parents’ names, birth date and place, clerk’s name (transcriber) and creation date.

John and Bridget Huggins, however, had nine known children. Besides the three listed above, two more births and one baptism are listed in Vital Records of Hampton, New Hampshire to the End of the Year 1900, Volume 1, by George Freeman Sanborn and Melinde Lutz Sanborn.

About FamilySearch.org

Thousands of genealogy enthusiasts around the world are making free records available on the Internet through the FamilySearch site. Volunteers extract information from digital images of historical documents (birth, marriage, death, census, and other records) to create searchable indexes online. FamilySearch is a free service of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

New Hampshire births to 1900 available online

The FamilySearch site now offers a searchable name index to New Hampshire birth records from 1640 to 1900.

Don’t get too excited yet. Official NH birth records were created by town or city clerks. In 1866, New Hampshire passed a law requiring towns and cities to send copies of birth records to the state. However, some towns and cities didn’t comply until the 1880s, so less than half of the population has birth records at the state level. This online index is from the handwritten card index at the state level. If you don't find what you're looking for, remember that New Hampshire towns and cities have more births recorded than what's available on this statewide card index.

The cards may include child’s name, date and place of birth, name of parents and their place of birth, occupation and ages of parents, name of attending physician or midwife, gender, color or race, living or stillborn, and place recorded. With this information, you will be able to order the original record from the birthplace or state.

For example, the FamilySearch index lists Martha (b. 1654), Ann (b. 1658), and Nathaniel (b. 1660), children of John Huggins and his wife Bridget of Hampton, NH. When you click on the individual names, you can view the transcription and the card image. These three cards were created in 1906, and list only child’s name, parents’ names, birth date and place, clerk’s name (transcriber) and creation date.

John and Bridget Huggins, however, had nine known children. Besides the three listed above, two more births and one baptism are listed in Vital Records of Hampton, NewHampshire to the End of the Year 1900, Volume 1, by George Freeman Sanborn and Melinde Lutz Sanborn.

About FamilySearch.org

Thousands of genealogy enthusiasts around the world are making free records available on the Internet through the FamilySearch site. Volunteers extract information from digital images of historical documents (birth, marriage, death, census, and other records) to create searchable indexes online. FamilySearch is a free service of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Celebrating Native American history and culture

Explore the rich tapestry of Native American history and culture by visiting these four museums and living history sites.

Teepees, Totem Poles, Tribal Music

On a quiet Sunday morning, the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, exudes a feeling of reverence. Perhaps it's the tribal music playing softly in the background, or the filtered light. As we venture forth, there’s a sense that the past is this mystery to explore—and respect.

My young daughter whispers excitedly and pulls me along. She’s attracted to the dioramas of long houses, round houses, pueblos, teepees, and igloos. These dwellings are unique but somehow similar to having split levels, colonials, and capes populating our town. A few of the diorama children are mostly naked, which reminds her of Mowgli from The Jungle Book. She stops in front of the life-size powwow dancers, a Sioux man and a Kiowa woman, admiring their colorful outfits and ornate jewelry.

We step deeper into the recesses of one room and, suddenly, the massive totem poles light up on automatic light sensors. My daughter hides behind me, momentarily frightened by the carved wooden faces from British Columbia.

Meeting a Native

Following the trail at Plimoth Plantation in the South Shore town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, we search for the Wampanoag Homesite. At a clearing, a cooking fire crackles near a traditional wetu (house). A man dressed in 17th-century deerskin clothing uses fire and tools to carve out the insides of a canoe. He invites us to look inside the wetu, to touch the woven bulrush mats and furs.

Unlike the Plantation's 1627 English Village, this man is not an actor re-enacting history. He's a native Wampanoag living nearby and working at Plimoth Plantation to share his experiences and his culture in this historic setting.

The Circle Quest

To the north is the unexpected treasure of the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum, 20 minutes northwest of Concord, New Hampshire. The museum is divided into galleries that showcase Native Americans of the Northeast, the Southeast, the Southwest, the Plains, and the Northwest Coast. Each grouping highlights the diverse lifestyles of the tribes, from their shelters, tools, and clothing to their crafts and ceremonial artifacts. Tribes in the Northeast used birch bark containers, for example, while those in the Southwest created painted clay pots. The common threads throughout are the ways in which these people adapted to the land and respected nature.

We follow the Circle Quest, a series of clues to objects in the museum. It makes learning fun, part of a game. Outside, there’s the Medicine Woods Quest with clues to the native plants that the Indians used for food, medicine, and shelter. During the year, the museum offers special events and celebrations that include Native American craft demonstrations, traditional music, and dance performances. During the summers, the Indian Museum also has weekly camp programs for children ages 6 to 14.

Past and Present

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is known for its maritime and East India trade collections. However, since its founding in 1799, the museum has also amassed thousands of Native American artifacts and works of art, from headdresses, beaded moccasins, spear points, and clay pipes to contemporary paintings, sculpture, and crafts. After viewing the Native American Art gallery, the Contemporary Native American Art gallery allows us to see how today's natives view the past, present, and future through their art works.

Visiting these places helps you put history and culture—and your genealogy—in perspective.