Our family and the witch trials
What happened. In the winter of 1692 a group of girls in Salem Village began having fits and named neighbors as witches. Over the next year more than two hundred people were accused. Nineteen were hanged on Proctor's Ledge, Giles Corey was pressed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea, and at least five more died in jail. The court allowed spectral evidence, testimony that the accused person's spirit had appeared to the witness. The governor shut the court down that autumn, and the colony later declared the trials unlawful.
The judge. John Hathorne, a Salem merchant and magistrate, and Jonathan Corwin issued the first arrest warrants and ran many of the first examinations; the transcripts show Hathorne questioning people as if their guilt were already settled. He also signed the one acquittal of 1692, Nehemiah Abbott Jr. Another judge, Samuel Sewall, stood up in church in 1697 and publicly took the blame and shame for his part. Hathorne never did. He died in 1717 and is buried in the Charter Street burying ground in Salem.
The writer. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was the judge's great-great-grandson. He is said to have added the W to his name to put distance between himself and that history, and he wrote about inherited guilt in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.
Where we come in. Our ancestor Priscilla Hathorne was baptized at Salem on 22 July 1649. Her father, John Hathorne, kept taverns at Salem, Malden and Lynn and was the younger brother of Major William Hathorne, the judge's father. So Priscilla and Judge Hathorne were first cousins. She married Jonathan Shore of Boston, and their son Samuel Shorey was born at Lynn in 1683. That line comes down to Eva Blanche Shorey, Ancil's mother. Our tie to Salem is to the bench, not the accused: no ancestor of ours is known to have been accused or to have testified.
A cousin's widow and a hanged minister. Priscilla's first cousin Capt. William Hathorne Jr. (1646–1678), the judge's brother, left a widow, Sarah Ruck. She married the Rev. George Burroughs, who was serving as minister at Wells, Maine, the town our Littlefield ancestors founded. Burroughs was arrested at Wells in May 1692 and hanged on 19 August. On the ladder he recited the Lord's Prayer perfectly, something a witch supposedly could not do, and the crowd was shaken until Cotton Mather talked them down. He was the only minister executed.
How sure we are. Reported, not yet checked. Priscilla's parentage and the cousin link come from compiled genealogies (WeRelate, WikiTree). The Shorey line down from Priscilla now runs Samuel (b. 1683) → Thomas (b. Kittery 1709, on record as Samuel's son) → his son Samuel → Samuel of Albion (about 1763–1842) → Edmund. Every step is now on record: Thomas's 1781 will names "my grandson Samuel Shorey, son of my son Samuel." (Mercy Lewis, one of the accusers, is no relation to our Lewis family of Hingham.)
Sources: WeRelate, John Hathorne (2); Cry Innocent: Col. John Hathorne; George Burroughs; Witches of Mass Bay: Burroughs genealogy; Rex Young's family site.