There’s a witch in the family…and it’s not me!

It’s Hocus Pocus season! Time for reveling in witches, talking cats, and spooky spells. This year, though, I want to honor the real people caught up in the Salem Witch Trials because one of them may be related to my husband’s family.

You just never know what information you will unearth when you start digging through birth and death records, family folklore, and old newspaper clippings.

I’ve been interested in genealogy for decades. I got bored investigating my own family roots and decided to branch out. Jeff’s parents weren’t terribly interested in their own family history, but another member of the extended family wrote a 16-page document compiling the known information on Jeff’s paternal grandmother’s ancestors, and that was where I started. I now have four binders of census reports, draft registrations, birth and death certs, and family Bible inscriptions. If you’re going to do something, do it whole hog, I say.

The family lore begins with a story about a British soldier who had traveled from Kent, England, to Canada to fight for the British in the War of 1812. After the war, he accepted a land grant to stay in Canada, where he married an “Indian princess” named Amelia sometime around 1816. As the story goes, Amelia had been found wandering in the woods at the age of five by a community of Jesuits. They raised and educated her.

The first rule of genealogy is to believe nothing from nobody. Trust, but verify. Double check every iota of information and take every morsel of fact with a grain of salt.

As a result of that rule, I have issues with the story of Amelia. It’s a bit of a heresy to question a story that is all but carved in stone. For one thing, there were no known Jesuits in Canada between 1800 and 1830, according to the website of Society of Jesus in Canada. That coincidentally includes the time frame where little Amelia would have been lost, located, and married off.

Also, if they could determine she was Native American and a princess, shouldn’t they have been able to determine who her people were and return her to them?

But, still, there could have been a renegade band of Jesuits operating in Quebec. It’s possible that it was a religious order other than the Jesuits. I will keep digging into that one.

Another story states that the Coates family is related to the Currier of Currier and Ives. I have not found any documents that support that claim either, but I have not given up hope that they exist.

It was while I was delving into the lineage of the Currier side of that family that I stumbled upon information that I found to be far more interesting that either of those stories. What surprises me is that no one in the Coates family seems to be aware of it.

While rummaging through some headstones listed on findagrave.com (yes, this is something that I do for fun), I followed a thread that linked the family to Mary Towne Easty, sometimes written as Esty. Mary was one of the last people executed in Salem, MA, in 1692 under suspicion of being a witch during the infamous Salem witch trials. That would make her my husband’s seventh great-grandmother.

Mary refused to knuckle under to the hysteria of the day. If she had admitted she was a witch, her life would have been spared. She chose instead to fight for truth even if it meant she would be killed. Her motive was to ensure that future generations would not suffer through such ignorance again. Her goal was to save the inhabitants of Salem from themselves and their own superstitions.

She wrote, “I petition to your honours not for my own life for I know I must die and my appointed time is set but the Lord he knows it is that if it be possible no more innocent blood may be shed.”

Her eloquent petition for clemency is cited as one of the reasons the witch hunt came to an end.

My research on Mary is not ironclad. I have a credible link of ancestors from Jeff’s dad up through his third great-grandmother Eunice Phoebe Currie Currier. I also have online documentation listing the descendants of Mary through Dorothy Esty Currie.

My one wobbly link is the tie between Dorothy and Eunice. I cannot find any birth certificates for Eunice, nor a marriage license or death certificate. Those government documents are the gold standard for genealogical proof. I have an obituary written in 1880 that lists Eunice as the daughter of David and Dorothy Esty Currier.

At least one family history in the Family Search website from the Church of Latter-Day Saints shows Eunice and Dorothy are mother and daughter. Also, a private researcher has detailed her family in tons of detail and her research includes the relationships. And of course, there is my original link through findagrave.com.

Combined, these provide strong support for my hypothesis, but I accept they are not fool proof.

Nevertheless, I am going to run with the story, mostly because I would be proud to admit her blood runs through that of my children and grandchildren.

(Another story that came to light during my search details the exploits of a male ancestor who burned his buttocks crouching over a pile of gunpowder while it was being lit. Not all ancestors can be heroic.)

I have added Salem as a stop on our bucket list of places to visit. Jeff and I can research the family there, then travel on to New Brunswick, where later generations of the family moved some years after the witch trials were over. Eunice was born there, and maybe I can find proof in their physical archives. I’ve exhausted ancestry.com on this issue.

I can’t begin to tell you how excited Jeff gets when I plan vacations around trips to graveyards.

In the meantime, I will continue to watch Hocus Pocus on Halloween. I never like to miss a chance to run amok, amok, amok.

I’ll just remember that the silliness of the Sanderson sisters masks a very real tragedy in American history, and one that now hits close to home.