[Editor's note: This blog post first appeared in Vita Brevis on 20 March 2017.]
Through a different part of my family, I descend from Jacob Towne (1632–1704) of Topsfield, Massachusetts, who was a brother of Mary (Towne) Esty and Rebecca (Towne) Nurse, both of whom were executed for witchcraft at Salem in 1692. So I liked to say I was the several greats nephew of two accused witches, as well as one of the judges who sentenced them. [1]
While there are several items wrong on the above chart (the name of Daniel Salisbury’s mother for one), I had not researched everything, and I had not come across anything to make me question Anne Hale’s parents and thus my Sewall descent. In 2007, when we published Eben Graves’s The Descendants of Henry Sewall, I happily looked at the book for my line of descent, which went down to the above Moses Hale and his wife Mary Moody but did not include their children. I had also done various research over the years on some of the Sewall and Dummer ancestors in England.
In the fall of 2015, I gave a talk to the Sons and Daughters of the First Settlers of Newbury, Massachusetts, and I thought I would briefly mention what I thought were my several early Newbury ancestors. I went over what I thought would be a quick confirmation of the various ancestors. I found the 1770 gravestone of Anne (Hale) Salisbury on findagrave (which actually lists her maiden name as Hale!). However, on the memorial the contributor had said she was a daughter of John Hale/Haile and Elizabeth Mason of Swansea, Massachusetts. Were the parents I had wrong? This was quite easy to confirm. The 1997 Descendants of Richard Haile of Swansea (1640–1729) shows the family of John Haile and Elizabeth Mason and provides a verbatim transcription of the 1743 administration of John Haile in which it says “Item We have divided to Anne the wife of Daniel Salisbury the only Daughter…”
Clearly I had the wrong parents! I could definitely have found this years earlier had I looked. The sketch of Moses Hale in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates says he had three sons and seven daughters, citing the 1889 Genealogy of Descendants of Thomas Hale [of Newbury]; had I consulted that work, I would have seen that Moses did not have a daughter named Anne (from his will, which listed all of his surviving daughters).
So in one swoop, I lost nearly all of my Newbury ancestors and gained several new Swansea ancestors. I told the Newbury group I now only had one single early Newbury ancestor – Anthony Morse, through a different (and researched) side of my family. While I still am a several greats nephew of the accused witches, I can say bye-bye as a several greats nephew to one of the judges.[2]
[1] Their sister Sarah Cloyce was also accused of witchcraft but was released from jail in 1693.
[2] My Town ancestors are included in Lois Payne Hoover, Towne Family – William Towne and Joanna Blessing Salem, Massachusetts 1635 (Baltimore: Otter Bay Books, 2010); the line is well-documented going down to my ancestor Elizabeth Davis (daughter of Tamar Town) and her husband John Eliot Eaton. I documented the generations from John and Elizabeth down to myself as part of an application to the Jamestowne Society through John Eliot Eaton’s descent from Major-General Daniel Gookin (ca. 1612–1687), briefly of Virginia and later of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
