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{{tTag}}A family history, 1589 to today
One family.
Six spellings.
Clerks in northern Maine wrote our name however they heard it. This is the story of the people behind it: potato farmers on the Aroostook, a minuteman at Lexington, four brothers lost in the Civil War, and a gunner on an aircraft carrier off Okinawa.
How the records spell us. Tap a name.
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174people in the tree
13generations
437years traced
3wars, 13 who served
01 / Timeline
Three centuries, one stop at a time
02 / Stories
What we found
Every story is marked by how sure we are. Proven means a record says so. Probable means the evidence points one way but a test or document is still missing. Reported means someone published it and we have not checked.
03 / Famous names
Names you know
Two different things live here, and we keep them apart. An ancestor is someone we come down from directly. A cousin is someone who shares one of our ancestors, which makes them family but not a forebear. Most of this comes from compiled genealogies gathered by Micah, and each entry says how far it has been checked.
We descend from them
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How we connect
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Famous cousins
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How we connect
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Salem, Massachusetts, 1692
Our family and the witch trials
200+people accused
19hanged
1pressed to death
5+died in jail
What happened. In the winter of 1692 a group of girls in Salem Village began having fits and named neighbours as witches. Over the next year more than two hundred people were accused. Nineteen were hanged on Gallows Hill, 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, meaning 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 was a Salem merchant and magistrate who ran many of the first examinations and then sat on the court that tried the cases. The surviving transcripts show him questioning people as if their guilt were already settled. Another judge, Samuel Sewall, stood up in his church in 1697 and publicly took the blame and shame for his part. Hathorne never did.
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 for the rest of his life, in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.
Where we come in. Priscilla Hathorne was baptized at Salem in July 1649 and married Jonathan Shore of Boston. She is reported to be a first cousin of Judge Hathorne, and she sits on our Shorey line, the family of Eva Blanche Shorey, Ancil's mother. So our tie to Salem is to the bench, not to the accused. No ancestor of ours is known to have been accused, and none is known to have testified.
How sure we are. Reported, not yet checked. Two things have to hold. Priscilla has to be the judge's cousin, which comes from compiled trees. And the Shorey line has to run unbroken from Jonathan Shore down to Edmund Shorey of Maine, where one or two generations in York County are still unconfirmed.
04 / Service
Somebody has to stand the watch
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05 / Open questions
Help us finish it
A family history is never done. These are the gaps we are working on now. If you have a photo, a letter, a Bible page or a memory that bears on any of them, we would love to hear from you.
Write to rexerito@mac.com{{q.a}}