A Witch in Line 

                                    THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

(Author's note: This is a genealogical exercise and may not be your cup of tea. No one will blame you if you would prefer to bow out or roll another one. As always, it is unapologetically, unedited.)

Everyone should have one - a witch that is. 

While I'd initially planned to review the pedigree chart shown below back to Mary Perkins Bradbury with a finer-tooth comb before sharing, the truth is, the core line was already established. (Mary Perkins Bradbury was tried for witchcraft at Salem in 1692 but escaped execution.)

Yes, the line to Mary Perkins Bradbury was "all there already." So, because of this, I'm gonna attempt to present it here, or at least generally, from published "source genealogies" for the older records, and in a smattering of vitals and newspaper clippings for the later ones. 

To do this, I've set up all these pieces of this ancestral line down in chronological order, and as they occurred, to link Mary Perkins Bradbury to Kelly Neptune. Kelly is a family friend and neighbor who helps take care of my 90-year-old father - no easy task. Lately, she's been curious about learning more about her own father's ancestry. (This led me here to Mary Perkins Bradbury.) These proofs will not be complete, and while they won't satisfy lineage society requirements, they should do the job. I know too that the images will be hard to see, and the highlights on them tough to make out.  (I advise looking at this post on a computer.) Still, I hope you will enjoy following the line from a Salem witch to Kelly.

Like I said, everyone needs a witch in their line. :) 

Let's start with the image of a provisional pedigree chart (shown below) to show how we're getting from point A to point B.

And yes, this won't always be easy to understand - but hang in there.

Now, let's go through each generation to show the available proofs in this instance.  The image directly below from the Perkins family genealogy will be a good starting point to introduce our Mary:      

It should also probably be labeled as "the first generation," but this is just a blog post and not official Register Style genealogy.     

We'll just call it "Generation Zero."

Above: George Augustus Perkins, The Family of John Perkins of Ipswich, Mass: Complete in Three Parts (Salem, MA: Salem Press Publishing & Printing Co., 1889), 15.

    

Instead, we'll go with this image below by introducing Mary Perkins Bradbury's daughter, Mary (Bradbury) Stanyan, as the first generation:

Above: Louis Clinton Hatch, ed., Maine: A History, vol. 4 (New York: The American Historical Society, 1919), 26.

   Next, for generation two, we'll use this image below. It introduces their daughter Ann Stanyan, who married Thomas Seally. (This surname is a tricky one as there a several spelling variations)

Above: L.A. Morrison, The History of the Sinclair Family in Europe and America (Boston: Damrell & Upham, 1896), 372

For generation three, I'm going to use this image to introduce their daughter Ann "Sylle", who married Samuel Blake.

Above: Sybil Noyes, Charles Thornton Libby, and Walter Goodwin Davis, Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (Portland, ME: Southworth Press, 1928–1939), 95.

 And for generation four, here is their son, also called Samuel Blake, shown in the image below:

Above: Carlton E. Blake, Descendants of Jasper Blake, Emigrant from England to Hampton, N.H., ca. 1643, 1649–1979 (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1980), 210.

These image references are from the Blake Genealogy, which I wish were more complete with source citations. Still, it's damn good, and probably the best work on the family that I've ever seen. Published in 1980, the author gives us general facts and gives us dates and places that can be followed up on if needed.

And what would generation five be without another "Samuel Blake?" LOL. In the image below, we meet their son Sam, whom I have incorrectly highlighted in the above image. (I should have highlighted #10 to correspond to the image below)

Above: Blake, Descendants of Jasper Blake, 213

Generation six - their son Theophilus Blake, who married Mary Adams in the mage below:

 Above: Blake, Descendants of Jasper Blake, 213, 214

And generation seven, another Samuel Blake, who married Marietta Elkins in the following image:

 Above: Blake, Descendants of Jasper Blake, 213, 214

For generation eight, things start to get a little tricky. The author of the Jasper genealogy forgot to include Emma Rosetta Blake, daughter of (this) Samuel Blake and Mariretta Elkins. It looks like the author didn't see the next page of the census record that shows little six-year-old Emma Blake in the 1880 census for that household. No worries, Sam! We have you covered. 

Above: 1880 U.S. Census, Shelby County, Iowa, population schedule, Harlan Township, enumeration district 207, page 207, s.v. "Emma Blake."

The obituary image below helps link Samuel Blake's wife, Marietta Elkins Blake (generation seven), back to their daughter Emma Blake (generation eight), who married Isaac Collins.

Now, for generation nine, their daughter Alicia Inez Collins, who married George William Briggs. She is referenced in the image below of her mother, Emma Blake Collins' obituary.

Below: Marriage record image for Inez Collins to George Briggs

   

And for generation ten - a marriage record for their daughter, Evelyn Mae Briggs. (Any competent genealogist will tell you that we need a birth record for Evelyn here to show that these were her parents, but we're gonna just go with this for now.)

And the image below for generation eleven for Gene Smith linking him to his parents - and to Mary Perkins Bradbury. (And yes, I know we still need better vitals here.)

           Generation twelve - Kelly Smith.         

      

So there you have it. A fairly good amount of anecdotal proof that links Kelly Smith Neptune to her ancestress, Mary Perkins Bradbury. And yes, I know it needs additional items to meet any proof standards (duh), but in truth, not much, and the line doesn't fall apart at any point. It may be missing a birth record for say Inez Collins, but these are things that can be obtained. Several of the older records can be gleaned out of New England, too, so I may post them here at a later date.

I'm good with this line.

The cool thing about MPB, too, is that (a) she's a frickn' awesome witch who got away, and (b) she comes with a whole host of verified famous people who are also descended from her. 

Winner, winner, chicken dinner?!?!?!

For me personally, the curious thing about MPB is that this is the second time this year I have encountered her. She is also related to my friend and client Paige Dunham (image below), as well as a several times over great aunt. Paige, who is descended from "the ghost" of Phillip Babb from the Isles of Shoals, Maine, and who is also related through Phillip Babb by marriage to - you guessed it Kelly Smith Neptume.

                         

I mean, go figure, right? You can't make this shit up - or, if you do, you are really frickn' nuts.

So I think I'm gonna go take an aspirin. Your head hurt too? 

It always happens when there is a "witch in the line."

(Wink!)

 "BACKWARDS and FORWARDS"

  A Tale of Irish Eyes and the Minister's Wife 

Using a 1864 Deed to Trace Cousins and Defeat a Century-Old Brick Wall

(Author's note: Some things are just better known.)

As always, unedited.

I.

We wannabe genealogists often fall victim to a common, yet limiting, habit: viewing ancestry as a simple, linear path stretching backward through time. We readily assume that the complete truth about our predecessors is waiting just beyond the next "brick wall," requiring only relentless effort to push through.

This happens a lot, I think, when we try to "jump the pond" and attempt to investigate our European roots. It can feel like we'll never find the records needed to connect us to, say, our eighteenth-century Irish ancestors. It’s like no matter how hard we try to push back in time, that brick wall won't come down.

But what if this perspective is flawed? What if the key to truly "going backward" is actually an act of moving forward to find our way there? What if the key to going back "ancestrally" is to take what's known and move down the line forward in time to see if the present just might reveal more about the past and ultimately knock down another brick wall?

Now I admit. In addition to all of this is the curiosity I have about "my cousins" I might have (or have had) on the other side of the Atlantic, that my family lines have been here so long any memory or evidence of my kin on the other side of the pond has disappeared. But what if you could combine these two concepts—that is, look down or forward in time on a collateral line and perhaps (at the same time) reconnect with, say, one's Irish roots?

I don't know about you, but I have never stood at the grave of any of my known kin anywhere in Europe—let alone the Emerald Isle. However, that changed this week for me as I researched the life of my cousin's family, specifically his ancestor Isabella (Stinson) Cummin. Before I could go any further, though, I found myself up against that rather infamous or proverbial brick wall, genealogically speaking, that is.

While I could map everything back to Isabella and to her brother Thomas Stinson (d. 1860), I couldn't get the line to budge back any further. I realized, though, that because Isabella's brother Thomas had died intestate and, more importantly, without issue (children), he had left a pretty solid list of his siblings and other heirs in some pretty complex documents. I wondered if I could sort them out. Would they give me any clues to the older generation—the ones past Thomas and Isabella?

There were so frickn' many!

Not to make excuses, but I'm not that smart. In addition to that, the document images of Thomas Stinson's estate settlement are numerous, written in hard-to-read script, and presented on difficult-to-navigate web pages.

I did have the advantage of an AI old-cursive script reader on FamilySearch, but even navigating that was beyond tedious, trying to match the script to both names and geography, often written phonetically or translated thusly by the AI. Really, with all these people in Thomas’s estate on both sides of the Atlantic, what did I have to go on?

I'd even fed everything I could find into Google's search engine to help me vet out the relationship between three generations spelled out in Thomas Stinson's estate settlement. But in between everyone being called John, Thomas, or James, I gotta say, with Thomas's eight siblings and numerous nieces and nephews, it all got a wee bit confusing. I had to argue with AI about a couple of the relationships amongst the apparent kinsmen in that the AI was gleaning, but I am generally comfortable with what it has proposed about who is related to whom out of the old text. (BTW...AI and I are still arguing over this a bit; however, this is what "we've" agreed on this far, as taken out of the old documents - that I can see anyway.)

BUT then I remembered that I did have something. I had something very specific, too.

I had the full names of a husband and wife. Not only that, but a Presbyterian minister and his wife.

I recalled a certain April 1864 deed among the mix of Thomas’s estate documents. This particular deed referenced:

  "We, the Reverend (Revd.) John Stinson, of the Manse Glendaright, in the County of Tyrone, Ireland, Presbyterian Minister, and Caroline Stinson, otherwise Hamilton, his wife..." 

This grand-nephew of the deceased Thomas provided a perfect anchor point. I began to wonder if there weren't modern-day descendants of "John and Caroline." Would it be possible to learn about the family and previous generations by understanding a later one?

Would they have a record of just who Isabella (Stinson) Cummin's and her eight siblings' parents were?

In truth, "John and Caroline" felt like the only "complete couple" I had to work with. At least they seemed to come with some clues. And I had an actual place in Tyrone County. Those clues are Caroline's maiden name of "Hamilton" and the fact that John was a minister. I did have one other couple in the mix of all this. Thomas and Isabella's sister, Nancy Stinson, married Ephraim McBride, but this led me nowhere fast.

After arguing a bit more with the AI model over exactly where Reverend John Stinson fit into the general pedigree, I decided to give it a go and to see just what was out there among the branches. I posited that if I could find direct descendants of one of Thomas and Isabella's brothers (who led me to his great-nephew, the Reverand John), I might be able to reconstruct and reconnect with existing modern-day family in Tyrone County, Ireland. (The Reverend's direct line descends from Thomas and Isabella's brother, James Stinson (G1), as confirmed by the deeds.)

Hey, it was worth a shot. Especially when I found these two:

 

Above: Final resting place for the Reverend John Stinson and his wife Caroline Hamilton Stinson at the Ballymagrane Presbyterian Church Yard, Aughnacloy, County Tyrone, Ireland. (In the manse of Glendaright (the location of the church), Ballymagrane is a nearby town. Aughnacloy is the main village.) See FindAGrave.com memorial number: 152710296

Yep. That's the Reverend John Stinson and his wife, Caroline Hamilton Stinson.

I knew I had 'em cuz they are the very same people mentioned in that 1864 Power of Attorney.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

For the first time in my genealogical life, I was able to look at a researched "American-Irish" connection from over the pond. I was able to look directly at the grave of Isabella (Stinson) Cummins's great-nephew and his wife. These are the graves of my Cousin Dan's Irish cousins. I could even estimate the degree of relationship.

I was getting closer.

II.

There are eight of them.

There are eight submitted family trees that show the Reverend John Stinson and his wife Caroline Hamilton as either the "submitter" or as the "home person." This meant that there are eight possibilities for making connections or learning more about the Stinson family in Ireland. Predictably so, the trees are split about half and half as to whether the submitter is from Ireland or here in the States. The largest issue, though, is that none of them appear to know anything more than I do about the Stinson clan. Only one of them reported back that the father of Reverend John Stinson's father was also named John Stinson  - a first cousin to Isabella (Stinson) Cummin.

At least thus far, any further information about the line has stopped.

          

 

This hasn't stopped me from reaching out across the pond to Ireland to ask any one of them if they know something more. I received a kind reply from one lady in Ireland who said the family tree she's submitted was "only for a neighbor of her mom's" and that she has no more information. Still, a "neighbor of her mom's" meant that the Stinson line - relatives of Thomas Stinson and Isabella (Stinson) Cummin - not to mention the rest of the Stinson gang, still exist. I need to follow up here to see if there is any wiggle room to learn more.

It also hasn't stopped me from creating a provisional pedigree chart to link my Cousin Dan's ancestors to his more recent ones.

The information about Reverend John Stinson has also allowed me to go genealogically forward. He and his wife, Caroline Hamilton Stinson, had three sons, one of whom also left descendants. The most recently traceable of these leads through their son, Rev. Thomas Stinson, who also became a Presbyterian minister. This Thomas moved to New Zealand, where he also had a family. He left behind a daughter, Olivia Caroline Stinson, who passed away in New Zealand in 1966.

So you got a pretty big family here with kinfolk stretching from Ireland to Pennsylvania to New Zealand. I haven't gone much farther than this. I still have a couple of inquiries out, and I'm hopeful for more replies. In the meantime, I will continue to argue with AI over who belongs where in the documents. I mean, when you're dealing with images like this, it's easy (at least for me) to get confused. 

Who'd have thought AI could be so helpful with all of this and also such a pain in the ass? LOL.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not taking AI at face value here. 

Anything it "reports" back to me is just another clue to investigate. Still, it has proven to be a great tool for deciphering so many of these obscurities that any genealogist will face every day. It helps narrow the playing field. In the meantime, I'm glad to bring the Irish family back to this lady who rests here below, and to maybe give her descendants a better feel for their Irish roots - past and present.

               

Above: The broken and barely legible grave of Isabella (Stinson) Cummin, wife of William Cummin Senior, at the Adams Cemetery, Juniata County, Pennsylvania. See FindAGrave Memorial No. 79414950

                

I think this is a good place to close for now. I believe I have brought some peace to a couple of the old ghosts, or at least have told a little bit more of the tale.

Until next time.

PEACE.

Correction: Olivia Caroline Stinson was from Christ's Church NZ and not Auckland as reported above.