Massachusetts Witch Trials: draw your own conclusions

Want to read the arrest warrant for John Alden? Yes, the one who loved Priscilla. You can see that, and there is more...and more fascinating stuff in very old court records.


Did you know that you can look at Massachusetts Court records of the Salem witch trials? The transcribed records are available through the Salem Witch Trials and Documentary Archive Transcription Project. 

The archive site also has other court records, and if you have any ancestors from Salem, you may find their names there as judges or as complainants, or defendants or even as witnesses.
 Another site with excellent transcriptions is: .Salem Witch Trials


Read the actual petitions of accused "witches." I put that word "witches"  in quotes because there were no witches in Salem, just victims of bad behavior on the part of their neighbors and countrymen.
I find the witch trials fascinating, and have pored over them to learn more about the time and events in Salem.



It is all there, and you can read the words as they were  recorded.
In my opinion, the court records always provide a great view into society and motives.
Image taken from Famous American Trials.(http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/salem.htm)

Francis De Pau and the slave trade

Francis De Pau, born 1773 in Bayonne, France, is well known in Northern New York for his financial successes, his shipping line, and his marriage to Sylvie de Grasse. A ship was named after him, and so was a town in Jefferson County, New York: Depauville. He lived in Trinidad, in New York, and in South Carolina, and married the daughter of  the French Count DeGrasse in New Jersey.

My research on this individual can serve as a useful model for successful research via the internet.

In hoping to find more information about him and his family, I used many forms of his name and places he had lived in search engines, and then built on the information that popped up. I found that as the administrator of an estate, he had sold a slave, so I then checked his name in connection to the slave trade.

What little information did appear was quite informative, and it came from an unlikely website.  Some business papers De Pau wrote are up for sale for quite a bit of cash at an auction site, believe it or not. Sometimes these obscure marketplaces are indeed where we can find the best authentic information. The papers are written to a captain of a ship, and are very revealing about the degree to which De Pau was a corrupt slave dealer.  He reveals his tactics for taking over a ship and acquiring slaves, and  describes the number of slaves to obtain and what their height may  be.
His family was very interesting, and  has inspired stories of intrigue and romance in the area where the French once settled in Jefferson and Lewis Counties, New York, but I had never heard of this side of him before.

As always, back to the original documents for the best information. De Pau reveals in his own hand what kind of businessman he was, and now those papers are, ironically, worth quite a bit of money--tens of thousands.


 I found scanned images of his papers and long descriptions of them at the website "Goldberg Coins and Collectibles."


The image of the ship Francis DePau is taken from antique-images.de

Bucks County, PA resources

There are many excellent resources for Bucks County, PA. Somehow it seems that the original settlers had great success in establishing large families with many descendants.

Many Quakers lived there, and there were immigrants from Scotland via Ireland, and from India, Holland, Germany, and Sweden as well, way, way back in time, beginning in the 1600's.

The PA GenWeb Archives for Bucks County is one of the best of all the GenWeb archives, with excellent abstracts of wills, which are well-indexed.   The abstracts themselves are excellent. They will really help you link your family connections together. You can find the wills in complete form by using the FamilySearch.org website. The wills are not yet indexed there, but you can combine the indexing done at PA GenWeb Archives with the documents at FamilySearch with good results. The will abstracts at the Bucks County Genweb Archives cover time periods from the early 1700's to the early 1800's.

Also very useful is the website PARoots.

A few additional resources for later years can be found on google books, but not all pages will be shown online.

There are also excellent biographies, area descriptions, and the like online for Bucks and Philadelphia counties.

George Williams Brown,  a prolific writer from the area, has written a number of books on people he knew or heard about in the history of that area. Many of the books can be found digitized online.

Just takes some looking, but a lot of what you may be looking for in Bucks County is digitized.

New way to order microfilms at LDS Family History centers

Familysearch.org, which is updating its records and its accessibilty at a breakneck speed (which I have to applaud) has recently changed procedures for ordering microfilms to be viewed at its centers. Instead of sending checks by mail, or walking into a Family History Center to fill out order forms, everything is now done online. Go to Familysearch.org/films and you will find that you need to set up an account (quick and easily done) and then you can go ahead and order your microfilms online. As I was advised, it is very important to designate the family history center at which you wish to view the films. Otherwise, a center is chosen for you, and as was pointed out to me, it might be one that is open one day a week by appointment. So just do a little planning, a little clicking, and you have your order in and your hopes up for good results when you get to see the films!

http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php/Microfilm