Mary Whitteridge and the witch trials

Leverett genealogists have been interested in a Mary Whitteridge since she appeared marrying William Leverich in Boston in 1715. The following year a William Leverit and Mary Whitteridge had a daughter Phebee in Boston. These may seem like random events, but there weren't many Leveretts around those days, and a William who appeared later, born in about 1727, could have come from this family.

In searching for who Mary Whitteridge could be, the trail leads directly to Ipswich. The Ipswich area was full of Whitteridges, and the name was spelled at least a half-dozen ways, maybe a dozen. Perhaps the most interesting of them was the Mary Whitheridge of this article. She was jailed in 1692, then acquitted, but had to pay court fees, which broke her (and her mother, Sarah Buckley). She then married Benjamin Proctor of the famous family involved in the witch trials.

One thing that is interesting is that she had two little children, at the time she was jailed, but neither of them was a Mary. One was Prudence Whittredge (1686) and the other was Silvester (1688). They would have been 6 and 4 when she was jailed, and they fell completely out of sight afterward, as did her mother, Sarah Buckley. She, Mary Buckley, had married a guy named Sylvester Whittredge from Marblehead, and had those two children, but he had died.

A couple of patterns I've found here are these. First, the spellings of Whitridge/Whitterage/Witherage/Whitered etc. are all over the map. There are at least a dozen of them. There are many people in this family but all of them that I can tell are in that north shore area, Ipswich, Gloucester, Marblehead, Danvers, etc. There are none in or from Boston or anywhere else. Second, the records aren't really all that clear. A couple of Whittridge men came early, like in 1635, so many of the people in the family are descended from them, and there are quite a few by 1692. But there is no information about who Sylvester's parents were. Ipswich wasn't as organized as Boston was at that time.

So what are the chances that the child, Prudence, ended up in Boston calling herself Mary? Well, somebody did, and it wasn't someone from Boston. I have come to believe that William himself, who was probably a Leverett based on what he called himself when he had Phebee, was from Ipswich too. I feel that if he was in Boston, people would have known about it. This doesn't explain how he got up there, with his mother, especially before or during the witch trials, but remember that a Mary Leverett was found in Salem marrying a Johnathan Moulton in 1708, and died in Wenham soon after. I might have my dates wrong here but there aren't many Mary Leveretts around, and it was unlikely that Ipswich/Salem was getting new ones from England or the South around that time. This Mary Leverett would I believe be John Leverett the Younger's full sister, born 1674, and she would have had to move to Ipswich herself with the baby around 1690, but actually could have moved up there at any time. I cannot explain why she would move up there, but a witch trial in Boston (1688) and an out-of-wedlock baby might explain something. Ipswich was a place where people weren't keeping such good track of such things, obviously. And her brother married into a powerful Ipswich family (1697); her sister (or half-sister, anyway) had already married into another one. They knew people in Ipswich; it wasn't Boston; those were two good reasons. Who knew that the place would become famous in the witch trials? Or that, nowadays, all kinds of research would be done on the Mary Whitteridge of the witch trials, and the 150 other people who were due to be hung, but who were pardoned and freed by Governor Phips? Perhaps long-lost records of Ipswich/Salem will pop up soon, in the process of doing the vigorous research people are doing.