Prudence Witherage (1686)

OK, so it was a long shot. My question was whether this poor girl had any relation to the Mary Whittridge who walked into the Boston Public Records office and announced her marriage to William Leveridge in 1715, and the following year, had a baby named Phebee, with him calling himself Leverit now. He could be one of ours, and could have had another William in a few years, and if so, she's one of ours too, but where did she come from? I thought maybe she'd be connected to Prudence.

Prudence (1686) was a six-year-old girl when her mother was jailed for witchcraft as part of the Salem witch trials. Her brother Silvester was four. Their father Silvester was dead; her mother was a widow. She was acquitted and released, but had to pay for her time in jail and it broke her. She ended up marrying Benjamin Proctor, and maybe that's an avenue of finding what happened to the kids.

The heck of it is, neither kid was ever seen again, that I know of. Now it's true that the name can be spelled a dozen or more ways, and I've only tried one or two. It's also true that the web might not be the only place to look. But the fact is, they dropped off the face of the earth. And the father, Silvester, he also is a total unknown.

Now the Witherage family got excited recently when Mary's name turned up among the people caught up in the witch trials. Especially since she lived, and had children, and had more even, after she got out of jail. But it was dead ends all around, when it came to finding her Witherage children, or the roots of the man she'd married, Silvester of Marblehead.

In my case I have to admit that it was a long shot in the first place, thinking I could find better evidence of who the Mary was that walked into that office in Boston. It turns out a lot of people are missing, or unaccounted for, or of unknown origin. Records just aren't that clear. What they have, has been saved carefully and made very accessible. I think those small towns, Salem, Wenham, Ipswich, Marblehead, etc. have all done the best they could in that regard. But lots of times it's a fire or a storm that destroys what paper there is and then, voila, it's gone. No record of where this guy came from. We'll just have to live with it.