Not Guilty

After visiting the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on Veterans Day Scott and I headed to Salem, Massachusetts. I vaguely remember the Salem Witch Trials from high school history but low and behold Scott is a direct descendant of the infamous Putnam family so we had to check it out.  The Putnam's daughter Ann was one of the accusers of the victims of the witch trials.  We found the town of Salem is very quaint, old, and charming.  We headed over to the Salem Witch Trial Museum but we found that it only had a gift shop and showed two films so we wandered around a little and ended up in the Park Service information center which had a 38 minute film on the Witch Trials and another film about the settling of the area.  Both were excellent and we learned many interesting facts.  What was fascinating was that Ann Putnam was the oldest of 12 children and both of her parents died in 1699 leaving Ann to raise her nine surviving siblings.  When we got home that evening I wanted to see how old Ann was when her parents died so I went on familysearch.org.  When I found the information on Thomas Putnam and Ann Putnam it showed that they had only four children but when we watched the film they finished by telling us that Ann never married and when her parents both died in 1699 she raised her 9 siblings.  She was 20 years old at that time. I wrote our family history expert Phil Duncan to see if he knew about the additional siblings.  He didn't have any information so I started "googling" and found a site called familypedia.com which gave me a list of 12 children of Thomas and Ann Putnam as well as their birth and death dates and the name of some of their spouses.  It is amazing how much is available to us now to link our generations.  I have passed on the information to Phil and I know he will update the Family Search website.  It was exciting to be involved in finding the children of the Putnam family from the 1600s. In searching for information I also read a letter of apology Ann had written about being a part of the death of innocent people.  A little sight seeing became an interesting experience in the importance of continually updating our family records.