My kids and I went to Proctor's Ledge partly because of what didn't happen there. As my mother's family history has long maintained, and genealogical research has confirmed, we are direct descendants of Abigail Faulkner, something of a witch-trials celebrity. You can hardly be whiter than I am, but in a sense I'm a product of a mixed marriage: My father came to America from Ireland as a teenager, and I know very little about his grandparents beyond their names and the towns where they lived. My mother was an old-line WASP whose ancestry can easily be traced back to 16th-century England, and in some cases further than that.
Abigail's husband, Francis Faulkner, was one of the richest men in Andover, a few miles northwest of Salem. His parents are recorded as the first couple married in the Massachusetts colony, and his father Edmund had "purchased" the territory where Andover now stands from a Native American leader called Cutshamache, reportedly for "twenty gallons of rum and a red coat." (I do not believe I am responsible for the deeds of my ancestors, but I'm responsible for facing the truth about them. That account was not easy to read.)
Our family catches a break with Abigail's father, the Rev. Francis Dane, who was then the elderly pastor in the North Parish of Andover (today the separate village of North Andover) and by any standard one of the true heroes of that shameful episode. Francis had been educated at Cambridge before emigrating to America, at a time when relatively few colonists could read or write, and from the beginning he refused to take part in the witch hunt, arguing that "spectral evidence" was nonsense and that the confessions of accused witches were unreliable, since "the extreme urgency that was used with some of them … and the fear they were then under, hath been an inducement to them to admit such things."
As repayment for standing up against bullshit evidence and confessions extracted under torture, Dane himself and numerous family members were accused of witchcraft in what looks an awful lot, from a 21st-century vantage point, like a "populist" revolt against the "cultural elite." Dane's extended family, in fact, accounted for about one-third of all the people accused in Salem and Andover, although his daughter Abigail — my sixth great-grandmother, as genealogy software reckons these things — was the only close relative to be tried and convicted. (Another daughter, Elizabeth Johnson, and a daughter-in-law, Deliverance Dane, both confessed to witchcraft and accused various others.)