A Name Missing On Purpose

Crista Cowan 0:00

The very first person accused of and executed for witchcraft in the American colonies was written about in the journal of the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Sort of. In the spring of 1647, he wrote one blank of Windsor, arraigned and executed at Hartford for a witch. He left a literal blank line where her name should have been. Just an empty space on the page, a hole in history. The governor probably knew who she was. The town definitely knew who she was. But for 200 years, no one else remembered who she was or what exactly she was accused of. No one knew if she left anyone behind. All they knew was she was someone deemed dangerous enough to hang and not important enough to name. This is the story of the woman whose name belonged in that blank space. Her name was Alse. She was a wife, a mother, a neighbor. And on May 26, 1647, in Hartford, Connecticut, she became the first person ever executed for witchcraft in the American colonies. 45 years before anyone in Salem was even looking for witches. She deserves more than a blank line. Stories

Why These Family Stories Matter

Crista Cowan 1:35

That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America. Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us. So join me for season two as we discover from Sea to Shining Sea the stories that live in us. Alse

Outsiders On Backer Row

Crista Cowan 2:14

Young wasn't just the name of the Windsor Witch. She was part of a family. And as it turns out, the Shadow of the Gallows didn't stop with her. To understand why Alse was chosen as a scapegoat, we have to look at a town gripped by paranoia, a doctor who couldn't save his own child, and a daughter named Alice, who 30 years later would face the same accusations as her mother. To understand why Alse was chosen, you also have to look down a row called Backer Row. That's where the young's lived. It was a small cluster of houses near the Farmington River, on the very edge of town. And if you knew Windsor in 1647, you knew that Backer Row, it was just slightly different. The families who lived there weren't part of the original founding group. Most of Windsor's earliest settlers had arrived together on a ship called the Mary and John 17 years earlier. These families were from the West Country of England, from the counties of Devon and Dorset and Somerset. They'd crossed the Atlantic Ocean together. They had settled together in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And then they'd picked up a few years later and moved together, effectively founding Windsor, which is the oldest settlement in the state of Connecticut. This group of people shared a dialect, a culture, a way of worshiping, and probably a web of cousins and loyalties that stretched back in England for generations. Alse Young wasn't one of them. She and her neighbors on Backer Row were likely from Berkshire, near London, different dialect, different customs, different way of worshiping, even with a shared faith. And today we might think that a distinction like that is really silly. But in a village with no more than several dozen families, isolated together in a colonial settlement, held together by shared belief and mutual suspicion, being from the wrong part of England mattered tremendously. Here's what that meant practically. When trouble came, those West Country families closed ranks around their own. Cousins were going to defend cousins. Shipmates were going to vouch for shipmates. That web of loyalty that they had created was, in a very real sense, protection for them. Alse didn't have that protection. She had John, her husband. She had little Alice. She had her few neighbors and families on back her row. And when the fever arrived in the spring of 1647, none of that would be enough to save her. It started

Fever, Grief, And Suspicion

Crista Cowan 5:27

as a cough, then it became a searing fever. Today we know it was probably just a massive influenza epidemic. But in 1647, it was a nightmare. Within weeks, the death rate in Windsor quadrupled. And a sickness like that doesn't care about status or loyalty. It took two children from the local minister. And then it reached the house of Bray Rosseter. Rosseter was the town doctor. He was the man the entire community looked to for answers. But as he watched his own child slip away, his medical knowledge hit a wall. In the 17th century, a doctor's failure wasn't just a professional tragedy, it was also a spiritual crisis. If medicine can't explain death, then the cause has to be something beyond nature. Rosseter is a disturbing figure in Connecticut history. Years later, in 1662, he would perform the first recorded autopsy in the New World, not to find a virus or a cure, but looking for witch marks on a child's organs. He was a man obsessed with proving that the invisible world was responsible for tragedies that he couldn't prevent. And in the spring of 1647, Dr. Rosseter couldn't save his own child. And he couldn't save the minister's children, and he couldn't save his neighbors. But somewhere on Backer Row, Alice Young's daughter was still alive. And to a grieving community, that survival wasn't a miracle. It was suspicious. If Dr. Rosseter provided the theory for why people were dying, it was the family living right next door to Alse that provided the proof. In the spring of 1647, Thomas and Anne Thornton were living through a parent's worst nightmare. They buried four of their children that single season. Thomas Thornton, he was a tanner by trade, but the trauma of that spring changed him enough that he eventually became a minister. He became obsessed, much like Dr. Rosseter, with the battle between good and evil. Years later, he would sit down with the famous witch hunter Cotton Mather, and he would recount the final moments of his daughter Priscilla's life. He claimed that when she lay dying, Priscilla didn't just have a fever. She was much troubled by Satan. He spoke of sins, he spoke of dark bouts with the invisible world. In 1647, when a child dies screaming about the devil, you don't look at the water or the air or what virus it might be. You look at who's standing next to their bed. You look at the neighbor whose own six-year-old daughter was somehow perfectly fine while the children in the house next door were all dying. As a neighbor, Alse Young was likely in and out of that house. Maybe she offered an herbal remedy that didn't work. Maybe she was a healer. Or maybe people simply whispered about the most suspicious fact of all that while prominent families of Windsor, the minister, the doctor, the Thorntons now, were burying their children, Alse's only daughter, Alice, was still alive and healthy. In a community gripped by fear-based thinking, survival isn't a blessing. To the Thorntons, little Alice's health wasn't just a coincidence. It was a sign of a pact with the devil, is what they would call it. In their grief-stricken minds, Alse Young hadn't just watched their children die, she had caused it. And it was likely their testimony that walked Alse Young to the gallows. Now, you might wonder if the Thorntons lived on Backer Row 2, weren't they outsiders? Probably not. Because while they shared the same dirt road, Thomas Thornton was a man who knew how to align himself with power. And we see this because of his trade as a tanner and because he was a man who would eventually join the ranks of the ministry. So in a community where everyone is looking for a scapegoat, the best way to prove you belong is to find someone who doesn't. And by pointing the finger at Alse, the Thorntons weren't just explaining their grief, they were securing their place in Windsor's inner circle. They were the insiders on the outsider street. And that made them Alse's most dangerous neighbors.

The Hanging And The Blank Record

Crista Cowan 10:36

We don't know what Alse Young was accused of specifically, other than witchcraft. No trial survives. There's no formal charge. There's no transcript of a testimony. Whatever was said about her, whether it was whispered accusations or a formal courtroom hearing, it's been lost. What we know is this. In the 17th century, executions were not private affairs behind prison walls. They were very, very public. Alse would have been removed from Windsor to Hartford, eight miles away. She would have been marched into Meeting House Square, the very center of the colony's spiritual and political life at the time. Today, that's the site of the old state house. It's a place of tourism and government. But in 1647, it was the site of the gallows. There was no Witch's Hill like in Salem. There were no dramatic confessions recorded for the crowd. There was just this woman in a rope and a community that believed her death would stop the fever. And so on May 26, 1647, Alse Young was hanged. She was 32 years old. Her daughter Alice was six. For the next 200 years, the name Alse Young vanished from the public. If you look at the official records of the Connecticut colony, you will not find any mention of her. Governor John Winthrop, a man who documented almost every significant event in New England, couldn't even bring himself to write her name. In his journal, under the date May 1647, he simply wrote one blank of Windsor, arraigned and executed at Hartford for a witch. He left a physical blank space on the page. Whether he couldn't be bothered to learn her name or didn't want to actually write it, we probably will never know. It wasn't until 1891 that a historian named James Hammond Trumbull found a different diary. It was the personal record of Windsor's town clerk, Matthew Grant. And on the inside cover, tucked away from the official eyes of the law, Grant had scribbled four words that changed everything. May 26, 47, Alse Young was hanged. Those four words were the only thing that kept her from being forgotten forever. But that was all history gave her. A blank line in the governor's handwriting and four words from the town clerk. After

Aftermath And A Daughter Targeted

Crista Cowan 13:31

Alse's execution, the town moved on. Alse's family and friends couldn't. Her husband John sold their land and fled to Stratford. Her little community of outsiders quietly packed up and left Windsor. They didn't just leave, they fled. Within six years, every house on Backer Row was empty, as if they knew exactly what the town was capable of and they didn't want any part of it. That quiet exodus, I think, tells us something that no court record ever could. And her daughter, young Alice, who was only six years old when she watched the town turn on her mother, carried that blank space with her. In the 17th century, the stain of witchcraft didn't die with the accused. It was believed to be passed through the blood, particularly from mothers to daughters, like a curse. And Alice would grow up with a target on her back, one that would be triggered 30 years later. In 1677, she was no longer a child watching from the sidelines. Now Alice was a wife. She was a mother of 12 children, including a set of four-year-old twins. And when a neighbor leveled the same accusation of witchcraft against her, it must have felt a little inevitable that the stain had surfaced. But the world had changed. And so had Alice. Unlike her mother, she had some protection. She had a husband, Simon Beaman, who stood by her. She had a dozen children, at least one of whom was a grown man at the time. And most importantly, I think she had the memory of what had happened to her mom. When the accusations started, she did not flee, but she also didn't stay quiet. She defended herself in court, claiming she was being slandered. She turned the town's suspicion right back on the accusers. And what we know is that she was never indicted. I don't know if Alice ever told her children the story of what happened to her mother. I don't know if she whispered the story in her daughter's ears as a way to fortify them against accusations that might be leveled at them someday. I don't know if her sons were warned about how to protect their wives and daughters against unjustness, or if they were challenged to never levy charges like that against another man's wife. But I do know she broke the cycle. She lived to see her children grow, and she died as an old woman, not a witch in a nameless grave, but as a matriarch of a whole family. For nearly four centuries, Alse Young was a warning and a scapegoat and a blank line in a governor's diary. And then slowly the world caught on. On

Pardons, Apologies, And A Brick

Crista Cowan 16:50

February 6th, 2017, the town of Windsor finally looked back at Backer Row. And in a unanimous vote, the town council passed a resolution acknowledging that these executions were the result of community-wide hysteria and fear. They didn't just apologize. They voted to restore her good name so she could finally, in their words, rest in peace. Then in May of 2023, on the 376th anniversary of her death, the state of Connecticut went even further. The state senate voted 33 to 1 to officially pardon Alse Young and 11 others executed for witchcraft in the colonial era. 33 to 1. And I want to know who the heck was that one person who thought this wasn't a good idea. But if you walk the north end of the Windsor Town Green today, you'll find two small red bricks pressed into the ground. They aren't much to look at. I imagine thousands of people walk right past them or over them every year without ever looking down. But one of those bricks bears her name, Alse Young, witch hanging victim, May 26, 1647. I know

My Family Connection To Alse Young

Crista Cowan 18:13

this because I stood there. In the fall of 2024, my brother Cameron and my parents and I went to Connecticut together as part of a fall leaf peeping trip. And we went to the old state house in Hartford, the very ground where Alse was hanged. We stood on that lawn and we tried to imagine a gallows there. And we tried to imagine a crowd gathered to watch. And we tried to imagine a six-year-old girl somewhere in Windsor waiting for her mom to come home. And then we drove to Windsor, and we found the town green and we found the bricks. And I stood there looking down at her name for a really long time. Here's what I haven't told you yet. Alse Young is my nine times great-grandmother. Her daughter, Alice Young Beaman, that little girl who lost her mother, the woman who learned what protection meant, the matriarch. She is my eight times great-grandmother. My connection to them runs through a woman named Carrie Inman, my two-times great-grandmother, who was the subject of the very first episode of this podcast and is one of the primary reasons why I became a genealogist. I have spent my entire career helping people find the stories hiding in their family trees. I have sat with thousands of people as they discovered ancestors they never knew they had. And it never gets old. Standing on that Windsor Town Green, looking down at that brick with my dad standing next to me, I just, it hits different every time. This wasn't just someone's ancestor. This was mine. This was ours. And probably the ancestor of tens of thousands of other people out there. Because remember when I mentioned that Alice had 12 children, Alse Young was erased in real time. A blank line where her name should have been. And somewhere down that long line of mothers and daughters and sons and fathers, she led to me. And she led to my dad. Standing on a town green in Connecticut on a fall evening, finally saying her name out loud. Studio sponsored by Ancestry.