Hello Margo,
Many of the Carrier descendants were watching with critical eyes also.
I personally thought the shows premise was a bit contrived and that a deed/records search
would have
been more productive than the termite method they used. It looked a bit Harry Potterish to
me.
I don't recall if they really identified where the house is suppose to be or have been
located. My information
shows (if the Adover Historical Societies map is any where accurate) that Thomas &
Martha actually lived
in Billerica or Middlesex county while the show only referred to Essex County and Salem.
This map also
shows several Abbot houses in what I think is Andover now.
We know that some of Thomas's sons moved to Conn. before he finally left Billerica
some time after 1700. He
received a court settlement for reimbursments of costs in 1710 for the amounts of 50
shillings and
4 pounds/16 shillings (prison fees). Also my ancestor, Thomas Jr. is recorded to still be
living in Andover
in 1712 and shows up on the Colchester records in 1718.
So, in reality, the Carrier family didn't leave town as soon as the rope stopped
swinging and must of had
some housing in order to stay there for 10 to 15 years after the executions.
Neal Carrier
8x descendant of Thomas & Martha
=====================================================================
Source: SALEM-WITCH-L(a)rootsweb.com
Subject: [SALEM-WITCH-L] Carrier House on History Detectives (PBS)
Hi all!
Did anyone else catch this past week's episode of PBS' "History
Detectives" in which they investigated a house in Essex County which
the owners seemed to think had belonged to Martha Carrier?
They have a sign on it attributing construction to Benjamin Abbott,
1685, one of Carrier's accusers. The current owners, Dean & Joan
Kemper, were pretty invested in the story that Abbott got Carrier's
property as a result of the trial. ("Was this originally Carrier
property that became Abbott's after Martha was executed?" asked one of
the current owners... well, duh: 1685 was *before* the trials...) The
researchers' stated goal at the outset was to see whether the property
of people convicted of witchcraft in Salem was handed over to their
accusers, but they never really looked at that, only the dating of the
building itself.
The team took wood samples from what appeared to be the oldest beams in
the oldest part of the house and sent them to England for analysis,
where the growth pattern of the wood was compared to those of known
samples from the area three centuries ago. The lab ended up dating the
felling of the tree used for the beam to 1711, years after both Carrier
and Abbott, her accuser, had died, and Carrier's widowed husband had
moved what remained of the family to Connecticut. The decided that the
house was built by Abbott's son. (They never looked at any deeds.) The
owners were a tad disappointed to learn that they didn't, after all,
own the oldest house in town, and that the story about the house was
proven to be only that: a story.
To my knowledge, any property seized from convicted "witches" was
claimed by the Crown -- although the court officers who did the
grabbing apparently charged a fee for their work to get it, leading to
current-day impressions that the sheriff and others were taking the
money/land for themselves. I didn't think they got to personally keep
it. And as to this story about the land of those convicted being given
to their accusers, I've never seen any evidence to support that. In
fact, in the aftermath of the trials, it was the Crown who paid the
accused and their families reparations.
A question remains, though: since Carrier's husband Thomas was alive
and not accused, wouldn't he have been considered the rightful
property-owner, not Martha? It doesn't make sense to me that unless
the case was against the husband, not just the wife, that family
property was subjected to *any* kind of seizure.
Does anyone have any specific information in the form of land deeds in
regard to this period and the property of the men executed? (John
Procter, Samuel Wardwell, George Burroughs, John Willard, George
Jacobs, Sr., and Giles Corey.) I thought the question was interesting,
but they never really answered the question of what happened to a
convicted person's land, despite a showy trip to the Peabody-Essex to
look at the original depositions and Carrier's examination, looking for
support that property disputes were part of the case against Martha
Carrier.
I have also heard that the house now called the "Rebecca Nurse
Homestead" is possibly not the one where she actually lived, although
it is a period house on the property the Nurse family owned at the
time. Anyone?
Cheers,
Margo