Martha Carrier and The Once & Future Witch Hunt

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Alice Markham-Cantor, author of the new Once & Future Witch Hunt.

My 9x-great-grandmother, Martha Carrier, was hanged in the Salem witch trials. She wasn’t a witch. She wasn’t an herbalist or a spiritualist. She was a forty-year-old Puritan, a mother of five, known for her temper and her sharp tongue. The afflicted girls who first accused her had never met her; they’d only heard of her reputation, which included a child born suspiciously early in the marriage and a smallpox outbreak that killed all her male relatives.

When I was a kid, nobody knew we had a witch in the family. It wasn’t until an uncle did some genealogy research when I was teenager that any of us found out about Martha. I started researching Salem and got hooked. I had a thousand questions about this woman, this woman without whom I wouldn’t be alive, and that research became The Once & Future Witch Hunt: A Descendant’s Reckoning from Salem to the Present. Writing the book was my attempt to answer the fundamental questions of Salem’s witch hunt: how could this have happened? What’s to keep this from happening again?

But there’s another question, one that lives outside the book. Martha Carrier is my 9x-great-grandmother, and no one in my family—her family—knew about her. At some point, her family stopped telling her story.

This is not, on its face, unusual. Every family has its secrets, and most of us will never know them. There’s only so far we can go back, and that’s leaving aside the ravages of displacement, war, slavery. The past can be lost to us in so many ways. But I’ve always wondered who stopped telling Martha Carrier’s story and why. Was it leftover Puritan shame, an attempt to escape the taint of a witch in the family? Was it grief? Was it nothing but time?

Sometimes we lose women along the way. My work has been to excavate Martha Carrier and her inheritance. Sometimes we lose women, but sometimes, despite the odds, we can get them back, if only half-glimpsed. Sometimes we can resurrect them, if only in words.

Our thanks to Alice for her guest post! For more from Alice Markham-Cantor, read her article “The 9 Most Common Misconceptions About the Salem Witch Trials.”