This is the time of year for ghosts, goblins, and other such superstitions. However, perhaps it is also a time to pause and reflect on the horrors of those who suffered in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. The witches of Salem and nearby towns probably have hundreds of thousands of present-day descendants. If you have ancestry from early Essex County, Massachusetts, you have an excellent chance of finding a connection to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

Salem, Massachusetts, and the surrounding towns in Essex County were amongst the first settled in this country. Most of the towns were established prior to 1640. By the time of the witchcraft trials of 1692, a complete legal system of courts and clerks was well established. Records were written, and many of them have been preserved. Even if your ancestors are not among those accused, it is quite possible that you can find them mentioned as witnesses, those who gave depositions, or perhaps even those who served on a jury.

The reasons for the witchcraft hysteria have been debated for centuries. One modern theory involves ergot of rye, a plant disease that is caused by a fungus, Claviceps purpurea. Anyone who eats bread made with ergot-infected rye can exhibit symptoms of muscle spasms, tremors, and writhing. This may be accompanied by hallucinations. Such afflictions can indicate poisoning by ergot, or “ergotism.” Modern science has documented likely cases of ergotism in the Dark Ages, but the cause was only proposed in 1670 by a French physician, and outbreaks in the 20^th century have shed much more light on both symptoms and their cause.

We know much about the lives of the Puritan inhabitants of Essex County in 1692. We know that they were mostly illiterate, and almost all citizens were intensely religious. In their simple lives, they were afraid of the darkness and of many things in this world that they did not understand. They were convinced that the Devil walked amongst them every night and that he had many disciples. This fear was reinforced by the sermons delivered by Reverend Samuel Parris most every Sunday. If the citizens of Salem and nearby towns did exhibit muscle spasms, tremors, writhing and hallucinations, one cannot be surprised that their neighbors felt the victims were indeed possessed by the Devil himself.

Ergot of Rye occurs in hot, humid weather. Warm, rainy springs and summers promote heavier than usual fungus infestation of rye. The pattern of the weather in 1691 and 1692 is apparent from brief comments in the diary of Samuel Sewall of Salem. Early rains and warm weather in the spring progressed to a hot and stormy summer in 1691, perfect conditions for creating hallucinogenic bread in the fall and winter of 1691, well into the spring and possibly very early summer of 1692, before the new crop of rye was harvested. Sewall recorded that there was a drought in 1692; thus, no contamination of the grain would be expected that year.

You can read a detailed explanation of ergotism and the at http://www.physics.smu.edu/scalise/P3333sp08/Ulcers/ergotism.html. There is no proof available today that ergot of rye was the cause of the Salem Witch Trials. It does, however, provide an intriguing possibility.

The whole series of episodes began in December 1691 and into January, a time when the people of Salem would be eating bread made from the summer's rye harvest, rye that had time to become infected with ergot. Two girls - Betty Parris, daughter of minister Samuel Parris, and his niece Abigail Williams - began exhibiting strange behavior. Soon a number of other young girls were also exhibiting the same symptoms. Several historians have suggested that perhaps the girls were simply playing childish games.

Physicians called in to examine the girls could find no explanation for their illness. In February one doctor suggested the girls might be bewitched. A neighbor had Parris's Barbados slave, Tituba, concoct a "witch cake" in order to determine if witchcraft was present. Shortly thereafter, the girls made an accusation of witchcraft against Tituba and two elderly women of general ill repute in Salem Village, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborn. The three women were taken into custody on 29 February 1692. The afflictions of the girls did not cease, and in March they accused Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse. Both of these women were well respected in the village and were covenanting members of the church. Further accusations by the children followed. By June the hunt for "witches" expanded beyond Salem to Andover, Ipswich, Gloucester, and other nearby towns.

The accused witches were tried and most of them found guilty, using logic that sounds silly today. However, to the ill-educated citizens of Salem, these were "facts." Contrary to some stories, none of the witches of Salem were ever burned at the stake. With one exception, all were hanged at a public gallows. The one exception is poor Giles Cory, a church-going member of the community, who was pressed to death with large stones.

The last hangings occurred in September of 1692, and by May of 1693 all accused witches still imprisoned were released. It is interesting to note that the reported drought of 1692 would have meant the elimination of ergot of rye by September, the time of the last execution.

The final count of witchcraft victims was twenty executed and more than a hundred imprisoned (One died in prison.). In addition, many others fled into exile or hiding places, their homes were broken up, their estates were ruined, and their families were left in desolation. All of this was caused by the leaders in the communities: the magistrates and ministers.

Finding your ancestors' roles during the Salem Witch Trials may not be terribly difficult. Many of the original trial documents are now both in print and online. You might start at your favorite search engine.

Salem, Massachusetts, was not the only scene of witchcraft trials in North America. However, it is the one whose history is permanently etched in our memories. You may have ancestors who were eyewitnesses to one of the saddest times in American history.

Feeling hungry? Want to eat something that your ancestors enjoyed? How about Surströmming?

According to Wikipedia, Surströmming has been part of northern Swedish cuisine since at least the 16th century. However, it wasn't confined to only Sweden. Also known as the Baltic herring, Surströmming was eaten by many people in the Baltic countries. Fermented fish is an old staple in European cuisines. The oldest archeological findings of fish fermentation are 9,200 years old and from the south of today's Sweden.

In short, Surströmming is preserved herring. The Baltic herring is a bit smaller than the normal Atlantic herring, found in the North Sea. Traditionally, the definition of strömming is "herring fished in the brackish waters of the Baltic north of the Kalmar Strait". The herring used for surströmming are caught just prior to spawning.

Wikipedia states, "During production of surströmming, just enough salt is used to prevent the raw herring from rotting. A fermentation process of at least six months gives the fish a characteristic strong smell and somewhat acidic taste. According to a Japanese study, a newly opened can of surströmming has one of the most putrid food smells in the world, stronger than similarly fermented fish dishes such as the Korean hongeohoe or Japanese kusaya."

Also, Wikipedia states that he herring are caught in April and May, when they are in prime condition and just about to spawn, and have not yet fattened. They are put into a strong brine for about 20 hours which draws out the blood, after which the heads are removed and the fish is gutted and put into a weaker brine solution. The barrels are placed in a temperature controlled room kept at 15–20 °C (59–68 °F). Canning takes place at the beginning of July and for five weeks thereafter. Ten days prior to the premiere the final product is distributed to wholesalers. The fermentation of the fish depends on a lactic acid enzyme in the spine that is activated if the conditions are right (temperature and brine concentration). The low temperature in Northern Sweden is one of the parameters that affects the character of the final product.

Fermentation continues in the can, causing it to bulge noticeably. Species of Haloanaerobium bacteria are responsible for the in-can ripening. These bacteria produce carbon dioxide and a number of compounds that account for the unique odour: pungent (propionic acid), rotten-egg (hydrogen sulfide), rancid-butter (butyric acid), and vinegary (acetic acid).

Surströmming is commonly sold in grocery stores all over Sweden.

Still feeling hungry?

I think I will find a different method of honoring my ancestors…

You might want to watch a YouTube video, I tried World’s SMELLIEST food in Sweden, showing a lady trying surströmming for the first time at https://youtu.be/sYbFoISWE3Q .

WARNING #1: The video is rather long at 17+ minutes and the surströmming episode in in the last half of the video. However, the first half shows a lot of Swedish countryside which might be enjoyable if Sweden is one of your ancestral homelands.

WARNING #2: Be aware of the description of this video: "In this episode I am trying a typical Swedish tradition - I am opening a can of Surströmming: fermented herring. Some say the smell resembles that of a dead body. Well, it was worse..."

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

Explore new family records from London and The Bahamas this Findmypast Friday.

Do you have family connections in London or the Caribbean? This week's new releases can help you find out.

Greater London Burial Index

Spanning 1583-1665, the latest additions to this useful collection come from St Olave's, Southwark. Many of those listed would have died during the Great Plague of London.

These records can reveal useful information for your family tree. You can discover your London ancestors' names, ages, occupations, addresses, and more. Check the parish list to see which other churches and timeframes are covered.

Bahamas life events

Findmypast has just released over 470,000 new birth, marriage, and death records from The Bahamas. You can explore the entire collection or focus on each record set separately:

Covering over a century of history, discover important details for the Caribbean branches of your family tree with these essential resources.

Newspapers

This week, Findmypast has added four new papers and thousands more pages to five others. Brand new to the site are:

Meanwhile, the following newspapers have been updated with more coverage:

I am delighted to announce the addition of one more free feature to this newsletter.

For years, various third-party companies offered to send email messages to newsletter readers listing all newly-posted articles. I never sent the messages myself; the various third-party companies did all the sending. Sometimes it worked well, sometimes it was erratic. Most of these third-party companies also inserted their own non-genealogy-related advertisements into each message they sent.

I never liked either the process of allowing other companies inserting their ads or the erratic delivery. When I switched to the new newsletter software 3 weeks ago, I decided to take matters into my own hands and create a method where I could send daily email messages to all the subscribers and to control the contents of each message. Namely, it would be reliable and would not contain non-genealogy-related advertisements.

The new daily email message is now in effect. Every reader will get a daily email message that lists all the articles I have posted in the previous 24 hours. If you want to read a listed article, clicking on its title will takes you directly to the full article on EOGN.com.

To introduce this feature, all Standard Edition and all Plus Edition subscribers have been signed up for the new daily email and will receive their first message on Friday morning, October 30. (Of course, you can unsubscribe, if you wish.) In the future, readers will be able to sign up for the daily email list as they please.

If you look at these daily emails listing new articles and then decide you do not want to receive such emails any more, scroll to the bottom of a message and click on UNSUBSCRIBE. Your email address will instantly be removed from the mailing list ONLY. All other capabilities of your email address and password will be unchanged.

In the future, readers who want to receive the daily email list can simply supply their email address and name at https://bit.ly/3jG85Xx or follow the links in the menus. That's all. There is no obligation to ever purchase anything nor any other obligation.

With these daily emails, you do not have to manually open a web browser and go to https://eogn.com to see if there is a new article of interest to you.

NOTE #1: Articles are posted most every weekday but normally not on weekends. As a result, you can expect to receive email messages early the next morning (Eastern North American Time). That will be Tuesday through Saturday mornings in North America.

NOTE #2: You can unsubscribe from these email messages within seconds at any time you wish. You do not have to ask me or anyone else to make a change for you. As always, you have direct, immediate control over anything sent to your in-box from this newsletter.

NOTE #3: This has been the most-requested feature from newsletter readers during the past 3 weeks.

I hope this makes your experience with EOGN even more enjoyable.

The following announcement was written by MyHeritage:

The original All Souls Day — which eventually morphed into Halloween — is celebrated in many traditional Christian societies as a day to honor the memories of one’s ancestors. What better way to honor your ancestors than to learn more details about their lives and discover their stories?

That’s why we’re opening all our death-related historical record collections — death, burial, cemetery, and obituary records — up to the public for free access during Halloween weekend, from October 29 to November 2!

Search the free records now

Death, burial, cemetery, and obituary records are key resources for family history information. Death certificates are typically issued within days of a death and can contain many details about a person’s life, such as their age at death, place of birth, parents’ names and origins, and the cause of death. The name of the person who provided these details may also be mentioned, and this can also be an important clue that can help you locate new relatives.

Burial and cemetery records can supplement death certificates and offer additional information, while obituaries may provide rich details about the person’s life: their interests, profession, passions, and connections in the community.

MyHeritage offers 153 collections in this category, containing 548,923,579 records in all. Normally, most of these collections are free to search, but require a paid MyHeritage plan to view fully and save the information to your family tree. But during this limited-time offer, you’ll be able to take full advantage of all the records in these collections absolutely free.

This is a perfect opportunity for everyone to access and enjoy these records! So dive right in and see what you can learn about your ancestors.

Search the death, burial, cemetery, and obituary records now

The Halloween season is perhaps the best time to reflect upon the injustices suffered by our ancestors. For instance, take the witchcraft hysteria of Hartford, in what is now called Connecticut.

Yes, this was in 1642, 45 years before the infamous witch trials a bit further north in Salem, Massachusetts. According to Wikipedia.org, the Connecticut Witch Trials, also sometimes referred to as the Hartford witch trials, occurred from 1647 to 1663. The exact number of witchcraft trials is unknown but a total of 37 total cases have been documented, 11 of which resulted in executions. The execution of Alse Young of Windsor in the spring of 1647 was the beginning of the witch panic in the area, which would not come to an end until 1670 with the release of Katherine Harrison.

Some of the better-known victims included:

Alse Young probably was the first person executed for witchcraft not only in Connecticut, but likely in the whole of the American colonies. On May 26, 1647, she was executed in Hartford.

Mary Johnson was the first recorded confession of witchcraft. She worked as a house servant and was accused of theft in 1648. After extensive torture and interrogation, Johnson confessed to "familiarity with the devil". She also confessed to having sexual relations with "men and devils" and to murdering a child. Her execution was delayed as she was pregnant during her imprisonment in Hartford. Johnson was executed June 6, 1650.

Katherine Harrison was a former maidservant of Captain John Cullick and the widow of Wethersfield's town crier.She became a wealthy citizen of Wethersfield, Connecticut after she inherited her husband's estate, worth one thousand pounds. Between 1668 and 1669, Harrison was accused of witchcraft. The accusations against her included breaking the Sabbath, fortune telling and using black magic, as well as appearing in spectral form to people. Harrison's trial faced many complications: the first jury never reached a decision, and the second found her guilty, but the magistrates disagreed as most of the evidence was spectral, which relied solely on the accuser.In May of 1670, Harrison was released from prison, and banished from the Connecticut colony; she and her family relocated to New York.

You can read a lot more about the Connecticut Witch Trials online, including in Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Witch_Trials. If you are interested in the details of these witch trials, start with the lengthy list of citations at the end of the Wikipedia article.

Nate Berg has published an article in the Fast Company web site that will interest many genealogists. He describes his latest project as a virtual reality trip through your home town 200 years ago. However, if it was me, I'd be more interested in seeing my ancestors' home towns of 200 years ago.

Old fire insurance maps of several major U.S. cities have already been converted to virtual reality. The map, called “rǝ,” is a project Raimondas Kiveris has led through his research into artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google. Though still in a very early form, the map is functional enough to offer a glimpse of what someone would have seen on a city street decades in the past.

The map was created using historical fire insurance maps, a rich source of information for the built environment that includes precise information about building ages, sizes, heights, roof shapes, and even materials. The map creates simplified 3D models of these buildings, and the time slider allows a user to see, for example, Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle nearly devoid of buildings in the 1870s and almost fully developed in the 1920s.

Eventually, with enough visual data contributed, Kiveris says the map will be able to create lifelike representations of entire neighborhoods that could be good enough to use as the setting for video games or even movies. “If it’s not possible today, it will be possible in five years,” he says.

You can read a lot more about this project at: https://bit.ly/34BCxxy.

Do you or someone you know have lots of files saved on floppy disks? A lady contacted me recently and asked how she could read her old floppy disks that she had saved from many years ago. It seems her present computer does not have a floppy disk drive in it. I suggested she do something NOW to save the disks. Before long, floppy disks will be about as useful as buggy whips.

Actually, there are THREE separate problems:

The first problem is that floppy disks were never designed for long-term storage for years and years. The manufacturers usually stated ten to twenty years' life expectancy for floppies if they were stored in ideal conditions. A typical residence isn't ideal.

In addition, floppy disks have always been highly sensitive to dust, condensation and temperature extremes. As with any magnetic storage, it is also vulnerable to magnetic fields. If the disk isn't stored in optimum conditions, the data will disappear because of these vulnerabilities. In many cases, data will disappear from floppies in much less than ten years.

The second problem is the one my correspondent mentioned: she no longer owns a floppy disk drive. In fact, most manufacturers stopped including floppy disk drives on new computers years ago. Luckily, you can still purchase external, “plug-in” floppy disk drives today although they are becoming rare.

If possible, see if someone you know owns an older computer that includes both a floppy disk drive and some method of copying information from floppy disks to some other media. Possibilities are to transfer across a network, transfer on the Internet, copy to a flash drive, or maybe to "burn" to a CD-ROM.

If you cannot find an older computer, you can purchase an external USB floppy drive that plugs into the USB port of most any modern Windows or Macintosh computer. The drives typically cost $10 to perhaps $30. You can see a selection of USB 3 1/2-inch floppy disk drives for sale today at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=floppy+disk+drive.

If you have an even older 5-1/4-inch floppy, your search will be more difficult. Very few of the older disk drives were ever manufactured with a USB connection. However, if you are willing to open the computer and bolt in an internal floppy drive, you might still be able to find a few on eBay.

The third, and possibly the biggest, problem of all is the information stored on the disk. Even if the data has not disappeared, and even if you can copy the files to more modern media, can you find a program today that will read the files created by a program ten or twenty years ago? For instance, if you have files created by Roots 3 (a popular genealogy program of the 1980s), you will have difficulty finding any program today that will read information stored in that old format. To my knowledge, Roots 3 files can only be read by Roots 3 or later versions of the same program. Unfortunately, no program today can read Roots 3 files. The same is true for data saved in old versions of Personal Ancestral File, Family Tree Maker, or genealogy programs that have since disappeared from the marketplace, such as The Family Edge or Generations Grande Suite.

My advice:

1. Copy the files NOW! Whatever is stored on a floppy disk may disappear at any time. Save it while you can. Copy the files to modern media.

2. Attempt to open the files with a modern word processor or genealogy program or even a simple ASCII file viewer, such as Windows Notepad. If you are lucky, you may be able to read the information.

3. If you cannot read the files, post messages on online forums asking for assistance from anyone who still has an old computer with the old software installed. For instance, if you find someone who still has Roots3 installed on a computer someplace (and if they also have the optional Roots 3 program that creates GEDCOM files), they could import your data and then export it in GEDCOM format. The information then can be read by any modern genealogy program.

Whatever you do, don't get trapped in the obsolescence problems again. Copy your data often to whatever new media has recently become available.

NOTE: This article contains personal opinions.

I recently received an email message from a reader of this newsletter in which she bemoaned the quality of genealogy information found on the Internet. She went on at some length to say that the information found online is full of inaccuracies, is posted by people who don't know what they are doing, and that "all genealogy information found on the Internet should never be trusted."

I was sympathetic to what she wrote until that last part. NEVER be trusted?

I will be the first to agree that there is a lot of inaccurate SECONDARY information on the Internet. But let's not overlook the fact that the Internet also brings us images of ORIGINAL source records as well.

Want to see the record of your great-great-grandparents in the U.S. Census? Click with your mouse and look at the IMAGE of the original entry without leaving your home. Want to see a naturalization record? IMAGES of many of them are available online. Would you like to see granddad's World War I Draft registration form that lists information about parents? The IMAGE of the original document is available online. Want to see an obituary? Several online services provide IMAGES of the newspaper obituaries. And how about the Southern Claims records, many of which were never available before on microfilm? IMAGES of each record are now available online.

Yes, the Internet certainly is a mix of good and bad news, but let's not condemn everything. Looking at images of original source records on the Internet makes us better genealogists than those of us who used to be limited only to transcribed (secondary) sources. We have much more information available today than ever before. Some of it is good information, such as IMAGES of original records. Other information found online is questionable, such as secondary information contributed by someone else. Let's not condemn everything simply because some of it is bad.

We do have an education problem. We need to educate newcomers as to what information is immediately believable versus what information requires independent verification. This education process must be active on all genealogy sites, including this one, and must continue forever as new genealogists join us. However, I will suggest that this requirement for education should not stop us from looking at images of original records.

There is an old saying that pops to mind, something having to do with babies and bathwater.

Looking forward ten or twenty years, I suspect that eventually all of us will focus primarily on images of original records, as found on the Internet. As millions and millions of additional images come online, the references we all enjoy will continue to improve. I see that as a great advance in genealogy scholarship.