♂Ephraim Wildes

Ephraim Wildes (February 1665/66 – 2 April 1725) was the constable of Topsfield, Massachusetts, in 1692, the year his own mother, Sarah Wildes, was arrested as a witch and hanged, and in that office he arrested others of the accused in the Salem witch trials^W. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Mary Wildes (died 1742).

The witch trials of 1692

In a statement to the court he wrote that he was constable “this yere” when the marshal of Salem came “to fetch away my mother”, Sarah Wildes^W. The marshal showed him a warrant addressed to the constable of Topsfield that named, with many others, William Hobbs and his wife Deliverance^W, and required him to arrest them at once, “which acordingly I ded”. He told the court he had often wondered whether his seizing of them had led Deliverance Hobbs to accuse his mother, “in some mesuer to be reuenged of me”, and he declared that he had never seen any harm in his mother, who had always “instructed me well in the cristion religon”.

In a second deposition, in which he gave his age as about twenty-seven, he described a match with one of Goodwife Simonds’s daughters that had come to nothing after Goodwife Simonds repeated talk that his mother had done her wrong; before a witness she admitted that the talk came only from Goodwife Redington, and he went to the house no more. He ended: “now she will reward mee”. His father, John Wildes, testified in the same paper that he had threatened to have John Redington arrested over his wife’s “report” against Sarah.

His office went on through the trials. His return on a warrant, dated 31 May 1692, records that he arrested Elizabeth How, the wife of James How of Topsfield, and brought her to Lieutenant Nathaniel Ingersoll’s house at Salem Village. Elizabeth How^W and Sarah Wildes were both hanged on 19 July 1692.

In 1710, when a committee of the General Court inquired into the losses of the families, he wrote that his father was now dead and “only my sellf left”. He listed the cost of keeping his mother in the prisons at Salem, Boston and Ipswich, with his father or himself visiting once or twice a week, and though he reckoned the damage at more than twenty pounds he was “willing to tak forten pounds”.

Town offices

A history of Topsfield published in 1940 shows him in the town’s business for some thirty years. In 1697 he was chosen to seize bricks that someone had made from clay on the common land; in 1718 he joined a petition to the General Court about the charge of the town’s bridge and causeway, and the town paid him, Isaac Peabody and Simon Bradstreet for building the bridge; and on 15 May 1719, as Quartermaster Ephraim Wildes, he was the first overseer of the poor named in the town records.

He died at Topsfield on 2 April 1725. The town register enters the death as “Ephraim, Quartermaster”, the title the town had used when it paid him for the bridge.

Family

Ephraim Wildes and Mary Howlett were married at Topsfield on 18 March 1689/90, entered in the town’s printed vital records as “WILDE, Ephraim, and Mary Howlet”. They had sixteen children, all entered in the Topsfield records between 1690 and 1718: the first, John, was born in June 1690 and the last, Elijah, in January 1717/18. A daughter, Priscilla, born in 1704, died the next summer, and the name was given again to a daughter born in 1706. Their daughter Mary, baptized on 13 March 1691/92, is the child through whom the line to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs. A history of Topsfield published in 1940 gives the same number, sixteen.

A Maine family history published in 1909 also gives them sixteen children, four of whom settled at Arundel, in Maine, and records that Mary died on 17 May 1758. The same work gives his mother’s maiden name as Averill, makes him the only son of John and Sarah Wildes, and gives the marriage as 18 March 1688/89; the Topsfield register’s 1689/90 is preferred here. It also puts his birth at Topsfield in December 1665, but the town record dates it to the “12 month, 1665”, which in the calendar then in use was February 1665/66.