♂John Wildes

John Wildes (died before September 1710) was a husbandman of Topsfield, Massachusetts, and the husband of Sarah Wildes^W, who was hanged at Salem as a witch on 19 July 1692. He testified on her behalf at her trial. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Ephraim Wildes.

The witch trials of 1692

The warrant of 21 April 1692, issued during the Salem witch trials^W, named “Sarah Wilds the wife of John Wilds” of Topsfield, and her indictment calls him “John Willes of Topsfield Husbandman”. Their son Ephraim, the constable of Topsfield that year, was shown the warrant when the marshal of Salem came “to fetch away my mother”.

John Wildes testified that when Mary, the wife of John Redington, raised “a report yt my wife had Bewitched her”, he told Redington that he “would arest him for his wifes defaming of my wife”, and that he later sent “my Bro: Auerell” to Goodwife Redington, who answered that she “knew no harm mye wife had don her”. Redington had asked him not to go to law, for “it would but waste his Estate”.

Sarah Wildes was found guilty and was hanged at Salem on 19 July 1692. Their son Ephraim wrote in 1710 that she was held in the prisons at Salem, Boston and Ipswich, and that “my father or my self” went “once a wek to see how she deed and what she wanted”. He added that “my father would often say” the cost to the family’s estate was more than twenty pounds. When Ephraim wrote that petition, on 11 September 1710, his father was dead: “my father being now disseced and only my sellf left”.

Family

The court papers show John Wildes as a man with children by an earlier marriage: in 1674 “John willes junrs sith” hung in a tree by the house of “John willes senr of Topsfeild”, and John Hale called Sarah “mother in law” to a youth named Jonathan Wiles. A Maine family history published in 1909 records that John Wildes married Sarah, daughter of William Averill of Ipswich, on 23 November 1663, after the death of his first wife, Priscilla Gould; a history of Topsfield published in 1940 also gives her name as Sarah Averill. A compiled genealogy, B. A. Gould’s The Family of Zaccheus Gould of Topsfield (1895), names Priscilla Gould, a daughter of Zaccheus Gould, as his first wife; the same book dates his second marriage, to Sarah Averill, to 23 November 1663. The same 1909 history makes Ephraim, whom it places at Topsfield in December 1665, the only son of John and Sarah; the Topsfield town record dates his birth to the “12 month, 1665”, which in the calendar then in use was February 1665/66.

That history gives him a fuller life. It says he was born in England in 1618, came to New England in 1635 with his brother William on the ship Elizabeth, settled at Ipswich and served in the Pequot War^W in 1639. About 1645 he married Priscilla, daughter of Zaccheus Gould, and moved to Topsfield, where he held town and church offices; Priscilla died on 16 April 1663, the mother of three sons and five daughters. It records that he married Mary Jacobs on 23 June 1693 and died at Topsfield on 14 May 1705. The 1940 history of Topsfield adds that his daughter Sarah, by his first wife, married Edward Bishop, and the same Edward and Sarah Bishop were named with Sarah Wildes in the warrant of April 1692.