♀Mary Howlett

Mary Howlett (17 February 1671/72 – 17 May 1758) was the wife of Ephraim Wildes, the constable of Topsfield, Massachusetts, whose mother, Sarah Wildes, was hanged as a witch in 1692. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Mary Wildes (died 1742).

Marriage and family

She was born at Topsfield on 17 February 1671/72, the daughter of Samuel Howlett and Sarah Clark. 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, and a history of Topsfield published in 1940 gives the same number.

Her daughter Mary was baptized on 13 March 1691/92. The next month her husband’s mother, Sarah Wildes^W, was taken to prison at Salem on a charge of witchcraft; she was hanged on 19 July 1692. In 1710 her husband listed the cost the family had borne in keeping his mother in the prisons at Salem, Boston and Ipswich.

Ephraim died at Topsfield on 2 April 1725; the town register enters the death as “Ephraim, Quartermaster”. 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.

She was a widow for 33 years. On 28 April 1758 she made her will, calling herself “Widow & Relict of Ephraim Wildes late of Topsfield”, and Elisha, Martha and Zebulon Wildes witnessed it. She died at Topsfield on 17 May 1758, and the town records enter the death as that of a widow, “an aged woman”. The will was proved at Ipswich on 5 June 1758.