♀Sarah Brown

Sarah (living in 1692) and her husband Cornelius Conner, a husbandman of Salisbury, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, raised eleven children there, born between 1659 and 1676. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Ruth Conner (1670–1727).

Family

Sarah was married to Cornelius by 1659. Eleven children were born to Cornelius and Sarah at Salisbury between August 1659 and November 1676, among them Ruth, born on 16 May 1670, who later married Thomas Clough of Salisbury. Dorothy, the youngest, died on 22 December 1683, aged seven. Cornelius named Sarah in the will he made in August 1684, and it was proved in May 1687. Sarah outlived him.

The petition for Mary Bradbury

In July 1692, a widow by then, Sarah was most likely the “Sarah Connor widow” whose name was set down on a petition in support of her Salisbury neighbour Mary Bradbury^W, then accused of witchcraft. Dated 22 July, the petition declared that none of Mary Bradbury’s neighbors had ever known her to fall out with anyone. Sarah’s family stood with her on it: the names of “John Connor & his wyfe”, her son John and his wife Elizabeth, and of “Tho: Clough & his wyfe”, Ruth and her husband, are on the same list. The petition did not save Mary Bradbury from being condemned that September, though she escaped. Sarah is said to have still been living in 1709.

Notes

Her name

No record gives Sarah’s maiden name. Torrey’s index of New England marriages enters her as “Sarah [?BROWN]”, the question mark being Torrey’s own; no record of the marriage itself is known, so she is entered here by her first name only.

Her dates

Torrey gives her years as 1634 to after 1709. The basis for both is not stated, and no record of her birth or death is known.

The petition

The petition is printed among the records of the Salem witch-hunt (Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, 2009). All the names on it were written by Mary Bradbury’s husband, Thomas Bradbury, though the editors see no reason to doubt that he set them down with the knowledge of the people named. The editors identify “Sarah Connor widow” as the widow of Cornelius Conner and mother of Ruth Clough, and John Connor as the son of Cornelius and Sarah who married Elizabeth Purington (written Podinton in the Salisbury records) on 15 May 1691.

The will

The dates of Cornelius’s will, 21 August 1684, and of its proving, 24 May 1687, and its mention of his wife Sarah, are from D. W. Hoyt’s Old Families of Salisbury and Amesbury.