Millions of Americans have ancestors who were involved, in one way or another, in the Salem Witchcraft epidemic of 1692. There are even more people all over the world who have a natural curiosity and a general interest in specific aspects of the witchcraft affair. Genealogy can provide a doorway to the past, as it provides a means of looking into family connections and community relationships. It helps to break down figurative stone walls and clear up misty areas to get to hard facts. Knowledge of the specific features of the events that motivated the people in the witchcraft aberration can be a source of inspiration in the understanding of otherwise inexplicable events. The location of the witchcraft outbreak in February 1692 was Salem Village. Today it is known as the town of Danvers, a name chosen to cover up the past. This book is concerned with the phase of the Salem witch-hunt that spilled over into the neighboring town of Andover. This old town of Andover embraces the modern towns of North Andover and Andover. In a letter of October 8, 1692, THOMAS BRATTLE wrote, "This consulting of these afflicted children, about their sickness, was the unhappy beginning of the unhappy troubles at poor Andover. Poor Andover does now rue the day that ever the said afflicted went among them; they lament their folly, and are an object of great pity and commiseration." This book is based upon the common threads of birth, marriage, and death that all people share and understand when looking towards the past. In 1692, the condemned witches were put to death on Gallows Hill in Salem. It is a rocky hill on the outskirts of Salem Town. Scattered with the few oaks and locust trees that are able to take root in its shallow soil, the hill overlooks the Atlantic Ocean beyond. As if it were too great, too mighty for common benefits, the ocean has no compassion, no law, no memory, no faith. Its eternal nature is hidden in mystery.
About the Author: Enders Anthony Robinson is the Professor Emeritus of Geophysics in the Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel Chair at Columbia University in City of New York. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts on March 18, 1930. He received from MIT a SB in mathematics in 1950, a SM in economics in 1952 and a PhD in geophysics in 1954. In 1950 vast areas of the world, including great sedimentary basins and nearly all water-covered regions, were impervious to oil exploration because of intrinsic limitations in analog methods. In 1950-1954 Robinson at MIT, as a research assistant in mathematics and a research associate in geophysics, was the first to apply the methods of digital signal processing to the seismic records used in oil exploration. He used the Whirlwind digital computer at MIT and the Ferranti digital computer at the University of Toronto. His PhD thesis introduced the digital concept of deconvolution, which was successful in opening up every area of the world to oil exploration. The deconvolution process removed the unwanted reverberations that obscured the desired primary reflections. Robinson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States and a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. In 2001, Robinson received the Maurice Ewing Gold Medal from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists with the citation, "For a lifetime of remarkable achievements that began while he was in MIT graduate school, when he in essence invented the field of digital seismic data processing. The progress in our science over the last 50 years in large part has evolved from the work of Enders Robinson." In 2003, the European Academy of Sciences awarded Robinson the Blaise Pascal Medal for Science and Technology as "the father of digital geophysics." In 2005, the International Astronomical Union, which acts as the internationally recognized authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies, named the asteroid Svenders with the citation, "In 1952 Enders Robinson became the first ever to perform signal processing on a digital computer." In 2010, the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers awarded the Desiderius Erasmus Award to Robinson with the citation, "His early research laid the groundwork for seismic deconvolution and the widespread use of geophysical digital filters in general. Universally recognized as an eminent scientist, Dr. Robinson has aptly been described as one of the living legends of exploration geophysics."