I realized I had overlooked another Petts ancestor who suffered terribly during the Salem Witch Trials. I visited Salem (and Topsfied) again last month but missed this gem. However, someone (hat's off to you, writer!) who posted it online. The originals are also digitized and online if you wish to look at the information.
(I haven't had time to dig in to this and add any commentary due to a lack of time--all credit goes again to the writer of this blog. I just cut and pasted the story in here if you don't want to go to another link).
https://historyofmassachusetts.org/sarah-wildes/
Sarah Averill Wildes was a woman from Topsfield who was accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials.
Sarah Averill Wildes was born sometime around 1627 to William Averill and Abigail Hynton Averill in Chipping Norton, England. The family later moved to the Massachusetts Bay Colony around 1637 where they settled in Ipswich, Mass.
Sarah Averill had previous brushes with the law before her witchcraft accusation in 1692. In 1649, Sarah was brought before the Ipswich Quarterly Court and ordered to be whipped for fornicating out of wedlock with Thomas Wardwell and in 1663 she was accused of violating the colony’s sumptuary laws by wearing a silk scarf (Robinson 295).
In November of 1663, Sarah married a local Topsfield judge named John Wildes, a widower with eight children whose first wife Priscilla Gould had died in April, and the couple went on to have one child together, Ephraim Wildes, in 1665.
The family lived in a house that stood in the triangular area between Perkins Row and Meetinghouse Lane in Topsfield.
By 1670, John Gould and Mary Gould Reddington, the brother and sister of Priscilla Gould, had developed a hatred of Sarah Wildes, according to an article, titled Topsfield in the Witchcraft Delusion, by Abbie Peterson Towne and Marietta Clark in the Historical Collections of the Topsfield Historical Society:
“After the marriage of John Wilds and Sarah Averill, there had been war between them and John Gould and Mary Reddington the brother and sister of Priscilla, the first wife. It has been supposed that the ill feeling was caused by the hasty second marriage, but that does not seem likely, for in those days eight months was a long time for a widower to remain single. But whatever the cause the effect was the same and cost Sarah Wilds her life” (Topsfield Historical Society 30).
The ill will towards Sarah continued for years and, even after Mary Gould Reddington passed away from natural causes years later, Mary’s friends continued to speak ill of Sarah Wildes.
In addition, the Wildes family were entangled in a land dispute between Topsfield and Salem Village which might have made them unpopular with the Salem villagers, according to Winfield S. Nevins in his book Witchcraft in Salem Village in 1692:
“The Wildes family belonged to the faction in Topsfield which was active in the feud with Salem Village. It is not possible to say whether this in any way influenced the prosecutors of Sarah Wildes. Ephraim Wildes, son of Sarah, deposed that the marshal of Salem came to Topsfield with the warrants for the arrest of his mother and William Hobbs and his wife. The marshal served that on Sarah Wildes, and young Wildes arrested Hobbs and his wife. Subsequently they accused his mother, and he thought it might be because he arrested them” (Nevins 205).
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