The Owners' Manual | Issue 21 | Spring/Summer 2021

Michael Fisher, Meriden I think I have a good one for you…My mother does a lot of research into our family ancestry. She actually traced my family tree back to Rebecca Nurse who was hung for being a witch during the Salem Witch Trials on July 19, 1692. But it doesn’t stop there. My mother has also looked into my wife’s ancestry and found that she is related to Susannah Martin who was also hung for being a witch during the Salem Witch Trials on the very same day alongside Rebecca Nurse and three other women. What are the odds? I took the wife and kids to Salem back in 2015 to see Rebecca Nurse’s homestead. Here’s a picture of my daughter pointing to Rebecca Nurse and Susannah Martin on a plaque in downtown Salem. There’s also a movie about Rebecca Nurse.

Brian Skelcher, Meriden

During covid quarantine my mother got interested in Ancestry.com and started searching for relatives as both her parents died when she was in her 20s and she never knew much about her mother’s side of the family. Over the course of several months and tracking down various birth and death certificates along with newspaper articles she traced her mother’s side back to the civil war and even found a letter written from her multi- great grandfather to her multi-great grandmother while he was away at war. Sadly, he died two days after sending the letter but the letter itself is a very interesting and heartbreaking glimpse into the civil war. She was able to continue tracking and found another multi-great grandfather who was in the American Revolution war. Having a relative in the Revolutionary War makes my family members eligible to join the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution organizations.