It started with a few little finds, like- I thought my mother's side was heavily Irish, in fact, it is heavily Scottish, with just a little Irish thrown in for good measure. I discovered that my French ancestors on my father's side, left France because they were Huguenots, fleeing the persecution of them by the Catholics. Multiple ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, multiple ancestors were founders of towns, and many many more were simply farmers, working the land.
One revelation, however, was a bit more of a shock.
On my mother's side, one of my great-grandmothers had the maiden name of Taulbee.
So I began searching for her parents. I found them easily enough, and in fact, was able to trace the entire Taulbee line right back to the first couple to have come to America. There is no record of their actual immigration, so it is speculated that they came from England, because they settled in the English, Puritan colony of Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1600s. Their names were John and Dorothy Talby. (Some records suggest her maiden name may have been Rawlinson, but that is not certain) They were my 11th Great-Grandparents.
Dorothy Talby was hanged for murder in 1638.
"Whoa." "I'm sorry...what??"
I had to look this one up for myself. It is true. The Puritans of Boston kept detailed records not only of the hanging, but of the events leading up to it.
From the Journal of John Winthrop:
"Dorothy Talbye was hanged at Boston for murdering her own daughter, a child of three years old. She had been a member of the church of Salem, and of good esteem for godliness, etc; but falling at difference with her husband, through melancholy or spiritual delusions, she sometimes attempted to kill him, and her children, and herself, by refusing meat, saying it was so revealed to her, etc.
...the church cast her out. Whereupon she grew worse; so as the magistrate caused her to be whipped. Whereupon she was reformed for a time and carried herself more dutifully to her husband, etc; but soon after, she was so possessed with Satan that he persuaded her...to break the neck of her own child that she might free it from future misery."
The church was the authority in this time, and so it is they who "handle" the situation.
They excommunicate Dorothy in 1637, and order her to be temporarily chained to a post in the center of town. Eventually, she is sent back home, but her behavior becomes worse, not better.
(What a shocker. Chaining mentally ill people doesn't work? What??)
When John Talby complains that she has become a danger to his life, she is sentenced to be publicly whipped. For a while, she seems better, but by 1638, her behavior is becoming strange again. She claims to have visions from God, and he instructs her to kill her child, and eventually she does so by breaking the toddler's neck.
When she is arrested, she confesses, but at her trial, she refuses to speak until the Governor threatens to press her to death if she does not enter her plea. (Pressing to death is a gruesome sentence that requires heavy stones to be laid onto the person until they are crushed. It is a long, and agonizing death, and the only person known to have suffered this fate was Giles Corey, who was accused of being a wizard in the Salem witch trials)
Dorothy confesses to avoid this horrific fate. She is sentenced to death by hanging. She begs the court to behead her instead, as she believes this death will be swifter and less painful. They deny her plea. She is hanged to death on December 6th, 1638.
Her husband, John is censured in the church in March of 1639, for "much pride, and unnaturalness, to his wife, who was lately executed for murdering her child.” (from a letter by Pastor, Hugh Peter) He later moves to Salem, and dies there in 1645. Three children survive- Anne, Stephen and John. Stephen is my ancestor, and he became the captain of a trading ketch, named the Adventurer.
Dorothy's case is very well publicized. She was the 3rd woman ever to be executed in the colonies. But her case is more famous than the first two because the records in those cases are lost, whereas Dorothy's is well documented. Oliver Wendell Holmes referenced the Talby case in his book Medical Essays. In Main Street, writer Nathaniel Hawthorne shows Dorothy Talby, "chained to a post at the corner of Prison Lane, with the hot sun blazing on her matronly face, and all for no other offence than lifting her hand against her husband."
When I first learned of all of this, I was shocked of course. I actually didn't want to tell my mother and my grandfather who their ancestor was. I was worried that they'd feel ashamed to have such an infamous murderer connected to our family. But then, I started to just feel very sorry for her. Poor Dorothy. In another time, in another place, she might have gotten help. At minimum, she would have simply gone to a mental hospital or jail for the rest of her life, instead of being hanged. Today, she might have seen a therapist before it ever got bad enough for her to end up killing her own child. And how much of her mental disorder was aggravated by her husband's ill-treatment of her, and by the church's misunderstanding of how to treat mentally ill persons? When you see her this way, what is there to be embarrassed of? Every family, if you search hard enough, will have some members with scandalous backgrounds. Its just a matter of odds. If you survey any large section of people, you are bound to find a criminal or two.Ours was just more well-known. The tragedy is that this is all she is known for. It would seem from John Winthrop's writings that for most of her life, she was considered an upstanding member of the community. No doubt she had good qualities.
To me, and my family, our ancestor will be Dorothy Talby- the unfortunate victim of misinformed Puritan doctrine. But to history, my great-grandmother will always be Dorothy Talby- murderer.
