Alice Young 1647 Sampler

The area of present-day Windsor was first settled by colonists in 1633, making it the first English settlement in Connecticut. As a result, the Congregational Church, which was established that same year, is also among the oldest in the nation. This Church was moved and rebuilt several times but the current version stands since 1794 (with alterations in 1844)

There is not much known of Alice's personal life, much is speculation. When Alice, (other spelling Alse), Stokes was born on 8 April 1600, in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England, her father, Robert Stokes, was 30 and her mother, Alice Haynes, was 25. Alice married John Young on 5 September 1639, in Alford, Lincolnshire, England, United Kingdom. I looked at many ship records for that time and found passengers Alice & John for around that timeframe, but the last name was different. They must have arrived fairly soon after they married.

John Young, bought a small parcel of land in Windsor in 1640, and then disappeared from the town records. He sold all of his holdings in Windsor in 1649, most likely as part of a removal from the town following the execution of his wife. A John Young subsequently appears in the records of Stratford; dying there in 1661.

Their daughter Alice was born in 1640 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony probably right after they landed from England. It seems like all first born girls were "Alice" or she was named after her Grandmother Alice Stokes.

Little Alice was only 6 years old when her mother was convicted of witchcraft in 1647. Mom Alice could have been a healer and might have been trying to save her family with herbs and potions. There was a terrible influenza outbreak in Windsor at the time of her being accused and many died during that time. It was so easy to make a scapegoat of just about anyone in those days. Many prominent members of the noble class lost their families. Given such circumstances, a member of the elite class may have may have looked for a scapegoat, leading to Alice's being chosen at random.

Daughter Alice was recorded as marrying Simon Beamon in Springfield who was a "Planter" and landowner. About 30 years later, young Alice would also be accused of witchcraft but never executed.

Very little else is recorded of Mom Alice "Alse" Young. We only know about her because of her reputation as a witch.

This is an excerpt from "Entertaining Satan" By John Putnam Demos' book on daughter Alice

The line of the Windsor "witch" is suggested by the following fact (1) the children of Simon Beamon include both a John and an Alice (and it was customary to name children after grandparents). (2) There is no other Young mentioned in any seventeenth-century records at Springfield (implying a place of origin for Alice [Young] Beamon, outside of the immediate area). (3) Two Beamon children seem, when grown, to have married Windsor residents, and one of them settled there. (4) Years later, 1677, Thomas Beamon, son of Alice [Young] Beamon, sued another man for slander- specifically for saying that "his mother was a witch, and he looked like one" (Was not the unsaid presumption here "like mother, like daughter"?) Admitting the speculative nature of these conjectures, a rough profile of the first New England witch can now be sketched. She was a married woman, probably no younger than forty nor older than fifty-five, with at least one child (aged between ten and twenty at the time of the mother's death). Her husband was a humble sort, perhaps a carpenter by trade. They had lived in Windsor for at least seven years before her trial and conviction. 

Half a century before Salem (1692-3), the first witch trials in the thirteen colonies took place in Connecticut around 1647. The Connecticut Witch Trials are often overlooked, but this dark part of our history started decades before those in Massachusetts. From start to finish, around 46 people were tried, and 11 were executed. 

 Alice - Alse- Young was exonerated in 2017

Her story inspired my sampler