Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Alice Markham-Cantor, author of the new Once & Future Witch Hunt.
My 9x-great-grandmother, Martha Carrier, was hanged in the Salem witch trials. She wasn't a witch. She wasn't an herbalist or a spiritualist. She was a forty-year-old Puritan, a mother of five, known for her temper and her sharp tongue. The afflicted girls who first accused her had never met her; they'd only heard of her reputation, which included a child born suspiciously early in the marriage and a smallpox outbreak that killed all her male relatives.
When I was a kid, nobody knew we had a witch in the family. It wasn't until an uncle did some genealogy research when
