Source:Salem Witchcraft Trial Records

Website link

Salem Witchcraft Trial Records. Congregational Library & Archives. Boston.

Collection History

The Salem Witchcraft Trials were a series of hearings before county court trials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people, men women, and children included, stood accused of witchcraft and thirty were eventually found guilty. Despite being generally known as the Salem Witchcraft Trials, the preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in various towns across the province: Salem Village (now Danvers), Ipswich, Andover, Topsfield, and Salem Town. The best-known trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 and the Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, both in Salem Town.

The original manuscripts in this collection are owned by our project partners, the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum. Further information about the collection can be found in the Phillips Library's finding aid.

A large portion of the documents were previously digitized by the University of Virginia and may be found as part of their Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. In early 2017, the members of the CLA and Phillips Library staff found several documents in the collection which had not yet been digitized. These documents were digitized as part of our New England's Hidden Histories project and may be accessed below or on our digital archive.

For ease of use, we have provided information about all of the documents in the collection here regardless of where the digitized versions can be accessed. Documents only available through the UVA site can be found in the Related Materials section.

Digital Materials

These documents are organized alphabetically by last name of the accused, and then in chronological order for each case. Links to the digitized records are provided in the righthand columns.