How to Research Your Family's Dark History: Finding Ancestors Accused of Witchcraft
How to Research Witch Trial Ancestors: Scotland, England & Colonial America
Most people who discover a witch in their family tree find out by accident. A surname appears in a local history book. A distant cousin mentions something at a funeral. A casual search on a genealogy platform throws up a record that stops you cold. What happens next, for most researchers, is a wall. The mainstream genealogy tools were not built for this. Ancestry.com and FindMyPast are exceptional for census records, parish registers, and civil registration, but the archives that hold witch trial records sit in a different institutional world entirely, and navigating them requires knowing where to look and what you are looking at when you find it.
This guide covers the full archival landscape for UK and US researchers, the specific databases and record classes that contain witch trial documentation, how to search when you have no name to start with, and how to read what you find when you get there.
The Scale of What You Are Searching
Before going into the archives, it helps to understand the scale of what the witch trials actually were, because most people significantly underestimate it.
The scholarly consensus on European witch trial executions across the period of approximately 1450 to 1750 is between 40,000 and 60,000 confirmed deaths, with the work of Brian Levack and other historians suggesting the upper end of that range is more accurate when unrecorded rural executions are factored in. Executions represent only a fraction of the total picture. For every person executed, several more were accused, tried, imprisoned, tortured, or acquitted. The total number of people who passed through some form of witch trial process across Europe during this period is estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
The distribution was not even. The Holy Roman Empire, which covered much of modern Germany, Austria, and the Low Countries, accounts for roughly half of all European executions. Switzerland, France, and Scotland follow. England, despite its cultural prominence in the popular imagination of witch trials, was actually a relatively moderate persecutor by European standards, with approximately 500 executions across the entire period. The English legal system's prohibition on judicial torture also means English trial records tend to be less detailed than their Scottish or continental counterparts, because suspects were not compelled under torture to name additional accomplices, which is one of the mechanisms that turned localised accusations into mass panics elsewhere.
Scotland is the country whose witch trial record demands specific attention from any genealogist with Scottish ancestry. Scotland executed an estimated 2,500 people for witchcraft, from a population that was, at the peak of the persecutions in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, roughly one million. That ratio of executions to population is among the highest of any country in Europe, comparable to some of the worst-affected regions of the Holy Roman Empire. The reasons for Scotland's exceptional intensity are the subject of significant historical scholarship, including the personal involvement of James VI, who attended torture sessions, participated in interrogations, and wrote a demonological treatise, the Daemonologie, published in 1597, that functioned as a theoretical framework for prosecution. The Presbyterian Kirk's network of local oversight also created an unusually efficient mechanism for translating community accusation into formal legal process.
The colonial American trials sit in a different context entirely. Salem in 1692 is the famous episode, with 19 executions and over 200 accusations, but Salem was not representative of American witch trial history and was, by European standards, a small and brief panic. The broader colonial period saw witch accusations and trials across multiple colonies from the 1640s onward, most of which did not result in execution and many of which did not reach formal legal proceedings at all. The American witch trial record is more diffuse and harder to search than its European counterpart, but the dedicated archives for it are now largely digitised.
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The Scottish Witchcraft Database
For researchers with Scottish ancestry, the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft at the University of Edinburgh is the single most important resource in existence. It is accessible free of charge at www.shca.ed.ac.uk/Research/witches and represents the most complete national database of witch trial records assembled for any country in the world.
The database contains records for over 3,000 named accused individuals, compiled from court records, Kirk session minutes, privy council registers, and local archive sources. Each entry contains, where the source material survives, the name of the accused, their approximate age, their occupation, their parish, the nature of the accusation, the names of accusers, the names of co-accused, the outcome of the trial, and, in many cases, direct transcription of or reference to the trial documentation.
To search the database effectively, use the name search function first if you have a surname. Scottish witch trial records frequently use variant spellings, so search both the standardised form and phonetic alternatives. The database's geographic search is particularly useful for location-based research: you can search by parish, county, or sheriffdom, which allows you to identify all recorded witch accusations within a specific geographic area during a specific period. If your ancestors lived in a particular parish in the late sixteenth or seventeenth century, this search will tell you whether any witch trials occurred in that community, which is your starting point for cross-referencing with family records.
The database links where possible to the original source documents, many of which are held at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh. The NRS catalogue is searchable online at nrscotland.gov.uk, and the primary record classes for witch trial material are the Justiciary Court records under class JC, specifically JC2 for the Books of Adjournal which record criminal proceedings, and JC26 for process papers which can include indictments, depositions, and precognitions. Kirk session records, which often contain the earliest stage of a witch accusation before it reached the secular courts, are catalogued under the CH2 class and are increasingly available through the NRS digital catalogue.
The English Archival Landscape
English witch trial records are distributed across a more complex institutional landscape than Scotland's centralised court system produced. The primary record classes at the National Archives in Kew are the Assize records under ASSI and the King's Bench records under KB.
The ASSI class contains the records of the circuit courts that handled serious criminal cases, including witchcraft prosecutions, across the English regions. The most relevant series for witch trial research are ASSI 35 for the Home Circuit covering the counties of Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, which were among the most active areas for English witch prosecutions, and the equivalent series for the Northern, Midland, Oxford, Norfolk, and Western circuits. These records include indictments, which name the accused and state the charge, and where they survive, examination records and depositions.
The KB records at the King's Bench level are relevant for cases that were removed from the Assizes for review or that originated at a higher jurisdictional level. KB 9 contains ancient indictments and KB 29 contains controlment rolls, both of which can contain witchcraft-related material.
A practical challenge with English Assize records is that survival is uneven. Fire, flood, and institutional neglect mean that records for some circuits and some decades are incomplete or missing. The National Archives online catalogue at discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk allows document-level searching and will show you what survives for a given county and period before you commit to a research visit or document order.
For published and cross-referenced English witch trial material, the Records of the Witch Trials in England project and the work of historians including James Sharpe and Malcolm Gaskill have produced extensively annotated secondary sources that can help triangulate the archival material. JSTOR provides access to journal articles in the History Workshop Journal, Past and Present, and the Journal of British Studies that contain detailed case studies with archival references you can follow directly into the primary sources.
Essex deserves particular mention for English researchers. The county accounts for a disproportionate number of English witch trial executions, particularly during the 1640s under the self-appointed Witch Finder General Matthew Hopkins, whose campaigns across Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk produced more English witch executions in two years than the previous century combined. Essex Record Office in Chelmsford holds significant local material supplementing the National Archives holdings, including Quarter Sessions records and local court documents.
The Colonial American Archives
For American researchers, the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive at the University of Virginia is the essential starting point and is entirely free to access online at salem.lib.virginia.edu. The archive contains transcribed and scanned primary source documents from the 1692 Salem proceedings, including all surviving examination records, court papers, petitions, and correspondence. The examination records are among the most detailed witch trial documents in the English-language archive, running to hundreds of pages of testimony from accusers, accused, and witnesses.
Searching the Salem archive requires knowing that the geographic scope of the 1692 panic extended well beyond Salem village itself, encompassing Andover, Topsfield, Beverly, Ipswich, and multiple other Massachusetts communities. If your ancestors lived anywhere in the broader Essex County, Massachusetts area in the 1690s, a search of the documentary archive is warranted.
For witch trials outside Massachusetts, the Beyond Salem project documents accusations and trials across colonial America from the 1640s to the early eighteenth century in Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, and other colonies. Much of this material is accessible through the New England Historical Genealogical Society at AmericanAncestors.org, which also holds digitised colonial court records from multiple states.
State archives are the critical next level for American research. Connecticut witch trial records are held at the Connecticut State Archives and the Connecticut State Library. Virginia colonial court records are at the Library of Virginia. New York colonial court records are at the New York State Archives. Each of these institutions has online catalogues and, increasingly, digitised holdings.
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Continental European Records
For researchers with German, French, Dutch, or Swiss ancestry, the archival landscape is more fragmented but increasingly accessible. The Compendium on Witch Trials in Early Modern Europe is an academic database compiled from institutional research across multiple countries, accessible through university library systems and through JSTOR in part.
German witch trial records are distributed across state and regional archives corresponding to the former territories of the Holy Roman Empire. The Bavarian State Archive in Munich, the Baden-Württemberg State Archives, the Hessian State Archives, and equivalents across the German federal system all hold relevant material. The German legal digitisation project has made a significant portion of early modern court records searchable online, and the German Genealogy Group maintains guides to accessing these resources in English.
French witch trial records sit primarily with the regional archives, the Archives Départementales, which hold records from the Parlement of Paris and regional courts. The Archives Nationales in Paris holds higher-level judicial records. Swiss cantonal archives, particularly those of Bern, Vaud, and Fribourg, contain exceptionally well-preserved records from some of the most intense Swiss persecution periods.
What the Records Actually Contain
Understanding what you will find when you locate a relevant document matters because these are not ordinary genealogical records and reading them without context can be disorienting.
An accusation document or indictment typically names the accused, gives their parish or community of residence, states the charge in formal legal language, names the accuser or complainant, and describes the alleged act. In English records this is often terse and formulaic. In Scottish and continental records it can be considerably more detailed, particularly where the formal process included a dittay, a Scottish term for the written charge document, which could list multiple alleged acts over a period of years.
The interrogation record or examination is where these documents become extraordinary primary sources. Suspects were questioned, in Scotland and on the continent typically under torture, about their activities, their accomplices, their relationship with the devil, and the specific harm they were alleged to have caused. These records contain direct speech, or what the court scribe recorded as direct speech, from people who lived four centuries ago. They describe their lives, their communities, their relationships, their fears, and their desperation in terms that are immediately human. Reading a Scottish interrogation record from 1590 is not an abstract archival exercise. It is an encounter with a specific person in an extreme situation, and it requires a certain steadiness to do well.
The verdict and sentence document closes the record. In Scottish courts, the verdict of guilty was followed by the sentence, which for witchcraft was typically death by strangling and burning, with the burning serving to destroy the body. Acquittals were more common than popular history suggests, particularly in English courts, and an acquittal record is a genealogical finding of its own importance.
Searching Without a Name
Most researchers do not begin with a name. They begin with a location and a family known to have lived there during the relevant period. The method for location-based searching is to identify all witch trial records from the parishes or counties where your family was present, then cross-reference the names that appear in those records against your existing genealogical tree.
The Scottish Witchcraft Database's parish search makes this straightforward for Scottish research. For English research, the National Archives online catalogue allows you to identify all surviving Assize records for a given county and period, which you then need to examine for names. For American research, the county court records at state archives can be searched by date range.
Parish records and census data are your cross-referencing tool. Where a witch trial record names the accused's parish and family members or neighbours, you can often trace connections to your known family tree through the same parish register that records your ancestor's baptism or marriage.
Reading What You Find with Accuracy
When you find an ancestor in a witch trial record, the specific charge matters enormously and varies far more than popular history suggests. Maleficium, the act of causing harm through witchcraft, is the most common charge in English records. Diabolism, making a pact with the devil, is more prominent in Scottish and continental records, particularly after James VI's influence on prosecution theology. Cunning folk, healers and charmers who used folk magic in ways their communities generally approved of, appear in trial records as frequently as the stereotypical malevolent witch, and many of them were acquitted because their neighbours testified in their defence.
An acquittal did not necessarily mean a return to normal life. The social cost of accusation in a small parish community was significant regardless of the legal outcome. A person found not guilty of witchcraft in 1620 still had to return to the village where their neighbours had accused them, and the parish record of their subsequent years often tells a secondary story of social displacement or relocation.
The interrogation records, where they describe confessions obtained under torture, must be read with the understanding that the content of those confessions was shaped by what the interrogators wanted to hear. The specific details of sabbath attendance, diabolical pacts, and familiars that appear in confessions reflect the theological framework of the prosecution as much as any genuine experience or belief of the accused.
Connecting Your Research to the Strange & Twisted Archive
If your research leads you to a specific trial, a specific accused ancestor, or a specific community caught up in a broader witch panic, the Strange & Twisted archive contains detailed historical context for the major trials and regional patterns across Britain and America. The Strange & Twisted guide to the Scottish witch trials covers the full historical arc from the North Berwick cases of 1590 through to the last Scottish execution in 1727. The Strange & Twisted history of the Salem witch trials examines the 1692 panic in its full colonial context, and the Strange & Twisted piece on the witch finder general Matthew Hopkins covers the English campaign of the 1640s in depth.
The records you find in the archives are one layer of the story. The history surrounding those records is the other, and understanding both is what turns a name in a database into a genuine encounter with someone who lived, was accused, and faced something most of us will never have to imagine.
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