I am providing some hand-outs for our event and will be including these tips:

Start with ONE great grandparent and trace them back as far as you can go.  Then you can begin working on their spouse and other sides of the family.  Don’t be like I was, chasing down 100 leads from all 8 great grandparents.  It made me batty (battier).

Check your dates carefully — especially when using someone else’s genealogy work.  People make mistakes.  I had a male relative on my Ancestry for a long time with what I thought was his father – except his father was only three years older than him.  You can assume the following things are usually true: Women are often the same age or a few years younger than their husbands – unless it is a subsequent marriage and then the husband might be considerably older.  US women rarely married before the age of sixteen.

Siblings: Once you start getting out past your grandparents, you may want to limit how many of Great x3 Grandma’s Matilda’s seventeen children you include because your tree will get unwieldy.  Two exceptions to this are: One, start looking at the siblings of your relative if you need more information like where people lived or when parents died.  This is because someone else might be claiming that sibling in their lineage and have the info you need.  Secondly, chase down siblings if you are convinced your 23^rd cousin is someone cool, like Bono.

Use local resources/Don’t pay for things that might be free:  One frustrating aspect about Ancestry is that the monthly subscription cost to explore international records is a steep jump. So figure out who, overseas, could have this information online for free.  I found out scads about my Mayflower family by searching online (FOR FREE) records for Essex County, England.  The same is true for the United States. For example, Oglethorpe County, GA has an amazingly rich website where I found out a lot about my family.  Many towns/counties have great searchable databases that are as easy to find as googling “Plymouth Colony” AND  genealogy.  You can also contact local historical societies.  If you know your entire family lived in Swamplandia, Louisiana for ten generations, then it’s time to pay dues to their local historical and genealogy societies.   

Connect with family: Every family has one cousin who has already done a LOT of this work.  Make it easy for them to share these records with you.  A word of warning: my Great Aunt Dott Zue (God bless her soul) had already done amazing genealogical research.  Except she left out anyone who she thought might have voted for a Democrat.  Or was Native American.  Or divorced. Or drank.  This meant that 15 generations of my family only had about 11 people in it.

Beware of historical myopia:  This is when people interpret information from scant evidence.  Most of you know my first female relative in the US was executed for murdering her daughter. And way too many people have written that “clearly” she had postpartum psychosis.  But this is a convenient explanation for a heinous murder and no way can this be determined about a woman who died in 1648.

Read primary sources when available: If you know your family lived in 1630’s Plymouth Colony, then go “the whole hog” and pour through sources written at that time in that place.  This is how I found the most relevant info about my great x10 murdering grandmother.  Don’t be scared.  Eventually, you will get used to reading “Ye freedman Bishyp doth flogged Goodwife Bishyp for amorous and immoral liaisons with Edward Frolicke.”  Good stuff!

When you really get into the thick of research, it might help to have a master list of all the last names in your lineage to keep things straight.  So my list has my four grandparents at the top in columns: Carrier…Tindle…Robertson…Reed.  Then under each column, I have all the last names that are part of that line.  Be a geek like me and alphabetize the names.

If you are on Ancestry, don’t rely on just the hints (green leaf icon by your family member’s name).  Also use the “search records” feature where you can look at other people’s family trees, military records, uploaded stories, newspaper articles and so forth.

 If you think your family arrived in the United States sometimes between 1602 and the end of the century,  you might be able to find their name on ship’s manifests at this site: http://www.packrat-pro.com/ships/shiplist.htm

Marvel at the horrific names your ancestors gave their children:  For instance, my family should not be allowed to name one another: Sally Sixkiller; Bat and Squirrel Adair; Hezekiah Bailey; Hazel Waunetta and Floyd Elwood Carrier; Azubah Hammond;  Ebenezer Kneeland; Zebulon Maxson;  Junaluskki Wasp;  Grissell Boughton; Dorcas Buckminster AND Dorcas Clapp (seriously…these last two sound like old-fashioned porn names).

Check out blogs:  You may even find blogs about your family lineage!  Some of my favorites are (and all on my blogroll to the right): Who Does She Think She Is? – from a blogger intent on rebuilding stories about the women in her family as well as other fascinating women.  I also enjoy All My Ancestors which has some great Oklahoma resources, Creative Gene and Free Genealogy  Resources.  I also check regularly English, Scottish and Irish Genealogy and Polly’s Granddaughter and Black & Red Journal – both great resources on Oklahoma African American and Cherokee heritage. 

Have fun.  Many of you, like me, are professional researchers in some capacity.  You will, like me, worry obsessively about your dates, names, dead ends and when, if ever, you will “complete” this project.  Genealogy should be something you enjoy like knitting or Jell-O shots.  Give it a break once in a while so your brain does not become a Jell-O shot.  And remember, your family history is not nearly as fascinating as you think it is to others. Except for my great uncle (see below) who nearly died in a bar fight with a monkey.

If you are working from Ancestry.com, when you view other people’s family trees,  see if they have a story attached.  These often include juicy biographical information!  You can also save family photos for a relative that is shared between that family tree and yours.

Scan any old family photos and make sure you have notes on where the photo was taken, what year and the full names of everyone in the photo.  You can choose to upload these onto Ancestry.com or your own blog and share your mortification at a global level:  Here is an example of the monkey-bitten great uncle Rex Reed Robertson.  He looks just like me but with an Adam’s apple.  Happy hunting!

Samuel Fuller married Jane Lathrop who arrived in Boston in 1634 with her widowed father, Rev. John Lathrop.  I have some investigating to do because surely Samuel Fuller knew Alice Martin as only a few dozen people survive that first Plymouth winter.  Samuel Fuller died in Barnstable, MA on 31 October 1683.

The backstory for my lineage goes like this: Samuel Fuller is my 9th great grandfather on my maternal grandmother CARRIER’s side (also related to executed-for-witchcraft Martha Allen Carrier). Samuel had a son known as “Little John” Fuller (1656-1712). Little John’s daughter was Mehitable Fuller (1706-1738) who had a daughter, Phebe Kneeland (1730-1793).  Phebe Kneeland married Amos Carrier (1722-1793) and Amos is the grandson of Martha Allen Carrier (1650-1692).

Alice Martin Bishop is my 10^th great grandmother on my paternal grandfather TAYLOR’s side.  Her daughter, Damaris had Joseph Sutton (1660-1753) and he had Joseph Sutton, Jr.  (1690-1769). Junior had William Sutton (1733-1770) who had Alice Sutton (1760-1830) who had Dorcas Cornell (1796-1890) who had Hannah Howell (1825-1895). Hannah Howell had Lucius Herbert Taylor (1847-1914), a Michigan Union soldier who injured a Confederate soldier in Vicksburg and escorted the young man home out of guilt.  LHT settled in Yazoo County, Mississippi married Nancy Ella Fears (very likely a cousin of the injured Confederate soldier LHT escorted) and that is how, via the Mayflower, I became a southern girl.  I wear the wedding ring that Lucius Taylor gave Nancy Ella Fears.

But perhaps this time served me in figuring out the right questions to ask.  I will never have all the answers and evidence I want, but I owe it to my Bishop-Martin great x10 grandparents (and my Great Aunt x9 Martha), to recreate their lives objectively which includes moments of empathy, doubt, pride and shame.

I have tried to remain mindful of my own historical myopia, to not blur facts with impressions.  But Alice’s story leaves an impression, to say the least.  So I am concluding this story (for now) with these thoughts and questions.  I hope readers will provide their own impressions as well as resources I have missed. I may add to this blog at a later point but thank you for being engaged thus far and especially to my thousands of distant Martin-Bishop cousins with whom I share this lineage.

1. Post partum depression and the much more severe and rare post partum psychosis are diagnosable mental illnesses with biochemical origins.  No one in seventeenth century Plymouth would have classified AMB as such.  Alice may have been seen by her contemporaries as melancholy, odd, hot-tempered, reclusive or dozens of other ways we classify people who are different than us. But to assume she had post partum depression is ultimately not fair to the victim, Martha.  Alice Martin Bishop cannot be re-tried in a 21^st century court of law with the benefit of a psychiatric evaluation.
2. We have no idea what the religious and other supernatural beliefs and fears were of Alice, her family of origin or her spouses.  Certainly, she was heavily influenced by the Pilgrim community in which she lived.
3. Hoffer contends that a married woman’s economic and social status might influence trial outcomes (47).  What would AMB have going for her as she faced a jury?  Once orphaned (and from a family with not the greatest of Mayflower reputations), of limited relative wealth, twice married to men who were newcomers to the community.
4. What do we know about Rachel Ramsden?  Her historical record is potentially blemished:  In 1651 a “Goodwife Ramsden” was cleared of charges she had been cavorting with numerous men (Stratton, 203).  This is not to accuse Ramsden of false testimony but to consider the impact Martha’s murder had on her own young adulthood.
5. Alice Martin Bishop had to be one exhausted mother.  She had three small children to tend to in a very small home (if one does not count the dubious birth of the fourth child, a son) where food was in scarce supply.  The family was at the mercy of the seasons, epidemics, bloody skirmishes with neighboring natives (whom the English settlers were quickly taking over their homelands) and Colony expectations of devout servitude and obedience.  In addition to this we should consider the several months of confinement (entirely house bound) mothers of newborns endured (Berkin, 34) and the cycle of pregnancy, birth and nursing.  This in no way justifies murdering one’s child.  But I want us to remember who Alice was:  An orphan in a strange land, who lost her first husband to unknown circumstances. Left with two girls and then a new husband and another baby on the way.  Perhaps AMB doesn’t serve historical mercy but she has earned my respect as a woman who endured incredible hardship. 
6. I have never forgotten the fact that Alice witnessed her parents die when she was four years old and murdered her child at the same age.  Maybe a psychologist would insinuate she was stymied in the tragic events of her fourth year.
7. Where was Alice kept between confession and trial? Was she allowed to return home? (see Chapin, 31 and 52). If she was imprisoned, what building would it have been?   Plymouth Colony went decades without a formal prison building and6” jail” often constituted no more than a cage in publicly viewed space.    Was this how Alice spent her last days, asking whatever had possessed her to murder her daughter?

Hoffer writes about the AMB case:

The trouble the colony took to try her even after Bishop confessed to the crime, the indifference to what must have been her mental distress at its commission, and the great attention given to the details of the crime in the records, suggest that everyone in the government, from Governor Bradford to the court clerk, viewed Bishop’s act with foreboding.  The grisly facts of the infant’s murder contributed to the solemnity of the trial, and the disruptive effects of Bishop’s violence went far beyond her own domestic circle (42).

I never picked up on the sense of foreboding that Hoffer says must have been present.  What evidence brought him to that conclusion?  I have found absolutely no mention that Alice was mentally unstable or violent before July 22, 1648. For all the records I have searched, she is only mentioned before as the wife of George Clark and then Richard Bishop.  Yet again, I am discouraged to see scholar and family historians make presumptions about her life that are not in the historical record.   Hoffer cites his source as the Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, II (132-135).

Just to clarify…when Hoffer says “infant” to describe Martha, he is using the English legal definition where a murdered child under the age of eight is classified as an “infant” (xiii).

Of the filicidal motivations Hoffer considers for all infanticides in his study (see 148-151), none seem to seamlessly fit with the AMB case.  We have no evidence that Martha or her siblings were abused by their parents, notably Alice.  Nor does this seem to be a case where mother kills child and then herself (altruistic suicides, see 149). Alice did not murder her other children and did not appear to be ending her own life when Rachel Ramsden arrived.   

Unlike neonaticides, Alice did not need to murder her four year-old child out of the shame of being found pregnant with a bastard child.  Martha was conceived within the span of the Clark-Bishop marriage.  In some filicides, mothers murder children because they see the child as a “rival” for their spouse’s affection.  This makes little sense in the AMB case.  Richard had two stepdaughters and one biological daughter – it would, perversely, make more sense for Alice to be deluded about Richard’s “attraction” to the older Abigail or his own flesh and blood, Damaris.

All too often, Alice’s story is tied up in the witch craze of 1690’s Salem. Historians have long since settled the question over Plymouth Colony and the witch crazes.  These were confined to specific towns, Salem being the most obvious, and were certainly not a factor in 1648.   There is no mention of Alice stating she was influenced by the devil or a belief by her jurors that she was in such a state. 

There are, however, intriguing contextual discussions about the spiritual lives of Puritan children that makes one wonder.  Puritans did not baptize young ones until they had reached the age of reason and, as such, believed these souls were damned without such salvation (Moran, 25).  Pertaining to AMB’s case, “In theory, all infants and children who died unconverted suffered the eternal torments of hell.” and this hell was “a place of unremitting and unmitigated torture.” (25). While Moran contends that most Puritans did not fixate on this prospect for their young brood(25), we are left to imagine how the fiery bowels of hell played out in Alice’s imagination.  Perhaps it speaks more to her frame of mind after she had killed Martha. 

However, Moran stresses that Puritans were capable of compassionate reason (or reasonable compassion).  Some parents had a measure of gratitude when their young one passed “It was a great temptation to consider a dead infant among the few God had selected for salvation.  In such cases, the character of the dead child was idealized and the meaning of his death rationalized.  His demise was considered a welcome departure from the cares and sorrows of the world” (25). Perhaps, Alice thought she was saving one daughter for the hardships of colonial life.  But then why not her other daughters?

Minister John Robinson preached in 1625 “there is in all children, though not alike, a stubbornness, and a stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down” (Moran 26). This was a more stern Puritanism than most parents adhered to (26). More fitting were the words of Reverend Samuel Willard who described children as “innocent vipers” – incapable of being culpable because they had yet to reach the age of reason (28).  Perhaps Alice thought her child was damned on earth, perhaps she thought she could secure Martha’s passage to heaven – perhaps she had such a jumble of thoughts that none of her peers could determine why she had committed murder. 

Chapin is another historian who makes assumptions about Alice’s mental state.  By looking at the case of Dorothy Talbie who was known to be insane before she snapped the neck of her child, Chapin concludes, Alice was “a woman apparently plagued by depression” (114).  Based on what?  What if Alice was just irate with her daughter, her own life and chose to manifest her rage with a kitchen knife?  What if Alice was a happy-go-lucky gal who just snapped that July day?

Finally, one blog reader has questioned whether AMB suffered from ergot poisoning – a fungus found amongst stored grains that can, in some instances, cause hallucinations.  Historians have questioned the prevalence of ergot poisoning during the 1690’s witch trials.  Is it possible AMB ingested contaminated grain and suffered a chemical reaction?  There is no way of knowing.  I do not recall reading about poisoned grain in 1640’s Plymouth Colony but then, honestly, I would not have been paying attention to those passages.   I do question if the community even had enough stores of grain to become contaminated. We must remember that the first generations of Pilgrims were in near starvation mode and had to master cultivating local foods of which rye and such would not have been one.  Later Puritans had both the benefit of more English ships carrying supplies and mastering agriculture.

even though just 51 survived that first year.

On July 11, 1666, Alice’s youngest daughter, Damaris Bishop, married William Sutton (born 1641 in Scituate, Plymouth).   Their children were Alice (born May 13, 1668), Thomas (born Nov 11, 1669) and Marah (October 4, 1671).

I cannot find out what happened to Abigail.  It’s a little heartbreaking that a young girl who watched both of her parents die (just as her mother had) simply disappears from the historical record.  Abigail would have been the one child old enough to remember her mother fully, perhaps in even happier times.  But there is no mention of Abigail Clark past the events surrounding AMB’s execution.  One genealogist claims she died at five years old (before Martha’s murder) with no proof to back it up . Another claims she lived until 1687…again with no records.

We do know that Abigail’s stepfather, Richard Bishop, chose not to take care of her past 1648.  Perhaps, she had already been placed in a home as a servant.  The Plymouth courts did authorize one John Churchill to dispose of the Clark-Martin home and land and for the benefits to be given to Abigail and this is the last reliable record I believe we have of her (PCR II). But I often wonder about the stigma Abigail faced (as well as compassion received) as the daughter of the infamous murderess.

Richard Bishop does not fare well historically and maybe he was of questionable character before his wife became homicidal.  We do know that just six months after his wife’s execution, Bishop pled guilty to stealing the spade of Andrew Ring, sat in the stocks for it and ordered to replace his neighbor’s tool (PCR II: 137).  He would go on to have further theft charges against him until he finally settled with his daughter, Damaris Bishop Sutton, in New Jersey.

1. Abigail Bishop: What happened to Alice’s eldest daughter?  The lineage for her half-sister, Damaris Bishop, has long been established.  But I can find no records of Abigail reaching adulthood.  Who did she live with as a child because it does not appear Richard Bishop kept her in his home after AMB’s execution?
2. Forensic Psychiatry:  What can we say about the fact that AMB saw her family die as a four year-old girl and then murdered her four-year old daughter?  It’s not the actual coincidence of age that matters as much as the psychic wounds of a four year old girl which may have never left her…thoughts?

3. Other Suspects: Because AMB admitted to the crime for which she also claimed to have no recollection, can we not even consider Richard Bishop as the murderer of his stepdaughter?  Did someone in Plymouth have a grudge against the Bishops and somehow got into the house?  What about Abigail? What about Rachel Ramsden? What about a stranger?  I know the historical record provides no other evidence than Alice as the culprit, but I have, on occasion, wondered.

4. James Bishop, a 4^th child? There is a July 7, 1740 will for a Mary Hudson Bishop, widow of James Bishop who some claim is the 4th child of AMB.  Is this true or is this the Bishop family of Salem? The troublesome Waterfield history of the Sutton family claims there are two children of the Bishop-Martin union: Damaris born 1645 and James born ca. 1646.  I would love to hear from anyone who can verify this …or disprove it.  

5. What would AMB’s trial been like today? “In all states, mothers who kill their children are prosecuted under homicide statutes. …courts continue to evaluate postpartum depression defenses and other mental illnesses under the existing insanity defense.  The prevailing insanity defense test applied across United States jurisdictions is extremely narrow and makes proving legal insanity exceptionally difficult for even the most severely postpartum psychotic women” The current insanity defense test is considered “too narrow because if confines [it] to a consideration of whether the individual knew the difference between right or wrong and not other aspects of the mental illness that are equally relevant” (Manchester, 718).  I don’t think AMB would have fared well under the M’Naghten standard (current test for insanity) because she seems to have immediate remorse for what she did indicating she knew it was wrong.  This is not to say she wasn’t severely mentally ill – it just means it might have not mattered in a 21^st c court of law.

I am eager to hear from you! ~ thanks, Erin

While women commit just 13% of all US violent crime, they are responsible for half of all child murders.

Many filicidal mothers have frequent depression, psychosis and suicidal thoughts and manifest one of five common motives:

a) Mother kills child out of love or for child’s best interest, possibly saving their children from future “harm” or “evil.” AKA Altruistic Filicide.

b) Mother kills child without any cognition or memory of her motive. May be responding to voices in her head.  AKA Acutely Psychotic Filicide.

c) Child dies as the result of abuse or neglect.

d) Mothers kills child because child is unwanted.

e) Spousal Revenge Filicide

(See Friedman and Resnick)

I think there is little doubt AMB was mentally unbalanced and not just because she hacked through her daughter’s windpipe.  What are the psychic wounds any person would sustain by being orphaned, seeing people die of horrible diseases and starvation, witnessing war, leaving one’s home country and having their husband die?  Therefore, I am not a fan of making AMB a raving lunatic living amidst the tranquil Plymouth community.  I believe all Pilgrims underwent relentless psychological trauma.  Maybe Alice represents the furthest edge of the community’s psyche – one eventually broken by living the Pilgrim dream?

In other words, Alice’s only rational response to such tragic and erosive conditions was to be traumatized and that might have contributed to a not entirely-unexpected psychic break.  Hoffer and Hull, who wrote extensively on English infanticide, claim that economic pressures, lean harvests and community uncertainty were correlated with increased filicide in sixteenth century England.  There are more than a dozen reported cases of infanticide/filicide in early colonial Virginia, Maryland and Massachusetts where living conditions, perhaps, generated similar, secondary motives.  Friedman and Resnick studied contemporary murdering mothers and found Alice’s life written in them: “The mothers were often poor, socially isolated, full-time caregivers, who were victims of domestic violence or had other relationship problems. Disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and primary responsibility for the children were common.” 

Other experiences and attributes regularly found in filicidal mothers:

• Endless child care and enduring baby’s crying/primary caregiver status
• Underlying mental illness
• Intellectual disabilities
• Belief child was abnormal
• Experience auditory hallucinations

Any one (or multiple) of these could have been AMB’s experience.  Because she did not kill an infant, I think it more likely she was committing altruistic or psychotic filicide but we cannot rule out that she was a rage-fueled child abuser either.  We do not have records that Abigail and Damaris were abused but that does not mean it did not happen.

I have discussed this case with my good friend, Patricia L. High, former Assistant District Attorney for Oklahoma County who has seen more than her fair share of terrorizing mothers. Automatically, Pattye believes AMB is a pissed off mother intent on ridding herself of that ungrateful Abigail who has, once again, done something unforgiveable like wet the bed.  Pattye’s experience is that mothers critically, even fatally, injure their children much more from places of rage and intent than from psychosis and voices in their heads.

I try to believe that because I don’t want to be an AMB apologist.  Martha died and did so savagely.  There are no heirs of Martha to tell her side of the story.    Certainly, there was nothing this four year-old child could have done to justify her slaughter. 

But applying modern definitions and experiences of child abuse will not slip seamlessly in seventeenth century Plymouth.  Take Pattye’s bed wetting theory. Would Alice hack her child to death for wetting a straw- filled bed in a community where clothes went weeks, even months, soiled and smelly?   By the evidence records we have, Martha was sleeping when she was killed – she had not spilled a pot from the stove, not hurt her little sister, not smart mouthed her mother.  She slept and Alice looked up, went for the knife and then climbed the ladder.

I think this scenario demonstrates intent.  For whatever unfathomable reason, AMB knew she needed to kill Martha.  That does not mean she was “in her right mind” at the moment or had any explanation for why she did it, only profound regret afterward (which the evidence record does indicate).  While she may have known what she was doing at the moment that does not mean that in the next moment, when she returned to a rational state, she wished she had never killed her child.  

In England, prior to the 18th century, mothers were pardoned in court because they were known to be insane or intellectually challenged. “Madness, not a medical term but a legal one, did not ‘excuse’ a homicide, but averted the death penalty” (Hoffer, 146).  Therefore, insanity was not so much a successful defense strategy but rather a way to save a mother from execution during sentencing. 

This does not seem to be the case in the American colonies.  Take, for example, the case of Dorothy Talbye who was hanged in 1639 Boston for the murder of her three year-old child.  It sounds remarkably similar to AMB’s case.  Except everyone knew Talbye was mentally ill because she had previously attempted to kill her children as well as her husband.  Talbye had been exiled form the church and publicly whipped – each to no avail.  As Governor Winthrop recalled her, “she was so possessed with Satan that he persuaded her by his delusions, which she listened to as revelations from God.”   Note how the existence of her mental illness is not questioned and yet, it could not justify her actions (Hoffer, 41).   Furthermore, even if the jurors believed Talbye was in the grips of Satan, there was no saving her – only saving the community’s exposure to one snatched by the Devil (Hoffer, 41).

If anyone had noticed Alice being mentally unstable, it would not have helped her much either. All of this, legally, is a moot point.  Judges found all forms of filicide “threats to the entire community” (Hoffer, 40) and punished it severely.   The M’Naughten standard which would be the foundation piece of our modern insanity defense was centuries away from American courtroom practice.

The AMB case’s greatest questions will be those that begin with “Why?”  And I do not expect we will ever have complete answers.  We can only remain aware of the context that shaped Alice’s beliefs and experiences.  It is always unimaginable when a woman murders those to which she gave birth.  We presume every child is cherished and that every woman is hardwired to love childrearing above all other acts.  Neither one is true.  Filicide severs these quaint notions from us. 

Plymouth’s first murder trial was held in 1630 with John Billington accused of murdering John Newcomen.  Billington was executed the same year (Philbrick, 157). Similar to AMB’s trial, there was no lengthy investigation-trial-retrial.  Cases were quickly delivered to juries, adjudicated, and if death were called for, there was no need to tarry.  Ross writes,

The Massachusetts legal system was not, in the fashion of early modern European polities, a patchwork of numerous and bounded jurisdictions with overlapping responsibilities and clashing agendas.  Settlers stripped away much of the complexity that they had known in England and thereby made the machinery for punishing offenders simpler and quicker (986).

With a streamlined system and only one Plymouth citizen with formal legal training (William Brewster, see Murrin 158), retributive justice was quickly determined by Plymouth citizens who had minimal functional literacy (Murrin, 158) but lived expertise in the community’s moral codes.  Nonetheless, “colonial courts were not concerned with questions of motive, but of fact.  The motive of the defendant does not generally appear in records” (Hoffer, 145). While English law required two witnesses to convict someone of murder, this was obviously not the case for AMB – we had Rachel Ramsden “eyewitness” account and AMB’s confession (Philbrick, 195).

A web page (American Female Hanging) reviewing the hanging deaths of American women provides the following data:

About 500 women have been executed in the United States between 1608 and 1900 – with well over 200 hanging for murder, notable infanticide.  In other words, a lady can commit many crimes and receive the death penalty – witchcraft, arson, even adultery.   

Hanging may appear a more painless way to die (awful anticipation followed a quick snap of the neck) but early executioners were often no more than an untrained sheriff or other civil servant tasked with the grim duty.  If the “correct drop” was not achieved (by scaffold height, design, knot, rope and weight of the person), the death may be caused by much slower strangulation.  In AMB’s case, she may have well stood on the back of a wagon or placed side saddle onto a horse and dragged off the back by her neck to achieve the hanging.

The following is a list of early colonial women who were executed beside AMB executed:

1632: Jane Champion for an unknown offense.

1633: (June 24) Margaret Hatch in Virginia for murdering her child.

1638: (December 6) Dorothy Talby hanged in Salem, MA for infanticide of daughter, Difficulty. Talby had prior conviction and public whipping for attacking her husband.

1643: (March 21) Mary Latham James Britton was hanged in Massachusetts for adultery.

1660: (June 1) Mary Dyer hanged in Boston for refusing to stop practicing her Quaker faith. 

1692: 13 women hanged including my great x8 grandmother Martha Allen Carrier in Salem, MA for practicing witchcraft.

Alice Martin Bishop left her trial and stopped briefly at home. Said her goodbyes to tearful, terrified girls, maybe shared a prayer with Richard.  It was likely she was quickly transported to her execution sight – was a formal scaffold built or did they just hang her from a tree?  How long did her body hang there? What were her last words?  Did she go to her death believing she was damned to hell?  And ultimately, what was she telling herself about why she killed her young daughter?

We know the hanging was likely a public spectacle if for no other reason than privacy would have been infeasible in this small community for such a publicized crime (ample court records prove that).  “Hangings [were meant ] to be spectacles so that the example of the fruits of the crime could be impressed on the people” (Chapin 55).  As had been done in England, executions happened almost immediately after sentencing and done so in an intentionally public setting.

While we know that a clergy member likely attended the execution to offer some consolation, we do not know if the Puritan practice of delivering a sermon to the public from a gallows pulpit had begun by the time AMB was executed (Chapin, 55).  What would a clergy member have said to Alice and what to the spectators?  What warning, what solace could he had offered his parishioners?  Did he insinuate that Alice must have been under some sort of demonic delusions? Did the gatherers pray for Martha? For her mother?

It seems only reasonable that Alice knew she would be executed.  We have no record of her recanting her confession or attempting to flee.  As Rachel Ramsden described her on that fateful July day, Alice probably remained “sad and dumpish.”

 And so on an early autumn day, a noose was placed around Alice’s neck.  Final words were said, maybe her face was covered.  And then Alice Martin Bishop was hanged for murder.