David Lake, Sr.

Male 1645 - Aft 1709  (64 years)


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Generation: 1

  1. 1.  David Lake, Sr. was born 1645, Dorchester, Suffolk, Massachusetts Bay Colony, British Colonial America (son of Henry Lake and Alice Ireod); died After 15 June 1709, Little Compton, Newport, Rhode Island, British Colonial America; was buried 1709, Rhode Island, British Colonial America.

    David married Sarah Earle 1667, Portsmouth, Rhode Island, British Colonial America. Sarah was born About 1640, Newport, Rhode Island, British Colonial America; died 4 Nov 1690, Tiverton, Newport, Rhode Island, British Colonial America; was buried , Tiverton, Newport, Rhode Island. [Group Sheet]

    Children:
    1. Joel Lake was born 30 Jan 1683, Tiverton, Newport, Rhode Island, British Colonial America; died 21 Oct 1735, Tiverton, Newport, Rhode Island, United States; was buried 1735, Portsmouth, Newport, Rhode Island, British Colonial America.

Generation: 2

  1. 2.  Henry Lake was born 14 Aug 1611, Liverpool, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom; was christened 14 Aug 1611, Childwall, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom (son of David Lake and Alice Backster); died 21 Feb 1678, Dartmouth, Bristol, Massachusetts Bay, British Colonial America.

    Notes:

    DEMOS, John Putnam: Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, 1982, Oxford University Press.
    [ISBN 0-19-503378-7]
    Page 71:
    "It is significant, moreover, that many children of accused witches went on to useful even successful lives. Thus, ... David LAKE, the younger son of Alice (convicted and executed at Dorchester in 1651) was a leading man in the town of Little Compton, Rhode Island." [source indicated: G. Andrews Moriarty's The Early Rhode Island Lakes, in The American Genealogist, XII, 17-24.]
    Page 170:
    "Alice LAKE of Dorchester was reportedly enticed into witchcraft 'by the devil...appearing to her in the likeness, and acting the part, of a child of hers then dead, on whom her heart was much set." [Here, Demos is quoting Burr quoting Nathaniel Mather's 1684 letter to his brother Increase Mather.]
    Pages 301-302:
    "The process of dispersal is a little easier to follow for the family of Alice LAKE, convicted and executed at Dorchester in about 1650. Her husband Henry moved away at once; his name appears regularly in the records of Portsmouth, RI, beginning in April 1651. Meanwhile the four LAKE children, all less than ten years old, remained in Dorchester. One, probably the youngest, was 'bound out' by the town meeting to a local family for a 'consideration' of 26 pounds--and was dead within two years. The other three were also placed in (separate) Dorchester households. At this point their trail becomes badly obscured. (One was living as a servant to an uncle--still in Dorchester--in 1659.) Later, having reached adulthood, the same three were found in Rhode Island--and then in Plymouth Colony, where their father had removed by 1673. It appears, therefore, that the family was eventually reunited, some two decades after the event that had broken it apart."
    [NOTE:: The uncle alluded to was likely Thomas LAKE, Henry's brother.]
    [sources cited are Burr quoting Mather's letter to his brother; Fourth Report of City of Boston; and Moriarty's Early Rhode Island Lakes.]

    FOX, Sandford J.: Science and Justice: the Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials, 1968.
    Page 43: (footnote)
    "... Nevins, Salem Village, p. 254 ... gives 'a partial list of persons accused whether convicted or not.' There are 126 names on the list. The following names were omitted: 19 who were executed; Giles Corey, who was pressed to death for failure to plead; 8 who were convicted but released when the prosecutions ceased ceased on September 22, 1693; and two who were convicted and died in prison--a total of 30. Volume 135 of the Massachusetts Archives, pp. 1-6, lists 91 names of persons accused of witchcraft from 1656 to 1750, including those executed. No attempt has been made to reconcile the Archives' list with Nevins. ..."
    Page 64:
    "The colonists seem to have adhered quite closely to the injunction of [Henricus] Institoris and [James] Sprenger in their [15th century book] Malleus Maleficarum that the first test for the presence of witchcraft in these cases was the verdict of the physicians." [See also Malleus Maleficarum at wikipedia. Henricus Institoris was an aka for Heinrich Kramer.]
    Page 93:
    "As to those who were executed as witches, the question of whether the defense [of insanity] might have been useful to them had it been in some way presented in their behalf involves more than the usual difficulties of such historically precarious speculation. The unfortunate fact is that we have no record at all of executions before 1692 on which to make a judgment. ... As to Mrs. LAKE and Mrs. KENDAL, there is virtually no information at all except Reverend Hale's statement that both denied their guilt to the end."

    HALE, John, Rev.: A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, written 1697, first published 1702, reprinted 1973, York Mail-Print, Inc., Bainbridge, NY.
    [ISBN 0-913126-05-5]

    Henry married Alice Ireod 1636, Lanchester, Durham, England, United Kingdom. Alice was born 1614, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom; died 5 Jun 1652, Dorchester, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States. [Group Sheet]


  2. 3.  Alice Ireod was born 1614, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom; died 5 Jun 1652, Dorchester, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States.

    Notes:

    http://alicemariebeard.com/genealogy/maternal/lake.htm

    In about 1651, near modern-day Boston, a mother of five lost her baby to death. After her baby died, she imagined she saw the baby. Because of that, she was accused and convicted of being a witch, and she was executed. The claim in the town of Dorchester, MA, was that the devil was coming to her in the form of her deceased, beloved child. Records are scant, but they show she had an opportunity to recant her story on the day of her execution and possibly to save her life. She did not recant her story, but she said she knew why God was punishing her: She had engaged in sex prior to marriage, become pregnant, and attempted a self-abortion. Hollywood has missed a good story; Alice Lake's story is a classic. She was ruled by two strong, womanly pulls -- guilt and grief.

    In the early part of the 20th century, Alice had a descendant who was a medical doctor who spent many years researching her story and trying to track her descendants. This man described Alice's story best:
    "Here is a penitent, broken hearted, submissive woman, laying bare the greatest secret of her bosom, asking forgiveness; yet the damnable tactics of the fanatical Christian Church string her up like a miserable tramp."
    There is a site on the 'net that considers the sexual implications of the "witch charges." It is not a site intended for children, but in light of that fact that Alice Lake confessed sexual "crimes" in what may have been a confession attempting to save her life, the point of view of the article is worth considering. CLICK HERE for "Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Woman to Live: The Reasons Behind the Hiding of Women's Sexuality During the Witchcraze."

    I spent the better part of six months trying to figure out Alice's story, and in the end I had no definite answers. The records of her trial are lost; Alice can be seen only in traces and reflections. There is no known record of her from when she still lived. The first the records show she lived was after she was dead, when the townsmen were trying to figure out what to do with Alice's children since she was dead and her husband had fled. Like most of the women accused of witchcraft, Alice was not well off financially; in today's world, she and her husband would be described as "poor, working class." She was a married woman with at least five children, all presumably fathered by her only known husband, Henry Lake. In 1651, those children would have been a girl about ten, a boy about seven, a boy about five, a child about three who likely was a boy, and an infant. Alice's year of birth is unknown, but because of the ages of her children, she was likely about 30. Like most working class women of the time, she would have worked from sun up till sun down, and likely even after sun down by the light of the hearth fire and by the light of candles she had likely made. She had no conveniences and two little children who would still have been soiling themselves. If she had siblings, parents, or other relatives where she was living, no researcher to date has found them. She carried with her the Puritanical guilt of having had sexual intercourse before marriage, a guilt further complicated because she became pregnant before marriage. Then her youngest baby died.

    After her baby died, she told people she saw the baby. Maybe she did. Others who have not been judged insane or witches have claimed to see dead people: Look at the Christian religion. Or, maybe she grieved so much that her mind allowed her to imagine that she saw her baby to ease her grief. Or, maybe she knew she did not see her baby, but claimed she did so as to have something to hold onto. As painful as the death of a loved one is, most recognize a mother's loss of her baby as a special loss. In Alice's case, that grief was compounded because -- while she had lost her youngest baby to a death she did not want -- she knew she had attempted to cause death to one of her other children by attempting an abortion. [From the earliest comment about this self-attempted abortion, it appears she did not succeed with the abortion.]

    The Reverend John Hale had been a young boy when Alice was executed. He went on to graduate from Harvard and became a minister. He supported the witch trials until the witch hunters came after his pregnant wife, the last woman accused of witchcraft in Salem in Nov. 1692. The Rev. Hale wrote the following in 1697:
    Another that suffered on that account some time after was a Dorchester Woman. And upon the day of her Execution Mr. Thompson Minister at Brantry, and J.P. her former Master took pains with her to bring her to repentance And she utterly denyed her guilt of Witchcraft; yet justifyed God for bringing her to that punishment: For she had when a single woman played the harlot, and being with Child used means to destroy the fruit of her body to conceal her sin & shame, and although she did not effect it, yet she was a Murderer in the sight of God for her endeavours, and showed great penitency for that sin; but owned nothing of the crime laid to her charge.
    This woman faced death, and still she would not say she had not seen her dead baby. Perhaps admitting her child had died was more than she could live with, even tho her only hope of living was to admit that she knew her baby was dead, and even if she had only pretended to see the baby because her grief was so profound. Or, perhaps her baby could not go on to the spirit world without a mother. How would the Hollywood types answer this question?

    Three of Alice's children reached maturity and had children themselves. Her son David married the widow Sarah Cornell, born Sarah Earle. Sarah's first husband had been convicted and executed for the murder of his own mother; the "evidence" against this man was that -- after his mother was dead and buried -- a man had a dream in which the dead woman said her son had killed her. That man was Thomas Cornell, an ancestor of the man who endowed Cornell University, and -- as irony would have it -- also an ancestor of Lizzie Borden. [Lizzie is remembered in the ditty, "Lizzie Borden took an ax. Gave her father forty whacks." Unlike her unfortunate ancestor accused of killing a parent, Lizzie walked away a free woman after the trial for killing her father and step-mother.]


    Children:
    1. 1. David Lake, Sr. was born 1645, Dorchester, Suffolk, Massachusetts Bay Colony, British Colonial America; died After 15 June 1709, Little Compton, Newport, Rhode Island, British Colonial America; was buried 1709, Rhode Island, British Colonial America.


Generation: 3

  1. 4.  David Lake was born Aug 1570, Childwall, Lancashire, England; was christened 3 Aug1570, Childwall, Lancashire, England (son of Richard Lake and Anne Wardell); died Deceased, England.

    David married Alice Backster 2 Feb 1607, Walton, Lancaster, England. Alice was born About 1580, Lancashire, England; died 1650, Salem, Essex, Massachusetts Colony, Colonial British America. [Group Sheet]


  2. 5.  Alice Backster was born About 1580, Lancashire, England; died 1650, Salem, Essex, Massachusetts Colony, Colonial British America.
    Children:
    1. 2. Henry Lake was born 14 Aug 1611, Liverpool, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom; was christened 14 Aug 1611, Childwall, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom; died 21 Feb 1678, Dartmouth, Bristol, Massachusetts Bay, British Colonial America.


Generation: 4

  1. 8.  Richard Lake was born 1539, Rayleigh, Rochford, Essex, England (son of John Lake, I and Elizabeth Lone); died 24 Sep 1599, North Benfleet, Basildon, Essex, England.

    Notes:

    https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/174001468/richard-lake

    Richard Lake was born 1539 at Rayleigh, Essex, England the son of John and Elizabeth Lone Lake. He married in 1564 at Essex, England, Anne Wardell the daughter of Edward and Anne Morel Bibte Wardell.

    Known Children:
    John Lake 1565-1612 Md Elizabeth Sandell Died North Benfleet, Essex, England

    Richard married Anne Wardell 19 May 1565, Childwall, Liverpool, Merseyside, Lancashire, England. Anne was born 1543, North Benfleet, Basildon, Essex, England; died 22 Sep 1599, Wickford, Basildon, Essex, England; was buried 22 Sep 1599, All Saints Churchyard North Benfleet, Basildon District, Essex, England. [Group Sheet]


  2. 9.  Anne Wardell was born 1543, North Benfleet, Basildon, Essex, England; died 22 Sep 1599, Wickford, Basildon, Essex, England; was buried 22 Sep 1599, All Saints Churchyard North Benfleet, Basildon District, Essex, England.

    Notes:

    https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/174004070/anne-lake

    Anne Wardell Lake was born 1543 in North Benfleet, Essex the daughter of Edward Wardell. She married in 1564, Richard Lake the son of John and Elizabeth Lone Lake.

    Known Children:
    John Lake 1565-1612 Md Elizabeth Sandell Died North Benfleet, Essex, England

    Children:
    1. 4. David Lake was born Aug 1570, Childwall, Lancashire, England; was christened 3 Aug1570, Childwall, Lancashire, England; died Deceased, England.