Another Ancestor

Genealogical research is a lot of fun.    It is also hard work and can be a sobering experience when one encounters the panoply of characters in our human story.  Yet, for every person of dubious repute, there always seems to be another person of real virtue.  In my family that is particularly true regarding persons who have stood up for religious liberty and paid a price for that.  My earliest such ancestor was Alisdair McIain McDonald, who was the Twelfth Chief of Clan Glencoe, a clan of Catholic (Roman and Anglican) Christians in the Northwestern Highlands of Scotland in the early seventeenth century.  He was murdered in his bed in a surprise attack by lowland Presbyterians, who also killed all the other men (except his sons, who escaped) and burnt down the homes, leaving the women and children to freeze to death in the particularly virulent February snowstorm that day.

This week I discovered a later remarkable ancestor, Mary Seymour Stuart Barrett Dyer.  Mary was born in Greater London in 1611, the year the first and complete King James Bible was promulgated. She spent some time in the Court of King Charles, later married and bore a son before she and her husband William immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the New World.  Later, on a return journey to England, she converted to the Quaker religion.  That meant that she would come afoul of Governor John Winthrop (an ancestor of my wife!) and the constitution of Massachusetts which made Puritanism the state religion and outlawed all other faiths.  When Mary birthed a stillborn child, Winthrop examined the foetus, declaring that it showed evidence of demonic possession. Finally, on 1 June 1660 she was hanged on Boston Common for apostasy, for having abandoned Puritan religion.  She and three other executed Quakers were denominated "the Boston Martyrs."

Mary's statue in Boston bears her words, "My life not availeth me in comparison to the liberty of the truth."  I salute in spirit Alisdair, Mary and all those of every faith who have suffered at the hands of ignorance and intolerance, and still do.