Deliverance Dane: 52 Ancestors Week 5 Prompt "The Library"

Deliverance Heaseltine Dane

March 25, 1651-June 15, 1735

            I remember spotting Katherine Howe’s novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, on the New Books shelf at my local library several years ago. The combination of the intriguing title and evocative cover illustration appealed to me. The novel moves back and forth between the lives of a modern day Harvard graduate student and a seventeenth century wife caught up in the Salem Witch Trials. While I never actually read the book, the alliterative name of the Salem area character stayed with me.

Imagine my surprise as I researched my Dane family line and discovered that Deliverance Dane was a real person, the wife of my 8^th great uncle, Nathaniel Dane. Nathaniel’s father, my 8^th great-grandfather Reverend Francis Dane, was a minister in Andover Massachusetts, a neighboring town to Salem. He expressed doubt about the witch trials roiling Salem in 1692, leading the witch hunters and accusers to turn on him and his entire extended family. Although some of the accusers named him during their examinations as a possible witch, Francis was never formally accused of witchcraft. However, two of his daughters, Elizabeth and Abigail, and his daughter-in-law Deliverance, along with several of his grandchildren, were accused, questioned and imprisoned. Elizabeth and Deliverance were eventually acquitted. However, Abigail was convicted and sentenced to hang; she only escaped death when her sentence was postponed due to her pregnancy. By the time she delivered her son, the Salem witch madness had run its course and she was freed.

The real Deliverance Dane was born to Robert Haseltine and Anna Wood Haseltine on March 25, 1651 in Essex County, Massachusetts. According to one Rowley Massachusetts pioneer history, her parents were the first settlers to marry in the community in 1639.  Her surname was variously spelled Hazeltine, Heaseltine, and Haseltine in local records.

Deliverance was 21 when she married 27 year-old Nathaniel Dane on December 12, 1672. By the time of the witch trials, the couple had six children: Nathaniel and Francis, who died before their first birthdays, and Hannah, Daniel, Mary and Deliverance, the oldest of whom was 16 when her mother was swept up in the witchcraft trials. Nathaniel and Deliverance had one more daughter after the witch trials, Abigail. Despite the trauma the false charges from their neighbors must have caused, they continued to live in Andover for the rest of their lives.

Nathaniel died in 1725, leaving his widow in the care of their son, Daniel. He was apparently a successful farmer and businessman, leaving his four daughters thirty five pounds each in money in his will, a substantial amount for the time period. Probate records listed a surprising amount of land, livestock, fields and personal possessions at his death, that was to be divided between his widow Deliverance and their son. Deliverance lived another ten years, dying in Andover June 15, 1735 at age 81.  

The fictional version of Deliverance is apparently quite different than the real woman. In the novel she had but one child at the time of the witch trials, and she was a practicing witch. The author appears to have been entranced by Deliverance’s charming Puritan name, but fictionalized everything else. There is, of course, no evidence that any of the poor women and men charged with witchcraft during the Salem trials actually practiced any sort of magic or witchcraft; the entire episode seems to have been a case of mass hysteria.

Now that I know more about my ancestor-by-marriage, Deliverance Dane, I will have to head back to the library and check out Katherine Howe’s novel once again. It should prove to be interesting to compare the two Deliverances, and to learn more about life in 17^th century colonial Massachusetts.