Update on Salem!

Wow, did we have a good time in Salem! One problem though.... it rained all day Saturday! We woke up to splendid weather on Saturday morning and then by the time we hit the streets - it was pouring rain! We were up in Salem three years ago and it was raining that weekend too! I can remember slogging through the streets on a rainy night following a guide as we did the ghost tour through the spooky streets of Salem. We saw lots of 'orbs' on the pictures that we took that night and a couple of 'spirits', or so my hubby says, on one of the pictures - I am looking for those pics - our computer crashed that winter and I need to find the discs with the pictures on them..... They don't seem to be in the normal place that I put computer discs...... Woow!!! That was supposed to be the sound of a ghost. LOL! I have pictures from this year and saw orbs and some kind of shooting lights that are going up into the air, not down like raindrops!! You can see the raindrops as round, misty circles that seem to sparkle; the one visible orb is near the ground and around one particular gravestone. I am not sure what those shooting star-like things are but there were no cars in the area and no major street lights that could be reflecting in the windows, and most of the shooting star things are not near any of the windows! By the time we finished with the tour, we were soaking wet and the water was wicking up my jeans and the last story was at the Salem Commons, right next door to our hotel!, so I told hubby that he could continue to walk around the streets taking pictures of 'orbs' but I was going back to the hotel and a warm bath!!! That convinced him to head indoors - it could have also been the fact that his coat was sopping wet because he didn't use his umbrella for most of the tour because he 'didn't want to miss anything and he needed to take pictures'. LOL! Sometimes, I wonder..... Anyway, the next morning it was again a beautiful day, so we walked around and took some pictures of some of the old homes of Salem. I got a great shot of what used to be, I think, the home and shop of Laurie Cabot - Salem's most famous witch - she has now moved her shop down to the waterfront and I don't know if she still lives there. We also went to the memorial to the people killed during the witch trials of 1692 and the burial ground next to it. I didn't know it but it is illegal to walk in a graveyard or on the commons after dark in Massachusetts!








I am always drawn to New England partly because of our relation to the Adams family through my dad's side of the family, but I am equally as drawn to Virginia through our descent from the Washington family through Jemima Washington, the daughter of Thomas Washington (one of George's aide de camps and his cousin), again through my dad's side of the family. I sometimes forget that West Virginia was part of Virginia until the Civil War. The funny thing is that I am also descended from the Grubb family that settled here in Delaware in the 1600's through my mother's side of the family - a fact I never knew until I did our ancestral tree as a gift to my family last Thanksgiving! One of my sisters-in-law wanted to know if the family stories that my brother had told her were true and it started me on a quest to answer some of those questions.
The answers I found were amazing and surprisingly enough - a lot of my ancestors came down to Virginia in the early 1700's and migrated to the western portion of Virginia into what eventually became West Virginia. The most interesting thing is that I am descended from one of the founding families of Delaware! Weird!! Anyway, off on one of my tangents again! The rest of this blog are pictures I took up in Salem showing the wonderful architecture of New England!