Sarah Good

Sarah Good (July 21 [O.S. July 11], 1653 – July 29 [O.S. July 19], 1692) was one of the first three women to be accused of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials, which occurred in 1692 in colonial Massachusetts.

Background

Sarah Good was born Sarah Solart in Wenham, Massachusetts Bay Colony to John and Elizabeth Solart. Her father was prosperous, but she and her sisters never received their inheritance when he died in 1672. Sarah first married Daniel Poole who was a laborer and who died in 1682. Sarah then married William Good. The debt that she had after Daniel died became the responsibility of William. Because they could not handle the debt, Sarah and William were "reduced to begging work, food, and shelter from their neighbors" and by 1692 were homeless.

Sarah was described by the people of Salem as being filthy, bad-tempered, and strangely detached from the rest of the village. She was often associated with the death of residents' livestock and would wander door to door, asking for charity. If the resident refused, Good would walk away muttering under her breath. Although she maintained at the trial that she was only saying the Ten Commandments, those who turned her away would later claim she was chanting curses in revenge. When she was asked to say the Commandments at her trial, she could not recite a single one.

Sarah

Sarah or Sara (/ˈsɛərə/;Hebrew: שָׂרָה, Modern Sara, Tiberian Śārā ISO 259-3 Śarra; Latin: Sara; Arabic: سارا or سارة Sāra;) was the wife and half–sister of Abraham and the mother of Isaac as described in the Hebrew Bible and the Quran. Her name was originally Sarai. According to Genesis 17:15, God changed her name to Sarah as part of a covenant after Hagar bore Abraham his first son, Ishmael.

The Hebrew name Sarah indicates a woman of high rank and is translated as "princess" or "noblewoman".

In the Hebrew Bible

Sarah was the wife of Abraham, as well as being his half-sister, the daughter of his father Terah. Sarah was approximately ten years younger than her husband.

She was considered beautiful to the point that Abraham feared that when they were near more powerful rulers she would be taken away and given to another man. Twice he purposely identified her as being only his sister so that he would be "treated well" for her sake. No reason is given why Sarah remained barren (childless) for a long period of time. She was originally called "Sarai", which is translated "my princess". Later she was called "Sarah", i.e., "princess".

Sarah McLachlan

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Sarah Ann McLachlan, OC, OBC (born January 28, 1968) is a Canadian musician, singer, songwriter, and pianist. Known for her emotional ballads and mezzo-soprano vocal range, as of 2009, she has sold over 40 million albums worldwide. McLachlan's best-selling album to date is Surfacing, for which she won two Grammy Awards (out of four nominations) and four Juno Awards. In addition to her personal artistic efforts, she founded the Lilith Fair tour, which showcased female musicians on an unprecedented scale. The Lilith Fair concert tours took place from 1997 to 1999, and resumed in the summer of 2010. On May 6, 2014, she released her first album of original music in four years, titled Shine On.

Early and personal life

Sarah McLachlan was born on January 28, 1968, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and adopted. Her biological father is Paddy Maiorana and her biological mother was Tracey Robertson. Her parents have Scottish ancestry. As a child, she took voice lessons, along with studies in classical piano and guitar. When she was 17 years old and still a student at Queen Elizabeth High School in Halifax, she fronted a short-lived rock band called The October Game. One of the band's songs, "Grind," credited as a group composition, can be found on the independent Flamingo Records release Out of the Fog and the CD Out of the Fog Too. It has yet to be released elsewhere. Her high school yearbook predicted that she was "destined to become a famous rock star."

Salem witch trials

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. The trials resulted in the executions of twenty people, fourteen of them women, and all but one by hanging. Twelve other women had previously been executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 17th century. Despite being generally known as the Salem witch trials, the preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in several towns: Salem Village (now Danvers), Salem Town, Ipswich and Andover. The most infamous trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 in Salem Town.

The episode is one of the Colonial America's most notorious cases of mass hysteria, and has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations and lapses in due process. It was not unique, but simply a Colonial American example of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials in the Early Modern period. Many historians consider the lasting effects of the trials to have been highly influential in subsequent United States history. According to historian George Lincoln Burr, "the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered".