Please note that the physical collection has been returned to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

The collection contains legal documents from the Essex County Court of Massachusetts, Court of Oyer and Terminer, for the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692. Documents include declarations, arrest warrants, summonses, mittmuses, and a death warrant. The documents have been left in their original order, with the item number included in parentheses. Documents have been indexed by name--conducting another search by individual name(s) will narrow down your search to specific documents. It should be noted that the numbering of the documents is not consecutive, there is a gap between 125 and 136, in Volume One, which resulted from a numbering error when the manuscripts were removed from the scrapbook volumes. An appendix with the materials indexed alphabetically by individual, can be found at the end of the finding aid. All descriptions of the documents, and their authors, have come from Bernard Rosenthal's book Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Hands refers to the person whose handwriting has been identified in the document, for example, "hand #2 Stephen Sewall" means that the second set of handwriting has been identified as belonging to Stephen Sewall. This collection has been divided into two series. For a more printer friendly finding aid, see the Abridged Finding Aid in the external documents.

Series I. Volume One contains the contents from scrapbook number one. It should also be noted that documents 11 and 12 are one item; documents 113 and 114 are one item; documents 138 and 139 are one item; items 142 and 143 are one item; items 153 and 154 are one item; documents 182 and 183 are one item; and documents 186 and 187 are one item. Item 177 was not included in the original inventory (see Appendix), it is in box 4, folder 37.

Series II. Volume Two contains the contents from scrapbook number two. It should be noted that documents #115 and #126 are not related to the 1692-1693 witchcraft trials.