They say the stones remember. I didn’t fully understand what that meant until I knelt before the weatherworn gravestone of my 10th great-grandfather, John Andrews (1657–1732), in Salem, Massachusetts the Old Burying Point Cemetery on Charter Street.

It was a quiet summer afternoon, heavy with that strange, electric stillness that seems to hum beneath the surface of this old city. As I placed my hand on the lichen-covered slate, I felt a pulse…not just of time, but of blood.

This wasn’t just a visit to a colonial graveyard. This was a return.

John Andrews was born in Topsfield, Essex County, in 1657, just a few miles from what would later become the epicenter of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. He died in Danvers (then Salem Village) in 1732 long after the last noose had been tied and the town began its long process of reckoning.

At the time of the trials, he was 35 years old (a grown man, a landholder, a father. There’s no record of him being accused, nor of accusing others. But he lived through it) through the sermons, the fast days, the fear, and the executions. He stood in the same meetinghouses and walked the same roads as the accused, the accusers, and the condemned. And now he rests in the same soil as Judge John Hathorne and other key players of that era.

It’s humbling to realize that my own ancestor stood witness to one of the darkest spiritual and political panics in American history.

What makes this discovery even more profound is that I, his descendant, have also walked the streets of Salem, not as a Puritan, but as a modern Witch. Not long ago, I was initiated and later elevated in the Gardnerian tradition of Witchcraft right here in this same city. Where once people were hanged for being called witches, I stood in circle, speaking oaths in the name of love, trust, and mystery.

It’s a strange and poetic symmetry. The path my ancestor walked led, through ten generations, to me, a Witch whose roots reach back to the very soil in which he now sleeps.

I often think about what John would make of me. Would he be horrified? Intrigued? Would he recognize something of the old ways in the rites I perform, not of malice or heresy, but of reverence, balance, and sacred order?

I don’t know. But I do know this: his survival made my path possible.

Standing at John Andrews’ grave was more than a genealogical discovery. It was an act of remembrance, of reclamation, of magic. In that moment, the veil between past and present, Witch and Puritan, condemned and consecrated thinned just enough to feel the current running through it all.

And I was not alone.

As a Gardnerian Witch, I hold dear the idea that lineage matters, not only our initiatory lines, but our ancestral ones. Both shape us, both challenge us, and both can call us to deeper understanding if we dare to listen.

So I leave this here as both testimony and offering. To John Andrews- witness of a fearful age, survivor of Salem’s crucible, father of many. And to all the ancestors whose names are carved in stone and whose blood runs through our veins:

We remember. We live. And we light the candle again.