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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The wind off the Atlantic smelled of salt and promise and — if a man was honest with himself — fear.
Samuel Stratton gripped the Arabella's rail and watched England disappear into gray morning mist. He was thirty-eight years old, broad through the shoulders, with hands roughened by a decade of farming. He had left behind a village, a churchyard where his parents lay, and a life that had never quite fit him the way a man's life ought to fit.
Beside him stood Alice, her dark hair whipping free of her cap. She did not look back at the receding coastline. She was looking ahead, into the gray nothing of the Atlantic, as though she could already see what was waiting on the other side.
"Frightened?" he asked her.
"Of what?" She turned to him, and there was something fierce in her eyes that he had loved since the first day he saw it. "We've been frightened in England. At least in the New World we'll be frightened for reasons of our own choosing."
Samuel almost smiled. That was Alice. That had always been Alice.
He turned back to the sea. Somewhere ahead of them — impossibly far, inconceivably wild — was Massachusetts. A place where a man could farm land that had never been farmed, build a community that answered to God rather than to bishops and kings, raise children who would never know the cramped old compromises of the world they were leaving behind.
John Winthrop had called it a city upon a hill.
Samuel Stratton intended to help build it.
What neither of them could know, as the English coast vanished and the Atlantic swallowed them whole, was the price that building would exact. From them. From their children. From their children's children, all the way down to a cold morning in 1775 when a musket ball would hum past the ear of a man named Francis Stratton, and an old soldier would discover that some debts to freedom take generations to pay.
They built Watertown the way they built everything in those first years — out of desperation and faith and the stubborn refusal to die.
Samuel felled trees until his arms shook. He dug foundation stones out of frozen ground. He learned to read the weather off the river and to trade with Wampanoag men who regarded these pale, God-addled newcomers with a mixture of curiosity and warranted suspicion. He served as surveyor, then selectman, then constable — positions that carried no pay and endless trouble, and that he accepted because someone had to do them and he had never been able to watch a thing go wrong when he could do something about it.
Alice kept the house, raised their sons Samuel and Richard and John, grew herbs in a kitchen garden that became the envy of the neighborhood, and formed opinions about everything. This last quality was not, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the 1630s, universally admired in a woman. Alice did not particularly care.
The colony grew around them — rough and pious and argumentative and alive. Harvard College rose up in Cambridge. Towns pushed inland. The General Court passed laws governing everything from the price of a beaver pelt to the theological qualifications for voting. It was a community that took itself intensely seriously, and Samuel respected that, mostly, though he sometimes found the intensity exhausting.
He was a man who believed in God without needing to talk about it constantly.
He was also a man who believed in justice. And in the summer of 1648, those two convictions were put to a test he had not seen coming.
Her name was Margaret Jones, and she was a healer.
Samuel had seen her work. She had sat with Alice through a fever three winters before, pressing cool cloths to Alice's forehead and murmuring remedies in a calm, practical voice that had nothing mystical about it. She knew herbs. She knew the body's rhythms. She was brusque and sometimes blunt, and some of her patients, when her remedies failed — as remedies sometimes did — found it easier to blame witchcraft than to accept that sickness was stronger than medicine.
The accusations came in the spring. By summer, Margaret Jones was in chains.
Samuel attended the trial. He sat in the back and listened to the testimony — neighbors who claimed she had given them pains, a man who said his cattle had sickened after she looked at them, a woman who swore she had seen a child-like specter emerging from Jones's body. He listened to the judges, somber men who believed utterly in the Devil's power to recruit agents among the living. He listened to Margaret Jones herself, who denied everything with a flat, stubborn dignity that he thought was probably sealing her fate.
She was convicted on a Thursday.
She was hanged on a Friday, at Gallows Hill outside Boston, in front of a crowd that watched in terrible silence.
Samuel said nothing at the trial. He said nothing at the hanging. He walked home through summer heat with Alice beside him, and they were quiet for a long time.
That evening, sitting at the table after supper, he said: "She was no witch."
Alice looked up from her mending. "No."
"The magistrates hanged an innocent woman."
"Yes."
"And took bribes doing it, I'll warrant."
Alice set down her mending. Her eyes were very still. "Samuel. You know what it will cost us."
"I know."
He stood up from the table. "I also know that if nobody says it, it might as well not be true."
Alice looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded — once, decisive — and picked up her mending again.
The next morning, Samuel Stratton began to tell his neighbors what he thought.
The summons came in October.
Samuel and Alice appeared before the county court at Cambridge on the thirtieth day of October, 1649. The charge was speaking against the court, against the magistrates, against the righteous judgment of the colony. The fine was five pounds — a substantial sum for a farmer. The requirement was public acknowledgment of their offense.
Samuel stood straight in the dock. Alice stood beside him. Around them, the court watched with the particular attention of people who wanted to see someone bend.
The magistrate read the judgment. He called upon Samuel Stratton to acknowledge the error of his ways and the mercy of the court.
Samuel said, with careful precision, that he acknowledged the mercy of the magistrates.
He said nothing further.
The magistrate's eyes narrowed. "And the charges against the court? Against the verdict?"
"I remain," Samuel said quietly, "of the same mind."
Somewhere in the gallery, a woman whispered. The magistrate's face went red.
The additional fine — five pounds more, levied the following April — was, Samuel always said afterward, worth every shilling. Alice agreed, though she pointed out that they had precious few shillings to spare.
They were, the court records would later note, "nearly suspected themselves" of witchcraft.
Samuel Stratton had never been particularly afraid of suspicion. He had noticed, in his years on this earth, that the people who worried most about what others suspected were the ones with the most to hide.
Seven years later, a document crossed Samuel's table that troubled him in a different way.
The man's name was Alexander Gordon. Scottish. Young. He had come to Massachusetts under circumstances that Gordon himself described as unjust, and which the General Court of Massachusetts — when a group of these Scotsmen petitioned for their freedom — had dismissed without much deliberation.
Samuel studied the indenture papers. Six years of service. No absences without permission, day or night. The full weight of colonial law behind the master's authority.
He thought about Margaret Jones.
He thought about the way power arranged itself, always, so that some categories of person had very little power to refuse.
He signed the papers. He needed the labor, and Gordon needed passage and food and the hope of something better at the end of it — freedom dues, a stake, a start. That was the bargain, and Samuel intended to honor his side of it even if the system that created the bargain was something he could not entirely defend.
When Samuel Stratton died in the winter of 1672, his will provided that his servant Thomas Cooper receive a cow.
It was a small gesture. It was not nothing.
The men and women who change the world in large ways are remembered. The ones who change it in small ways — a cow in a will, a voice raised in a courtroom when the cost of raising it was real — mostly are not. Samuel Stratton fell into the second category, and history treated him accordingly.
Until 2025, when the Massachusetts legislature introduced a bill to exonerate Margaret Jones and seven other victims of pre-Salem witch trials, and someone reading the old court records found Samuel Stratton's name, and understood what it had cost him to put it there.
The colony changed around him as he aged.
The Half-Way Covenant of 1662 — a theological compromise that would have appalled the founders — admitted children of church members to partial standing even without a conversion experience. The old guard called it apostasy. Samuel thought it was inevitable. Communities either adapted or they calcified, and calcified things eventually shattered.
Roger Williams had been banished for saying that conscience was a man's own business. Anne Hutchinson had been banished for saying the ministers were wrong. Four Quakers had been hanged before the Crown intervened. Samuel had watched all of it with the weary recognition of a man who had already paid his own price for speaking plainly.
He made his will on December 19, 1672 — "being in sound memory and understanding, But near my Death." He was eighty years old. He had been in Massachusetts for nearly four decades, and the colony he was leaving behind bore only passing resemblance to Winthrop's city upon a hill.
He thought that was probably all right. Cities upon hills were aspirations. Aspirations were meant to be reached for, not achieved. The reaching was the point.
He died on Christmas Day, 1672, and was buried in the Old Burying Place in Watertown.
Three years later, King Philip's War tore the colony apart. Wampanoag, Nipmuck, and Narragansett warriors struck at settlements from the coast to the Connecticut River. Twelve towns were destroyed. Six hundred colonists died. The Native peoples lost far more — in battle, in massacre, in the slavery that awaited those who surrendered. Southern New England was, when it was done, English in a way it had never been before, and the price of that transformation was written in blood on both sides.
Samuel Stratton did not live to see it. Perhaps that was a mercy.
His sons did. And his grandsons. And somewhere down that line of descent, in a farmhouse in Chelmsford, a boy grew up hearing the old stories — the war, the trials, the grandmother who had stood in a Cambridge courtroom and refused to fully recant — and understood without being told that the Stratton way of doing things involved, when it came to it, standing your ground.
His name was Francis. And his time was coming.
The rider came through Chelmsford before dawn, his horse lathered and blowing.
Francis Stratton heard the hoofbeats from inside the farmhouse. He was already awake — at fifty-nine, he rarely slept past four — sitting at the kitchen table with cold cider and the particular quiet of a New England morning that is about to become something else entirely.
He heard the bells begin. The drum.
Sarah appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, her gray hair loose around her shoulders. She looked at him. She had been married to him for thirty years, and she knew his face the way a sailor knows weather.
"The British?" she said.
"Moving on Concord, they say." He was already on his feet, reaching for his coat. His musket hung above the mantle — a long Pennsylvania rifle, old but true, that had served him in the French wars and had not fired in anger since.
"Francis—"
"I know." He lifted the musket down. "I know my age."
"That isn't what I was going to say."
He turned. She was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed, and her eyes were bright — not with fear, he realized. With something else entirely.
"I was going to say," Sarah told him, "that you should take the good powder. The French stuff. It's drier."
He loved her so much in that moment that he could not speak.
He took the French powder. He kissed her once, hard, and walked out into the April darkness.
They were five hundred strong when they gathered along the road from Concord — men from Chelmsford and Billerica and Reading, farmers and tradesmen and old soldiers like Francis who had done this before and knew what it cost.
They took positions behind stone fences. They waited.
The British came in the gray light of early morning, their column ragged and desperate, nothing like the smart red formations that had marched out of Boston the night before. They had been ambushed at the North Bridge, harassed through every yard of their retreat. They were bleeding and frightened and very far from help.
Francis steadied his rifle on the top rail of the fence. Beside him, a boy of perhaps seventeen — someone's son, someone he probably knew from church — was trembling so badly that his ramrod was rattling against his musket barrel.
"Easy," Francis said, without looking away from the road. "Pick your man. Wait for the order. Then fire and reload and fire again."
"Are you scared?" the boy managed.
"Every time," Francis said.
The order came. The line erupted in smoke and thunder. Men in red coats fell. The flankers charged and were driven back. Francis fired, reloaded with the automatic efficiency of a man who had done it a thousand times, fired again. The acrid smoke burned his eyes and his throat. A ball clipped the fence post six inches from his head and sent stone chips stinging across his cheek.
He did not flinch. He reloaded.
When it was over — when the British had broken through and continued their panicked run toward Lexington — Francis stood in the smoke-hazed morning and counted his men. All present. One grazed on the forearm, nothing serious.
The boy who had been trembling was reloading his musket with steady hands, his face white and set and older than it had been an hour ago.
"You all right?" Francis asked him.
The boy nodded. "I think so, sir." He paused. "Is it always like that?"
Francis looked at him. At this child who had just fired his first shots in a war that was going to last longer than either of them could imagine.
"No," he said honestly. "Sometimes it's worse."
John Stratton was twenty years old and he did not answer the muster.
No one recorded why. A man's private reasons were his own, and the rolls simply showed an absence where John's name should have been. His wife Mary had given birth to a son only months before. Perhaps that was reason enough.
Francis Stratton arrived at the muster ground in Barre on August 16th, 1777, with a private's kit and a private's insignia and sixty-one years of living behind his eyes.
The younger men stared. The officers recognized him — Sergeant Stratton of Chelmsford, the man who had stood at Meriam's Corner, the man who'd fought in two wars before this one.
Captain James Wheeler approached him quietly, away from the ranks.
"Stratton. You understand what we're marching into?"
"Burgoyne." Francis adjusted the strap of his pack. "He's cut off Gates from the north and he means to split us in half."
"You understand it'll be hard marching and likely a hard fight at the end of it?"
"I've had hard marching before, Captain."
Wheeler studied him. A man this age, voluntarily reduced in rank, standing in his son's place without anyone asking him to. It was either the most admirable thing Wheeler had seen in two years of war, or the most foolish.
He decided it was both.
"Fall in, then," Wheeler said. "We're glad to have you."
Francis Stratton picked up his musket — the same one he'd carried at Meriam's Corner — and fell in with men young enough to be his sons. As they marched north, toward Vermont and whatever waited beyond, he thought about Samuel Stratton, dead five years now, who had paid a fine in a Cambridge courtroom for saying a true thing at a time when saying it was dangerous.
He thought: this is the same thing. Different form. Same price.
He marched.
The battles of Saratoga were two engagements separated by three weeks of cold and hunger and the particular misery of men who can see the enemy's fires and know that tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, it begins again.
Francis fought at Freeman's Farm on September 19th. He stood in line with Sparhawk's Regiment in the smoke and chaos of a hardwood forest where visibility was measured in yards, where British regulars pushed forward and American militia pushed back and the line surged like a tide that couldn't decide which way to run. He fired until his musket barrel blistered the palm of his hand. He fell back when ordered, resupplied, went forward again.
"Still with us, old man?" a lieutenant shouted at him during a lull.
"Still here," Francis said, and reloaded.
At Bemis Heights on October 7th, the Americans attacked. Francis advanced through smoke so thick he could barely see the man beside him, firing on command, watching the British line waver and then — finally, at last — break. He saw them retreating back toward their fortifications, and he understood, in the way a soldier understands things in the moment without needing to be told, that something decisive had happened.
On October 17th, 1777, British General John Burgoyne surrendered his entire army — nearly six thousand men — to General Horatio Gates. The soldiers came out of their fortifications in good order and grounded their muskets, and some of them wept, and the Americans watched in silence that was more stunned than triumphant.
Francis Stratton stood in the November cold and watched the British stack their arms.
He thought about Meriam's Corner. About the boy who had stopped trembling. About John, home in Warren with Mary and the new baby, the son who had not come and whose place Francis had filled without ever explaining why.
He thought: we did it.
Then he picked up his musket and began the long walk home.
The war ground on for four more years. John Stratton served in later campaigns, and the son born in his absence grew up to hear the story of the grandfather who had marched north at sixty-one to stand in his father's place.
The boy's name was Francis.
He grew up in a country that had not existed when his grandfather was born — a nation assembled from argument and blood and the stubborn conviction of people who believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they deserved something better than what kings and bishops had given them.
Samuel Stratton had believed that. He had said so in a Cambridge courtroom in 1649, and paid five pounds for the privilege, and refused to take it back.
Francis Stratton had believed it. He had said so with a Pennsylvania rifle at Meriam's Corner and at Freeman's Farm and at Bemis Heights, and the British Empire had eventually agreed with him.
The city upon a hill that John Winthrop had imagined turned out to be something stranger and more difficult and more durable than Winthrop could have foreseen — a nation that argued with itself constantly, that fell short of its ideals at every turn, that was never finished and never would be.
The Strattons had helped build it.
That was enough. That would have to be enough.
It was.
Author's Note: The historical events in this narrative — the Winthrop Fleet, the Margaret Jones witch trial, the Stratton family's defiance and fines, the Gordon indenture, King Philip's War, the Lexington Alarm, Francis Stratton's service at Meriam's Corner and Saratoga in his son's place — are drawn from the historical record. The scenes, dialogue, and interior lives of the characters are imagined. That is the compact of historical fiction: the facts as foundation, the humanity as the house built upon them.
For the documentary record behind this story, see The Massachusetts Bay Colony: A City Upon a Hill.
—Wm. F. Stratton, April 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
If you are tracing a Stratton line, start here. Harriet Russell Stratton's two-volume Book of Strattons is the most comprehensive Stratton genealogy ever compiled—both volumes are free and fully searchable online.