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Descendants want justice for Connecticut witches

At age 82, Bernice Mable Graham Telian doubts she’ll live long enough to see the name of her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother and ten others hanged in colonial Connecticut for witchcraft cleared.

Telian was researching her family tree when she discovered that her ancestor Mary Barnes of Farmington, Connecticut, was sent to the gallows at the site of the old State House in Hartford in 1663.

“You won’t find Mary’s grave. She and all these people who were hanged were dumped in a hole. Their graves aren’t marked. They wanted them to be forgotten,” said Telian, a retired university administrator who now lives in Delhi, New York.