Nathaniel Hawthorne's great -great-grandfather, William Hathorne, immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. He Settled in Salem, the colony's oldest town, and became one of Salem's most prominent townsmen. An Indian fighter and a judge, Hathorne in one instance ordered that a burglar's ear be cut off and his forehead branded with the letter Bboth common punishments at that time. During Salem's 1691-1692 witchcraft frenzy, in which many townspeople were accused of being witches, his son, John Hathorne, interrogated suspects such as Martha Corey, who was later hanged as a witch. Corey would become a character in "Young Goodman Brown." The fact that Hawthorne's ancestors had pursued such "evildoers" on behalf of the Puritan faith troubled him. Although there is no evidence for this claim, some have suggested that his ancestors' actions bothered him so much that he changed the spelling of his last name to distance himself from them.
The Puritan colonies. The Puritan religion grew out of the religious void that existed in England in the late 1500s when King Henry VIII severed ties between England and the Catholic pope.
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