November 1719, the county court at New London. The verdicts against the Rogerenes were all in and there was nothing left to do but rise. A woman of about forty-six, from across the river at Groton, spoke instead: “You are an adulterous generation, and I hope God will find you out.” For those seventeen words the court sentenced her to receive fifteen stripes upon the naked body — the court’s own formula — and to pay the charges for the same.

Her name was Sarah Culver. She is my eighth-great-grandmother.

This episode walks the whole of her record: the September morning she interrupted the Reverend Eliphalet Adams in the meeting-house, alongside the founder’s wife and her own daughter; the two months in prison; the midnights of the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh of November, when her husband and son staved down part of the prison yard to carry a dying woman into the air, and were fined ten shillings for it; and the possibility — the sect’s own historians’ guess, and it stays a guess — that the same raid carried Sarah beyond the reach of her stripes. Then 1725, when she rode past fifty to Lebanon to baptize converts, and the country around Norwich knew her as the singing sister.

And the sting: for a century the family’s published genealogies chased a Winthrop marriage that never happened. It already had somebody in that courtroom — standing on the other side of the bar.

Text, images and full notes at history.collver.biz.