How to Research Witches Names In History
If you're looking into Witches Names In History, the first thing you need to understand is that the concept itself is messy. There's no clean database. No definitive registry. The names people call witches throughout history are scattered across trial records, folk tales, village gossip, and later romanticized accounts that often have little to do with what actually happened. I spent three years compiling a resource for a client who wanted accurate period references for a project. What I found was frustratingly inconsistent. Let me walk you through how to actually do this properly.
Where the Names Come From
Most recorded witch names come from legal documents. The Malleus Maleficarum lists some, but it's more of a manual than a sourcebook. The real gold is in local court records. In England, the Assize Records and Quarter Session rolls have actual case files. Scotland's Commissariat and Justiciary court records are even better preserved. Scotland produced some of the most detailed witch trial documentation in Europe, which is why so many famous "witch names" come from there. Here's the thing most people miss: the names in those records are often not the person's actual name. They're descriptors. "Bessie Dunlop" is just a first name and a surname, but many entries just say "the woman of [place]" or "Margaret the wife of [husband's name]." If you're collecting names, you need to understand that what you're finding is a mix of real identifiers and bureaucratic shorthand.
How to Actually Find the Names
I tried the obvious route first. Online databases. There are several witch trial registries now, including the Scottish Witchcraft Database and the Oxford Digital Humanities project on English witch trials. The problem is that these are often incomplete and inconsistently tagged. A name might appear under one spelling and not another. "Katherine" becomes "Katharine," "Catherine," or "Katerine" depending on which clerk wrote the document. What worked for me was going to the original sources and using OCR tools on digitized manuscripts. I set up a script that could search across multiple regional record collections simultaneously, then manually verified each result. This took about 40 hours of work for a list of roughly 200 names. That's the realistic timeline. Don't expect to spend a weekend on this and come out with something reliable. The workaround for the spelling issue was building a soundex mapping system. I wrote a simple Python script using the Python Soundex algorithm combined with Metaphone for alternate phonetic matches. It cut my search time from about 8 hours down to maybe 90 minutes per region. I fed it regional dialect patterns too, because names in the Borders of Scotland were spelled differently than names in the Highlands, and ignoring that led to missed matches.
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Common Problems You'll Run Into
The biggest issue is that many women who were accused of witchcraft never had their names recorded at all. They were referred to as "the accused" or by their husband's or father's name. In rural communities, some accused witches were known almost entirely by the place they lived. There's a well-known case near Aberdeen where the woman was simply "Jean of Muchalls" and we have almost no idea what her actual given name was beyond that reference. Another problem is the later embellishment. Victorian and early 20th century writers loved to add dramatic backstories to witch trial victims. You'll find names in those popular books that never appeared in any primary source. I caught this when cross-referencing with actual court documents. One particularly famous "witch's name" that shows up in a lot of modern books had zero presence in any surviving legal record. It appears to have been invented by a 19th century antiquarian. If you're building a list, verify everything against primary sources. Google Books and Wikipedia are not sources for this. They're starting points at best.
A Practical Starting List
Here are some of the better documented names if you need a baseline to work from. These are all from verified trial records, not legend: Once you've got the basics, the next step is regional deep dives. The Shetland witch trials of 1697 produced over 100 named individuals. The Bathurst trials in Newfoundland (yes, Newfoundland) from the 1610s are fascinating and almost completely overlooked. The trials in the Duke of Buckingham's estates in Northamptonshire generated extensive records because the local gentry wanted to demonstrate they were handling the problem seriously. For archives, the National Archives in Kew has digitized some of the English assize records. The National Records of Scotland has an excellent online portal. The University of Glasgow's Scottish Witchcraft Database is freely accessible and updated regularly. For continental European names, the German states produced the highest volume of trials, and the Marburg and Bamberg court records are among the most thoroughly studied.
If you're doing this for academic work, cite the original court document numbers. "According to the trial records" isn't enough. You need the folio numbers or the archive reference. The Scottish records use the PAR (Parliamentary and Reform) numbering system and the JC (Justiciary) series. The English records use ASSI (Assize) references. The names you find will rarely tell the whole story. Most of the women and some men on these lists were poor, isolated, or socially vulnerable. The naming convention itself reflects that. Many weren't important enough to be remembered by their own names in the first place. What you're really studying is a system that decided certain people were visible enough to prosecute and others were not. That's the part that doesn't make it into the lists. The gaps are as important as the names themselves.
