Edna Dean Proctor was born September 18, 1829, in Henniker, New Hampshire, her father's family having gone there from Essex County, Massachusetts. Of English ancestry, her father, John Proctor, was a native of Manchester, Massachusetts, and a descendant of John Proctor of England, who came to Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1635, and whose eldest son, John Proctor, of Salem Village, was one of the victims in August 1692 of the Salem witchcraft delusion. The Goodhues, the Cogswells, the Appletons, and the Choates, of Essex County, were allied with this family. Her mother, Lucinda Gould of Henniker, represented the Goulds who had come from Massachusetts to the newer settlement and the Prescotts and Hiltons of Hampton and Exeter, New Hampshire. The Proctor family removed from Manchester to Henniker, and chose their home upon a hill overlooking the Contoocook River valley, the "pine-crowned hill" of her poem, "Contoocook River". Her brothers included Francis Proctor, E. Allen Proctor, and John C. Proctor.