Katherine McTeir was a farm servant residing in the village of Halie, within the parish of Dundonald, Ayrshire. Her connection to the local judicial system was deeply rooted in her family history; she was the daughter of a woman who had been brought before the church session and explicitly branded as "ane notit witch." On May 20, 1604, Katherine herself was summoned before the authorities, a process recorded in the administrative proceedings of the era under case reference C/EGD/139.
The subsequent legal journey of Katherine is marked by her appearance in two distinct trial records, indexed as T/LA/1743 and T/LA/879. These records document the formal engagement of the legal system with a woman from a lower socioeconomic background whose reputation was shadowed by the perceived transgressions of her mother. While the specific testimony or ultimate verdict remains preserved within these archival citations, her case stands as a representative example of the intense scrutiny faced by marginalized individuals in seventeenth-century Scotland.