In the late summer of 1661, the administrative machinery of the Scottish witch trials reached into the parish of Ormiston, Haddington, to document the case of Jon Harlaw. As a resident of the parish, Jon was brought into the legal record on September 6, 1661, under case reference C/EGD/1393. During this volatile period of Scottish history, where judicial oversight increasingly focused on the identification and prosecution of those suspected of maleficium, his name was formally entered into the rolls of the local judiciary.
The surviving documentation concerning Jon is sparse, consisting of the initial entry of his case and a subsequent reference to his trial, indexed as T/JO/818. While these records confirm his standing as a member of the Ormiston community and his eventual appearance before the court, they contain no surviving details regarding the specific allegations or the testimony presented against him. His history remains preserved solely through these skeletal administrative fragments, marking his encounter with the legal processes of the mid-seventeenth century.