Last week I went to Salem, Finally

My mother told me many years ago that I ought to visit Salem, home of my 6-X great grandmother, Rebecca Nurse, and sign my name in the book. Not the devil's book, I hasten to add, but the book of great-granny Nurse's descendants, who are as numerous as the sands of the sea. Harold and I finally had a chance to go there last week on our way home from Maine. It was… interesting.

The seaport town of Salem is something of a zoo nowadays. We encountered a wild-eyed, hairy docent leading a troop of quivering tourists from attraction to attraction, while he amazed them with a Pagan spiel.  At one point he chased us out of the garden of one of the old houses, the Witch House, I think it was called. It was a lovely old garden with a pear tree laden with fruit. I don't know what his problem was, or even whether he was authorized to chase us. Surely the pagans aren't in charge of Salem now. Or maybe they are.

For myself, I'm a Christian, as was Rebecca Nurse. I shudder to think what she would make of all the witch kitsch in Salem. But I have no business professing to be shocked by all that, since I knew what to expect beforehand.

I did not realize that Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables was in Salem, right on the harbor. We found a caterer in possession and a wedding going on out behind under a big white tent. Have your wedding at the House of Seven Gables!

We had a delicious dinner at the Captain's Waterfront Grill, looking right out on the dock where the Friendship of Salem was moored. That's the same square-rigged ship depicted on my dinner plates. I was very pleased to see it, a little bit of home.

But all this was hours after we visited the actual home of Rebecca Nurse.

The Nurse homestead is not in Salem itself but in the town of Danvers, called Salem Village in 1692 to distinguish it from Salem Town. It is being maintained as an historic farmstead, an oasis of stillness in the middle of an ordinary suburban town. We went down a dirt driveway and parked in front of the fence, as the sign instructed. Then we walked on to the house. No one was there.

As luck would have it, the Nurse house closed at three every afternoon, and whatever docents we might have encountered had fled away by 3:05. All the same it was nice. Quiet. Dignified. The way I like things. It's not as if I didn't know the story, or needed someone to tell it to me. Here was the rolling, fertile acreage coveted by the evil, posession-shamming Putnam family. There was the upstairs window, the window of the very bedroom where the wicked bailiffs came and dragged that sweet old lady, and she not feeling well, off to the jail for refusing to confess that she was a witch.

We wandered all over, taking pictures. I had an odd feeling. No one knows where Rebecca Nurse's grave might be, for the family cut her down from the gallows and buried her secretly, perhaps somewhere on her own farm. The secret location was not passed down in my mother's family. I might have been walking over her remains. I didn't think to say a prayer for her. Surely she's at rest in the bosom of the Lord.

Since we couldn't get inside, the house being all locked up, I never did find out whether there was actually a book for me to sign.

©  2014 Kate Gallison

Digging Up the Ancestors

1885: Dedicating the Rebecca Nurse Memorial

I got a call from a previously unknown second cousin on the Gallison side the other day requesting information about my dad's forebears. I couldn't help her very much. I have a lot more information about my mother's side of the family than my father's side, because they paid attention to that stuff. I'm sure I told you about Rebecca Nurse, my 9th great-grandmother, who was dragged out of her sickbed and convicted of being a witch on the say-so of those wretched little girls. Rebecca Nurse had many children, and they all had many children, and so there are a lot of us descended from her. But Rebecca Nurse is neither here nor there a far as the Gallisons go. No relation. Anyway nobody seems to know who the Gallisons really were.

My dad, who never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, used to tell us they were descended from the inventor of the Guillotine. We all knew that was a bald-faced lie. But the other family traditions–that I had a great-great grandmother named Marie LaChance, that the earliest known Gallison was named David–even that he was named Gallison–these were all false as well. I discovered the true facts by signing up for Ancestry.com for an international membership in order to access the Canadian census records, spurred on by the questions my newfound cousin raised. None of that crowd called themselves Gallison until they crossed the border into Maine and settled in Vanceboro.

In the old country, which is to say Canada, they called themselves Galishan, and told the census taker they were Welsh, even though my grandfather was christened with a French name. That is, I guess he was christened. They also told the Canadian census taker they were Baptists, but I feel their hearts weren't in it; I think they were "Home Baptists." There was no Marie LaChance. Thomas Alexander Galishan's father was called William, not David. In Vanceboro they told the census taker they all came from Ireland. I'm beginning to suspect they were crypto-French, maybe going clear back to the days when the British were deporting all the French people in Acadia to the swamps of Louisiana. Hey, I could have been a Cajun, if my forebears weren't so good at hiding out.

Or not. Fact is, the Galishans are lost in the mists of history, at least for now. It doesn't help that they were perfectly willing to tell tall tales to the census takers.

But the ancestors on the other side, the ones who settled Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, are well known and have been closely examined by scholars, genealogists, and descendants who wanted to get into the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution. Next week I'll tell you some of the things I found out about them. Their lives were much harder than mine, poor things, and a good half of them were barking mad. Bordens. Yes. I am a blood relative of Lizzie.

Kate Gallison