Ancestors
Rebecca Nurse
1621-1692
Born 1621, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England
Died 1692
Father: William Towne
Mother: Joanna Blessing
Children include Benjamin
Rebecca Towne was the first child of William Towne and Joanna Blessing, baptised in the church of St Nicholas at Great Yarmouth on 21 February 1621. She crossed to Salem with her parents in the late 1630s and married Francis Nurse, a tray maker who lived on the North River. They had four sons and four daughters, and Benjamin, the youngest, was born in January 1666. In 1678 Francis bought the three hundred acre Bishop farm at Salem Village, and by 1692 her married children lived on it around her. She was a full member of the church, the inner body of communicants who had made a public profession of their faith.
In March 1692 the girls who were having fits at Salem Village began to see her. Ann Putnam junior said that on 13 March she saw the shape of a woman she knew only by where she sat in the meeting house: a pale faced woman in her grandmother's seat. Who first put the name Goody Nurse to it was never settled. Her son in law John Tarbell went to the Putnam house on 28 March and asked. Mercy Lewis said it was Goody Putnam who had named her, and Goody Putnam said it was Mercy Lewis, "thus they turned it upon one another, saying it was you and it was you that told her."
She was seventy one, deaf, and had been sick in bed almost a week. On 23 March Edward and Jonathan Putnam swore a complaint against her. The marshal of Essex took her up the next morning, and she was brought into the Salem Village meeting house before the magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. She denied everything, and the girls fell into fits at every movement of her hands and head. She was committed that day, and on 12 April she was sent to the jail in Boston. The keeper later charged the province seven weeks and a day for her keep there, at two shillings and sixpence a week.
Before her trial a jury of women searched her body for a witch's mark. One of them, the oldest and most skilful, said she saw nothing that could not arise from a natural cause. Rebecca told the court what that cause was: weaknesses that came partly from nature and partly from the hard times she had had in childbirth. Her daughters Rebecca Preston and Mary Tarbell offered to swear that she had suffered from an infirmity of the body for many years. Thirty nine of her neighbours signed a paper at her husband's request saying they had known her many years and never had cause to suspect her.
The Court of Oyer and Terminer tried her at Salem at the end of June. The jury came back with not guilty. The judges said they had let slip something she had said when two confessed witches, Deliverance Hobbs and her daughter, were brought in against her: "What, do these persons give in evidence against me now, they used to come among us." The jury went out again. When they came back into court, one of the jurymen repeated the words to her, and she made no reply. They found her guilty. She explained afterwards that she was hard of hearing and full of grief and had not understood what was being asked. She had meant only that the two women had been prisoners with her.
The governor granted her a reprieve and then withdrew it under pressure from her accusers. On the communion day before her death she was taken in chains to the meeting house and excommunicated by her own minister. She was hanged at Salem on 19 July 1692 with four other women, and her family took her body home in the night to bury it on their own land.
Her children spent almost twenty years clearing her name. Her sons Samuel and John signed the petition of 1703 asking the General Court to take the infamy off the condemned, and Benjamin signed the address of 1709. In September 1710 Samuel set down what it had cost: the family had kept her in prison at Salem and Boston for almost four months and made many journeys to plead for her. What they wanted most, he wrote, was the reproach lifted from her name and her posterity. On 17 October 1711 the General Court reversed her attainder, the legal stain of the conviction, and in December the governor ordered twenty five pounds paid to Samuel for the family. In 1712 the church at Salem blotted out her excommunication.
Sources
The three generations above Daniel Nurse come from WALTER GOODWIN DAVIS, The Ancestry of Sarah Johnson, wife of Joseph Neal of Litchfield, Me. (1960), which sets them out from the probate files and cites MIDDLESEX COUNTY PROBATE 16093 and WORCESTER PROBATE, SERIES A 43954.
WILLIAM NURSE, born 8 MARCH 1696 at Framingham. "m. in Shrewsbury on Dec. 12, 1723, [Re]becca Fay of Westborough; both d. in Westborough, she on June 22, 1776, and he on April 15, 1779. William Nurse was of Shrewsbury when he made his will on Jan. 3, 1758, but of Westborough when he died, the will being proved on June 7, 1779."
AND HIS WILL NAMES THE SHREWSBURY CHILDREN BACK. "To his wife Rebekah, all of his household goods and part of house... To son Daniel, all his lands in Shrewsbury and elsewhere, reserving house-room for daughters Lydia and Rebekah as long as they remain single and in such a weakly condition. To son Daniel, all quick stock, husbandry tools, one-half of clothes, and his money bonds. To second son Benjamin, all cooper's tools and one-half of clothing. To daughters Mary, Lydia, Rebekah and Zerviah. All my Books of Divinity shall be Equally Divided among all my children. Executors: wife Rebekah and eldest son Daniel." Every one of those names is in the Shrewsbury town book as a child of William Nurse and Rebekah, and DANIEL is the eldest son in both. The will and the town book are the same household read from two ends.
HIS FATHER. "5. BENJAMIN NURSE [Francis] was born in Salem on January 26, 1666. He married Tamesin Smith on February 21, 1688, in Salem. She died before February 16, 1713/4, when he married in Framingham widow Elizabeth (Sawtelle) Morse of Watertown. Benjamin Nurse of Framingham, yeoman, made his will August 1, 1735. It was proved February 13, 1748." The will leaves legacies "to his son William" among the five eldest children, and the eight children are listed as born at Framingham, William third among them. All eight fall before the first wife's death, so TAMESIN SMITH is William's mother.
AND THAT BENJAMIN IS REBECCA NURSE'S YOUNGEST SON. Francis and Rebecca Nurse of Salem Village had eight children, the last of them Benjamin, born 1665 or 1666. This Benjamin was born in Salem on 26 January 1666 and Davis brackets his father as Francis. REBECCA NURSE was tried for witchcraft in the summer of 1692, acquitted by the jury, had the verdict sent back by the court, and was hanged on Gallows Hill on 19 JULY 1692. She was seventy one. Her son Benjamin left Salem for Framingham, his son William went west again to Shrewsbury, and William's son Daniel to Westborough.
WHAT IS PRIMARY HERE AND WHAT IS NOT. The two lowest links are town clerks' entries read directly: Perssela to Daniel in 1764, and Daniel to William in 1729. The three above them are a published genealogy citing probate files, which is a serious source and is not the same thing as reading the file. And Davis was read in a Towne Family Association newsletter's reprint rather than in the book itself. The probate references are given above so the chain can be walked properly whenever somebody wants to. EDWIN EUGENE TOWNE, The Descendants of William Towne (Newtonville, 1901), pages 19 to 21; with the Salem and Topsfield material that George A. Perkins printed in The Family of John Perkins of Ipswich (1889) from the Essex deeds.
"In this church, founded in a.d. 1123, dedicated to St. Nicholas in 1251, and still retaining the name, were married, March 25, 1620, William Towne and Joanna Blessing, and here their first six children were baptized."
"1 WILLIAM TOWNE, b. in England in 1600, and believed to be the son of Richard Towne, of Braceby, England, came from either Yarmouth or Bristol, England, with his wife Joanna (Blessing) Towne and five or six children. They took up their residence in Salem. Their children: i. Rebecca, bapt. February 21, 1621. m. Francis Nourse, of Salem, who d. November 22, 1695. ii. John, bapt. February 16, 1624. Never m. iii. Susannah, bapt. October 20, 1625. Never m. iv. Edmund, bapt. June 28, 1628. v. Jacob, bapt. March 11, 1632. vi. Mary, bapt. August 24, 1634. m. Isaac Estey. vii. Sarah, bapt. September 3, 1648. m., first, Edmund Bridges, January 11, 1660; second, Peter Cloyes. viii. Joseph, b. 1639. bapt. September 3, 1648."
AT SALEM AND TOPSFIELD. His first American record is a grant of 11 October 1640, "a little neck of land right over against his house on the other side of the river." In 1651 he bought about forty acres at Topsfield of William Paine of Ipswich, the year after the town was incorporated, and in 1652 sold his Salem land to Harry Bullock. In 1663 he and Joanna conveyed two thirds of their house, barn, outhouses, yard, gardens and orchards and about forty four acres to their son Joseph on his marriage to Phebe Perkins, and the Perkins genealogy prints the deed from the Essex records with the words "WILLIAM TOWNE (BORN IN YARMOUTH ENGD.) and Joanna (Blessing) his wife." He died at Topsfield about 1672 and Joanna about 1682.
THE BRACEBY FATHER IS REFUSED. The compiler's "believed to be the son of Richard Towne, of Braceby" rests on nothing, and the will of Ann Towne, Richard's widow, dated 10 December 1629 and printed in the same book, names her eight children and William is not among them. James Savage guessed the same father independently and is defeated by the same will. The deed says Yarmouth, and the cards stop there. Charles W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft; with an Account of Salem Village (Boston, 1867), volume I, pages 79 to 92, on the Bishop farm, the terms of the sale and the Endicott suit, with the deposition of Hugh Jones and Alexius Reynolds (archive.org salemwitchcraftw01upha_0); volume II, pages 57 to 63, on Rebecca Nurse, printing the statement of Israel Porter, Elizabeth Porter, Daniel Andrew and Peter Cloyse and the record of the examination of 24 March 1692 (archive.org salemwitchcraft01uphagoog).
"On the 29th of April, 1678, Allen sold the Bishop farm to Francis Nurse, of the town of Salem, for four hundred pounds. Nurse was an early settler, and, before this purchase, had lived, for some forty years, 'near Skerry's,' on the North River ... He is described as a 'tray-maker.'" "He was then fifty-eight years of age. His wife Rebecca was fifty-seven years of age."
Witchcraft Papers, No. 30, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Image and transcription: Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive, University of Virginia, SWP No. 94.9.
Essex County Court Archives, Salem Witchcraft, vol. 1, no. 88, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Judicial Archives, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston. Image and transcription: Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive, University of Virginia, SWP No. 94.31.
Salem Witchcraft Papers, the verbatim transcription by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (1977), revised, Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive, University of Virginia, salem.lib.virginia.edu, SWP No. 94 (Rebecca Nurse), No. 171 (officials' accounts, 1692), No. 172.5 and 172.10 (petitions of 2 March 1703 and 25 May 1709, Massachusetts Archives vol. 135), No. 173.35, 173.47 and 173.48 (Samuel Nurse's petition of 13 September 1710, the act of 17 October 1711, the order for payment of 17 December 1711).
Edwin Eugene Towne, The Descendants of William Towne (1901). Charles W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft (1867). Salem Witchcraft Papers, the verbatim transcription by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (1977), revised, Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive, University of Virginia, salem.lib.virginia.edu, SWP No. 94 (her case file, from the Essex County Court Archives, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Peabody Essex Museum and Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World, 1700), No. 171 (the Boston keeper's account), Nos. 172 and 173 (the petitions of 1703 to 1710, the act of 17 October 1711 and the order for payment).
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Cite: Heirology, "Rebecca Nurse (1621-1692)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/rebecca-nurse-1621-1692-1626ef.