Provided Southwick

  General Notes:

Cassandra Southwick is our most famous ancestor. Thirteen generation ago, she and her family were Quaker martyrs. Actually her name was Provided. Her name is confused in the "Ballad of Cassandra Southwick", because poet John Greenleaf Whittier used her mother's name to indicate the "prophetic" nature of her trials.

Now, that's the story you'll read from the Quakers. I think she actually just went to the Providence Plantation in Rhode Island where Provided married Samuel Gaskill. Get a copy of Whittier's Ballad. It's really very good.

In 1658, Provided Southwick was arrested for being a Quaker and imprisoned in Salem, Massachusetts. She was only 18 years old. Her parents had already been jailed, impoverished through repeated fines and run out of town for being Quakers and not following the Puritan ways. She was sentenced to be sold into slavery to the English in the Barbados or Virginia because she had no money to pay her fine. Much later, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem about Provided, but changed her first name to her mother's name, Cassandra, because he felt that Provided was not poetic enough. This is the poem written for Provided Southwick Gaskill, a Quaker Heroine.
--source-- The History of Salem, Massachusetts by, Sidney Perley (1924)

Provided married Samuel Gaskill, son of Edward Gaskill and Sarah Parker, on 30 Dec 1662 in Salem, Essex Co. MA. (Samuel Gaskill was born on 7 Jun 1639 in Salem, Essex Co. MA, died on 6 Oct 1720 in Shelter Island, NY and was buried in Marsh Burial Ground, West Peabody, MA..)