William Salisbury
Descent: Meghan Jane Leineweber ← Catherine Raye Lobb ← Patricia Jane Loomis ← Beulah Grahm ← Anna Frances Brown ← Isaac Horace Brown ← Apema Seamans ← John Seamans ← John Seamans ← John Seamans ← Susannah Salisbury ← William Salisbury
In brief
Born 1635. He died June 24, 1675, in Swansea, Massachusetts.
Family
No linked relatives on file.
Children
- John Salisburyb. Abt. 1655
- Susannah Salisbury · in this lineb. April 27, 1662m. Thomas Seamans, 1687 in Swansea, Massachusetts
Life story
Killed at the Outbreak of War
William Salisbury was born in 1635 and lived near Swansea, Massachusetts, having moved to Rhode Island shortly before King Philip's War erupted in June 1675. On June 23, 1675, William spotted several Indigenous men near a house he had recently abandoned and ordered his twenty-year-old son John to fire on them, wounding one fatally — among the opening acts of violence of the war. The next day, Indigenous fighters came to Swansea seeking William and John in retaliation; both were killed, along with seven other colonists. William's head was reportedly displayed on a pole along the road from Swansea to Mount Hope in the days that followed.
Sources (2)
- John Julian Lawton, The Seamans Family in America (Syracuse, New York: Charles Seamans Brown, 1933).
- Richard LeBaron Bowen, Early Rehoboth: Volume III (Concord, New Hampshire: The Rumford Press, 1948); digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/earlyrehobothdoc03bowe : accessed 24 August 2026).