Before Salem

Before accusation, there was uncertainty.
Before testimony, there was observation.
Before Salem, there was silence.

In the historical imagination, Salem arrives fully formed. Names are spoken. Charges are made. The record seems loud with fear and certainty. Yet decades earlier, in places like Northampton, Massachusetts, the archive tells a different story. One marked by pauses. By careful language. By communities confronted with a body, a ledger, a circumstance, and no clear way to explain what they were seeing.

Silence in the archive is often mistaken for absence.
It is not.
It is a condition.

Seventeenth-century records rarely announce their anxieties outright. Instead, they circle them. A jury lists physical observations without interpretation. A clerk records a death and adds nothing more. A census names relationships while withholding explanation. These silences are not neutral. They are deliberate, shaped by fear, belief, restraint, and the limits of what could safely be spoken.

This publication exists in those spaces.

I am not interested in proving guilt or uncovering scandal for its own sake. I am interested in how ordinary people lived within uncertainty. How communities responded when the record could not fully account for what they observed. How identity, faith, and fear shaped both what was written down and what was left unsaid.

Genealogy is often presented as a straight line. Names, dates, relationships. The archive resists that simplicity. Records contradict one another. Ages shift. Birthplaces move. Causes of death compress complex lives into a single phrase. When these fractures appear, they are not errors to be erased. They are evidence.

Before Salem, there was no witch.
There was only a record struggling to contain doubt.

What follows here will be essays, case studies, and annotated documents. Some stories will resolve. Many will not. That, too, is part of the work. To sit with what cannot be concluded and still take it seriously.

The silence speaks,
if we learn how to listen.