♂Abraham Perkins

Abraham Perkins (died 31 August 1683) was one of the early settlers of Hampton, in the Province of New Hampshire^W, where he lived for more than forty years. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Abigail Perkins (born 1655). In 1656 he and his son were summoned as witnesses in the witchcraft case against Eunice Cole^W, a Hampton woman accused of witchcraft that year.

Hampton

He was already of Hampton in 1639, when the court at Ipswich settled the estate of Humfry Wise and it was agreed that Wise’s eldest son, Benjamin, should serve Abraham Perkins of Hampton as an apprentice for seven years. When the town’s meeting-house was seated on 4 March 1649/50, he was among the men given places on the south side. He married Mary, and their daughter Abigail was born at Hampton on 12 April 1655; she is probably the Abigail Perkins who married John Folsom of Exeter on 10 November 1675. In March 1677, named as Abraham Perkins senior, he took the oath as an appraiser of estates with Ensign John Samborn. That October his son Abraham was dead, and the court gave the son’s widow, Elizabeth, charge of his estate.

Will and death

Weak in body, he made his will at Hampton on 22 August 1683 and asked to be buried in the Hampton burying place. He left his wife the new end of his house with the chamber above, two cows, four sheep, his household goods and a third of the orchard’s apples, and he bound their sons Jonathan and Humphry to “provide comfortable relief for their mother”: hay for her cows, firewood, sixteen bushels of corn, a fatted hog and beef each year. If they failed her, she was to have a third of all he had.

Jonathan and Humphry took his lands in Hampton, his carpenter’s tools, his farm implements and his guns, swords and pikes, and paid out the other legacies: money to his daughters Sarah and Abigail, his son James, a granddaughter Mary Fifield then living with him and a grandson John Perkins, and five shillings each to his sons David and Luke, “for these two sons have had their share already”. He died nine days later, on 31 August 1683. The will was proved on 18 September, and his estate was valued at £361 2s. 6d.

Notes

Sources

The will, dated 22 August 1683 and proved 18 September 1683, and the note of the inventory (taken 4 October 1683, giving his death as 31 August 1683) are printed in Probate Records of the Province of New Hampshire, vol. 1 (New Hampshire State Papers, vol. 31, 1907), pp. 263–265. The apprenticeship of Benjamin Wise is printed in The Probate Records of Essex County, Massachusetts, vol. 1, from Ipswich Deeds, vol. 1. The meeting-house seating of 4 March 1649/50 (from the Hampton town book) and the list of witnesses summoned in the Eunice Cole case (Suffolk Court Files 262038) are printed in Noyes, Libby and Davis, Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire. The appraisers’ oath of 31 March 1677 and the administration of the estate of “Abraham Perkins, jr., late of Hampton”, granted to his widow Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Sleeper, are in Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, vol. 6. Abigail’s birth is in the New Hampshire birth records, dated “12, 2 mo. 1655”, that is 12 April 1655; one index of the same record gives February in error.

Birth year and daughter Abigail

No record of his birth or English origin is known. Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700 gives his dates as “?1603-1683”, a compiler’s estimate. The will names a daughter Abigail but gives no married name. Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary and an 1882 Folsom genealogy both make Abigail, wife of John Folsom of Exeter, a daughter of Abraham Perkins of Hampton, and the Hampton birth of 1655 fits; the link is therefore probable rather than proved.

Another Abraham Perkins

A different Abraham Perkins lived at Ipswich at the same time: he owned the ketch Dove of Ipswich in 1673–74 and sued her master over her sale at Barbados, and his brother Luke testified in the case. The Hampton entries that name only “Abraham Perkins” in the 1660s and 1670s, such as a selectman’s signature of 1666 and a constable’s return of 1675, could belong to this Abraham or to his son, and are not used above. Some online trees make him a son of John Perkins of Ipswich; WikiTree’s profile of that John has detached an Abraham born in 1604 from his family, citing The Great Migration Begins, and his parents are not known.