♀Alice (surname unknown)

Alice (buried 20 August 1613) was the wife of Thomas Perkins (1525–1592), a landholder of Hillmorton, Warwickshire, England, and the mother of the seven sons named in his will of 1588. She was the eleventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Henry Perkins (1555–1609).

Her surname and parents are not known. She and Thomas had at least seven sons: Henry, the eldest, John, William, Thomas, Edward, Luke and Isaac. When her husband made his will on 15 September 1588, he left to Alice, “now my wife,” all the household stuff and the furniture of the parlour or chamber where they had slept, and the use of that chamber for as long as she remained his widow. Thomas Perkins was buried at Hillmorton on 23 March 1591/2^W. An Alice Perkyns buried at Hillmorton on 20 August 1613 was probably his widow, which would mean she outlived him by more than twenty-one years.

Notes

Sources

Her husband’s will and both burials come from Walter Goodwin Davis, The Ancestry of Dudley Wildes, 1759–1820, of Topsfield, Massachusetts (1959), chapter “Perkins, of Topsfield”, which abstracts the Hillmorton parish register and the probate records of the Lichfield registry. Davis calls the Alice Perkyns buried in 1613 “probably his widow”.

Her surname

Because Thomas Perkins’s will leaves a legacy to “his brother Kebble’s wife”, Davis suggests she may have been Alice Kebble, but he adds that there are other possibilities, and four Kebble wills of the time and place do not identify her.