♀Elizabeth Sawbridge

Elizabeth Sawbridge married Henry Perkins (about 1555–1609) of Hillmorton, Warwickshire, England, in 1579 and was the mother of his fifteen children. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son John Perkins (died 1654), who settled at Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W. Her family took its name from the hamlet of Sawbridge in the parish of Wolfhamcote, about six miles from Hillmorton, and several Sawbridge households lived in Hillmorton itself. Her parents are not known.

Marriage and children

Elizabeth Sawbridge married Henry Perkins at Hillmorton on 29 November 1579. Between March 1581 and July 1607 fifteen children were baptized to the couple at Hillmorton, a run of twenty-six years. Three died as infants: two sons named Francis, buried in 1585 and 1587, and a daughter Elizabeth, buried at Christmas 1602. Both names were given again, and a third Francis, baptized in February 1596/7, and a second Elizabeth, baptized in 1604, lived. Their son John was baptized on 23 December 1583.

Henry’s death

Henry was buried at Hillmorton on 11 March 1608/9, and letters of administration went to their son Thomas, with a bond for the tuition, or guardianship, of nine younger children. Her own burial is not recorded, and the records do not say whether she outlived him.

Notes

Sources

Her marriage and her children’s baptisms come from Walter Goodwin Davis, The Ancestry of Dudley Wildes, 1759–1820, of Topsfield, Massachusetts (1959), which abstracts the Hillmorton parish register and the probate records of the Lichfield registry. The register begins in 1564, probably too late to hold her own baptism. The Great Migration Begins (Robert Charles Anderson) names John’s parents as “Henry and Elizabeth (Sawbridge) Perkins”.

Her family

Davis abstracts several Sawbridge wills of the neighborhood but says they “throw scant light on Elizabeth Sawbridge’s parentage”. He takes George Sawbridge of Hillmorton, whose will was made on 13 March 1636 and proved in 1637, to be “doubtless the brother of Elizabeth Perkins”: George names his mother Elizabeth and makes his “cozen [nephew] Thomas Perkins” an overseer. A John Sawbridge, yeoman, was one of the five men who valued Henry’s goods in March 1609; the records do not say how he was related to her.

Was she living in 1603?

When Elizabeth Perkins, widow of Henry’s brother John, made her will in June 1603, she named “her sister Elizabeth Perkins”. That may be this Elizabeth, but Henry’s brother William had also married an Elizabeth, who was his widow in 1590, so the will does not settle it.