♂Henry Perkins

Henry Perkins (about 1555 – buried 11 March 1608/9) was the eldest son and heir of a landholding family of Hillmorton, Warwickshire, England, who married Elizabeth Sawbridge there in 1579 and raised a large family in the village. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son John Perkins (died 1654), who settled at Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Family and inheritance

He was probably born in Hillmorton about 1555, the eldest son of Thomas Perkins (1525–1592) and his wife Alice. His father made his will on 15 September 1588. It settled a house and land on Henry’s brother John, left money to the younger sons, and gave “To his eldest son Henry Perkyns, all the residue of his houses, lands, tenements and hereditaments”, naming him sole executor. Thomas Perkins was buried at Hillmorton on 23 March 1591/2, and the will was proved that May, so Henry came into the family land in his late thirties.

Marriage and children

Henry Perkins married Elizabeth Sawbridge 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.

His name runs through the wills of his brothers’ households. His brother John, in a will made in December 1601, left a legacy to “his brother Harry Perkins”. When John’s widow Elizabeth made her own will in June 1603, she named Henry and his three daughters and chose him as one of her two overseers, with her brother Edward Shawe.

Death

Henry Perkins was buried at Hillmorton on 11 March 1608/9^W, five months after his son John married Judith Gater there. No will of his is known. Letters of administration^W were granted on 5 April 1609 to his son Thomas, with a bond for the tuition, or guardianship, of nine younger children, “the other children”: Margaret, Edward, Agnes, Sarah, Francis, William, Luke, Elizabeth and Jacob. John, of age and married, was not among them. Five neighbors valued his goods, among them a Thomas Perkins and a John Sawbridge, and the inventory came to £336 8s 8d.

Notes

Sources and dates

Every date here comes 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. The register begins in 1564, after Henry was born, so his birth year is Davis’s estimate: “probably born in Hillmorton about 1555”. The Great Migration Begins (Robert Charles Anderson) gives John’s baptism at Hillmorton on 23 December 1583 as “son of Henry and Elizabeth (Sawbridge) Perkins”. Davis gives John’s marriage to Judith Gater as 9 October 1608; Anderson gives 8 October. The burial and the inventory fall in the weeks before 25 March, when the year then began, so they carry double years; Davis prints the inventory’s date as “March 22, 1608”, with 1609 added in brackets.

Earlier generations

Davis carries the family one generation above Thomas Perkins, to a Henry Perkins of Hillmorton whose will was proved in 1546, but marks the link with a question mark: that will is missing, and two abstracts of its probate disagree on whether a son Thomas is mentioned. It is not followed here.