♀Katherine Towne

Katherine Towne (25 February 1662 – 2 July 1714) was a farm wife of Topsfield, Massachusetts, and a member of one of the town’s founding families: three of her father’s sisters were accused of witchcraft in 1692, and two of them, Rebecca Nurse and Mary Estey, were hanged. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Thomas Perkins (1681–1761).

Early life

A genealogy of the Perkins family published in 1889 gives her birth as 25 February 1662 and names her parents as Jacob Towne and Katherine Symonds. Jacob was one of the three sons of William Towne, an early settler who had come to Topsfield from Salem, as the 1682/3 settlement of William’s estate records, and he married Katherine Symonds in 1657; her father’s will of 1671 names her as “my daughter, Kathren Town”. Jacob Towne was a commoner of the town by 1661, farming land south of the Ipswich River near what is now Hill Street, next to his brother Edmund’s; the farm of Thomas Perkins, her future father-in-law, lay close by.

Marriage and family

The Topsfield records enter her marriage on 23 February 1680 as “Elisha Perkins and Kathrone Towne”. She was about eighteen. Elisha, a son of Thomas Perkins, farmed part of his father’s homestead and later held many of the town’s offices. The town records name her as the mother of two sons born in 1683 and 1685, entered as children of “Elisha and Katherine” and “Elisha and Catherine”; the Perkins genealogy lists nine children in all, born between 1681 and 1702, the eldest being Thomas, who later settled at Cape Porpoise in Maine.

In the spring of 1692, when Katherine was about thirty with several small children, the witchcraft accusations reached her father’s family. Her aunt Rebecca Nurse of Salem Village, the best known of the accused, was hanged in July. Dow records that her aunt Mary Towne, wife of Isaac Estey, was taken from her son’s house in Topsfield, tried and executed as a witch that year, and that another aunt, Sarah, the widow of Edmund Bridges and by then the wife of Peter Cloyse, was also accused but escaped execution; she is said to have been spirited away by her son. The records do not say how the accusations touched Katherine’s own household.

Death

The Perkins genealogy gives her death as 2 July 1714. Her death is not in the printed Topsfield vital records, and the date rests on the compilation alone. Elisha remarried on 4 April 1715, to Elizabeth (Knight) Towne, the widow of Samuel Towne, whom the same genealogy calls Katherine’s uncle, though the town history suggests he may have been her cousin. Elisha died in 1741.