♀Mary Perkins

Mary Perkins (about 1758 – 1 March 1845) was the wife of Gideon Walker of Topsham, Maine, and the daughter of Thomas Perkins, Esq., town clerk of Arundel (now Kennebunkport), and Susannah Hovey. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Hannah Walker (1780–1867).

A private family record copied into the published vital records of Topsham enters the marriage of “Gideon and Mary Perkins, d. Thomas, Esq., of Kennebunk, who was a minister”, without a date or place. Her father was a magistrate, not a minister; the minister in the family was her mother’s father, the Rev. John Hovey of Arundel, and the record probably folds the two together. Charles Bradbury’s History of Kennebunk Port (1837), a compiled family register, agrees, listing among Thomas Perkins’s children “Mary, Gideon Walker”, and among the children of Gideon Walker the elder of Kennebunk Port his son “Gideon, Mary Perkins”. A history of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell published in 1878 gives her birth as 16 January 1758 and the wedding as 2 November 1777. The couple lived at Arundel, where their daughter Hannah was born on 2 January 1780, and moved to Topsham on 3 December 1789. Her father died at Arundel in 1794 without a will, and in January 1802 Gideon petitioned the York County probate court on behalf of the heirs, asking that the late widow’s dower be divided among them. Hannah married first Captain James Stone of Brunswick in 1796 and second Johnson Wilson in 1807. The same history names three more children, Nathaniel, Lucy and Susanna; Lucy died at Topsham on 19 December 1802, aged seventeen. Gideon Walker died in 1828, and Mary lived on at Topsham as his widow for almost seventeen years. She died there on 1 March 1845; her gravestone names her “Mrs. Mary Perkins relict of Gideon Walker” and gives her age as 87, the source of the estimate of her birth about 1758.