♀Mary (surname unknown)

Mary lived at Hampton, in the Province of New Hampshire^W, where she and her husband, Abraham Perkins (died 1683), one of the town’s early settlers, raised their family. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Abigail Perkins (born 1655).

She married Abraham Perkins, and their daughter Abigail was born at Hampton on 12 April 1655; she is probably the Abigail Perkins who married John Folsom of Exeter on 10 November 1675. When Abraham made his will at Hampton on 22 August 1683, he left his wife the new end of his house with the chamber above, two cows, four sheep, his household goods and a third of the orchard’s apples, and he bound their sons Jonathan and Humphry to “provide comfortable relief for their mother”: hay for her cows, firewood, sixteen bushels of corn, a fatted hog and beef each year. If they failed her, she was to have a third of all he had. Abraham died nine days later, on 31 August 1683. Mary is said to have died in 1706, aged 88, more than twenty years after him.

Notes

Sources

Abigail’s birth is in the New Hampshire birth records, dated “12, 2 mo. 1655”, that is 12 April 1655, and names her parents as Abraham Perkins and Mary. Abraham’s will and the note of his inventory are printed in Probate Records of the Province of New Hampshire, vol. 1 (New Hampshire State Papers, vol. 31, 1907), pp. 263–265; the will calls her only “my beloved Wife”. Her death in 1706, aged 88, is given by Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700, a compiled work. Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary and an 1882 Folsom genealogy make Abigail, wife of John Folsom of Exeter, a daughter of Abraham Perkins of Hampton, and the Hampton birth of 1655 fits; the link is probable rather than proved.

Her surname

No record names her family. Torrey supplies a maiden name in brackets, which marks it as his own inference, and it is not used here.