♀Mary Wildes

Mary Wildes (baptized 13 March 1691/92 – 1 April 1749) was the wife of Ensign Thomas Perkins, an early settler of Cape Porpoise, later Arundel and now Kennebunkport, Maine. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Thomas Perkins (1724–1794).

She was baptized at Topsfield, Massachusetts, on 13 March 1691/92, “Mary, d. Ephraim”. On 26 November 1719 she married Thomas Perkins, then “of Caporpose”, at Topsfield, and went to join him on the Maine coast, at Cape Porpoise, where he had settled by 1718. A genealogy of the Wildes family published in 1906 records that she went back to her old home at Topsfield to have her first children, and the births of Judith (1721) and Thomas (1724) are entered in the Topsfield records rather than at Arundel. Four more children followed: Mary, Sarah, John and Ephraim.

She died at Arundel on 1 April 1749 and was buried in the Arundel Cemetery at Cape Porpoise. The Wildes genealogy notes that her gravestone was still standing in 1906.

Notes

Date of death

Her death is dated 1 April 1749, not 1742. The gravestone at the Arundel Cemetery, Cape Porpoise (Kennebunkport), gives her as “the wife of Thomas Perkins Esqr” and “aged 57 years & 2 months”, and a Find a Grave memorial (56887494) transcribes the date as 1 April 1749. An 1866 visitor to the graveyard recorded “Mary Perkins died 1749 ag. 57”. The stone’s age agrees with the baptism of 13 March 1691/92.

The 1742 date

Charles Bradbury’s History of Kennebunk Port (1837) printed her death as 1742 and gave her age as 57. Those two figures would put her birth about 1685, six or seven years before her baptism. A Perkins genealogy of 1889 followed Bradbury’s 1742. The 1749 date on the stone is the one used here.