♀Phebe Gould

Phebe Gould (baptized 17 September 1620 – living 1685) was the wife of Deacon Thomas Perkins, a farmer and early settler of Topsfield, Massachusetts, and by the family genealogies the mother of his nine children. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Elisha Perkins (1656–1741).

Origins

The parish register of Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England, records her baptism on 17 September 1620, in the entry “phebe the daughter of Zacheus goulde”. Two compiled genealogies, B. A. Gould’s “Ancestry and Posterity of Zaccheus Gould” (1872) and George A. Perkins’s The Family of John Perkins of Ipswich (1889), make her the eldest child of Zaccheus and Phebe Gould of Topsfield; both printed genealogies misprint the day of the baptism. Two documents of her husband’s point the same way. On 25 September 1662 Thomas Perkins and his wife Phebe sold a quarter share of 600 acres of Rowley land “which we have by deed of gift of our father Zaccheus Gould”, as George Francis Dow’s History of Topsfield (1940) quotes the deed. Thomas’s will of 1685 likewise speaks of a farm “which I had of my father, Gould”.

Marriage and family

Thomas Perkins and Phebe Gould married about 1640, by the account of George A. Perkins’s The Family of John Perkins of Ipswich (1889), which adds that her father gave the couple a farm of 150 acres in the middle of Topsfield. The 1889 genealogy gives the couple nine children, born between 1641 and 1661. By that account her daughter Phebe married Joseph Towne, a brother of Rebecca Nurse^W, in 1665; Rebecca Nurse was hanged at Salem as a witch in 1692, and Phebe’s son Elisha had married Joseph’s niece Katherine Towne in 1680.

Testimony at Ipswich

In May 1670 Phebe gave evidence at the Ipswich court in the drunkenness case against her own minister, Thomas Gilbert of Topsfield, who had been presented for suspicion of being overtaken with drink. Her deposition runs: “Phebe Perkins, wife of Tho. Perkins, deposed that on sacrament day she was at dinner at Mr. Gilbert’s and there was a cup with wine in it which was offered to Mr. Gilbert. He refused to take it at first, but afterward put the cup to his mouth, but she knew not whether he drank or not.” Her sister-in-law Sarah Gould also gave a deposition, and the court admonished Gilbert. The case is printed in Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, volume 4 (1914), page 246.

Widowhood

Thomas’s will, dated 11 December 1685 and printed in the 1889 genealogy, provided for “my wife, Phebe Perkins”: a room in the house while she remained a widow, two cows, a bed with its furniture, half the household goods, the old white mare and a yearly allowance from their sons. He died in 1686. The 1889 genealogy says that she outlived him; the date of her death is not known.