♀Susannah Hovey

Susannah Hovey (baptised 18 September 1737 – before 1800) was the daughter of the Rev. John Hovey, minister of Arundel in the District of Maine, and the second wife of Thomas Perkins, the town’s clerk. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Mary Perkins (1758–1845).

She was baptised at the First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 18 September 1737, “Susanna, d. of John”, while her father was still a schoolmaster in Cambridge; her mother was Susannah Levett of York. The family moved to Arundel when her father was ordained there in 1741. A Hovey family genealogy published in 1913, and Charles Bradbury’s History of Kennebunk Port (1837), both record her marriage to Thomas Perkins, as his second wife, and a second marriage after his death to Edward Emerson of York.

Thomas Perkins died in 1794 without a will. In May 1795 the probate court granted administration to “Susanna & Thomas Perkins”, the widow and a son, and one third of his real estate was set off to “Susanna Perkins Widow of the said Deceased” as her dower. When her son-in-law Gideon Walker petitioned for that third to be divided among the heirs on 27 January 1802, she had “been dead more than two years”. So she died before the beginning of 1800, and any marriage to Edward Emerson took place between 1795 and her death. No record of the Emerson marriage or of her burial has been found.

Notes

Bradbury states that Thomas Perkins’s first wife died about 1758 and left no children, and Mary Perkins was born about 1758. That places Mary as Susannah’s daughter, at about twenty, but no record found so far names Mary’s mother.