♂Thomas Perkins

Thomas Perkins (christened 28 April 1622 – 7 May 1686), known in the town records as Deacon Thomas Perkins, was a farmer and one of the early settlers of Topsfield, Massachusetts, where he served as selectman, tithingman and deacon of the church. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Elisha Perkins (1656–1741).

Early life

He was a son of John Perkins of Ipswich, whose will of 1654 left “my son Thomas Perkins” a cow and a heifer. The parish register of St John the Baptist at Hillmorton, Warwickshire, records his christening there on 28 April 1622, six years after the birth in England in 1616 that George A. Perkins’s The Family of John Perkins of Ipswich (1889) gives. That genealogy has the whole family sail from Bristol on 1 December 1630 in the ship Lyon; by that account they crossed with Roger Williams^W, and the ship reached Nantasket, laden with provisions for the hungry colony, on 5 February 1631, the day before a fast had been appointed to pray for its relief. The genealogy adds that the family lived about two years in Boston before moving to Ipswich in 1633, where Thomas held a grant of land at Sagamore Hill and later exchanged it with his brother John before moving to Topsfield.

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. 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. The 1889 genealogy gives the couple nine children, born between 1641 and 1661. By the same genealogy, their daughter Phebe married Joseph Towne, a son of William and Joanna (Blessing) Towne, in 1665, and their son Elisha married Joseph’s niece Katherine Towne in 1680.

Topsfield

Dow’s history counts him among the earliest settlers of Topsfield and a commoner of the town in 1661, and records that he was released from military training in 1670 on “paying 6s. yearly to the use of the company”. The town records printed in the 1889 genealogy show him chosen selectman in March 1675/6 and again in March 1681/2. In September 1677 the selectmen named “Daken Thomus Perkins” one of four tithingmen^W, each set to watch a list of households; he was chosen again in 1678 “to inspect ani person ore persons that shall profane the sabath”. By then he was a deacon of the church, chosen about 1677, and between 1680 and 1685 he sat on the town’s committees to keep its ministers and to settle what the Boxford villagers should pay toward them.

Will and death

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. It divided the home farm among his sons Thomas, Elisha and Timothy, gave Zaccheus the farm “which I had of my father, Gould”, and remembered a grandson Thomas, son of his late son John, and “my son Elisha’s son Thomas”, who received a calf. He died at Topsfield on 7 May 1686, as the town’s vital records enter it, and the will was proved at Boston on 10 September 1686.