ELIZABETH Perkins

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Perkins (dates unknown), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her marriage to Samuel Aiken Sargent, her recorded place associations of Homestead and Brockton, her daughter Elizabeth Nancy Sargent, and colonial New England era context surrounding her likely lifetime in the early-to-mid eighteenth century.

Elizabeth Perkins, whose precise birth and death dates have not survived in the family record, occupied a place seven generations removed from the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather line. She was the wife of Samuel Aiken Sargent, and through that union she bore at least one daughter preserved to the archive: Elizabeth Nancy Sargent, born in 1754 and gone from this life in 1782, at the tender age of twenty-eight.

The family register associates Elizabeth's birth with Homestead and her death with Brockton, place-names long resonant within the older New England landscape. Massachusetts in the colonial and early federal eras was a patchwork of farming townships and gathering meeting-houses, where families such as the Perkinses and Sargents intermarried across the parish lines of Essex, Plymouth, and the surrounding counties. The Perkins name itself ranks among the older surnames of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, planted in the region during the first generations of English settlement, and the Sargents likewise belonged to the long-rooted yeomanry of that ground.

That Elizabeth's daughter was given her own Christian name — Elizabeth Nancy — reflected a common practice of the period, by which a mother's name passed forward as a quiet declaration of continuity. The daughter's death in 1782, in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, occurred during years of considerable upheaval and reordering in New England, when the new American republic was still finding its civic footing and when sickness, childbirth, and the lingering disruptions of wartime took a heavy toll upon women of childbearing age.

Of Elizabeth Perkins herself — her parentage, the year of her marriage, the full count of her children, the faith she kept, the hand she set to needle, hearth, or scripture — the archive is silent. What endures is her name, her station as wife and mother, and the line of descent she carried forward.

Elizabeth was the compiler's 7× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.