Perkins Family History

Where Did Our Perkins Family Come From?

We’ve been studying early Perkins genealogy for generations. Thanks to generations of work by family historians, we have a wealth of good information about our ancestors. Unfortunately, we also have a wealth of bad information, and with the Internet we can now find, copy, paste, and publish nonsense about our ancestry faster than our ancestors could have dreamed. This isn’t anyone’s fault. We gather information faster than we can organize it, it gets thrown on a pile, and the pile gets copied and recopied by people who don’t want to lose it. There are so many dubious, contradictory, and unsourced claims about Richard Perkins’s origins that I wanted to try gathering and organizing what we knew about him and how we knew it.

So, did I end up creating a proper repository of Richard Perkins I information as I had intended? Well, no, sorry. It didn’t work out the way I had planned. I was just like when I try to organize the garage, discover something interesting, and get distracted. As I got to work collecting and laying out what we knew about Richard Perkins, this project took an unexpected turn.

The first page or two are what I had planned to start with as I worked toward an organized presentation of what we had learned about Richard Perkins. But then questions occurred to me, and I kept writing as I went. I’ve tidied up the formatting and wording, but the information is presented in the order I found it. I could now rewrite the whole thing, but I'd rather leave this as is—a record for my own descendants of what ended up happening when I tried to organize what we knew about our earliest Perkins ancestor.

ODDS AND ENDS

• My name is Glen Perkins. Whenever I read something about my genealogy, I always wonder how I’m related to the writer, so here I am:
  • Richard Perkins I of Spesutia Hundred, Baltimore County, Province of Maryland
  • Richard Perkins II
  • Richard “Tomahawk Dick” Perkins III
  • Robert Biggan Perkins
  • Ute Perkins
  • Reuben Perkins
  • Jesse Nelson Perkins
  • Reuben Josiah Perkins
  • Andrew M. Perkins
  • Donald M. Perkins
  • Glen C. Perkins (me)
  • Ryan D. Perkins & Alec R. Perkins (cont’d)
• I will probably update this document from time to time. I also hope to write some others related to this one, and if I do, I might end up reorganizing them and moving parts of one document into another. If there is anything in this document that you want to preserve exactly as it is, go ahead and make yourself a copy and feel free to use it however you like.
• I want to improve the source citations in various ways. I have sources for every claim—I think—but I’ll have to go find some of them again so I can include them. I’ll try not to waste time proving the obvious, but I think I can provide better documentation of important claims that are less obvious. This isn’t printed on paper, so it can continue evolving.
• Quotation marks are used literally, which means that if it’s not quoted text, it doesn’t go inside the quotation marks:
  • NO (American standard): He said his name was “Perkins.” He wrote, “red,” “white,” and “blue.”
  • YES (literal): He said his name was “Perkins”. He wrote, “red”, “white”, and “blue”.
  The literal approach makes it easier to discuss textual data with precision even though there are still a few problems with it. Other punctuation leans toward the literal as well.
• Anything enclosed in [square brackets] within a quotation is a comment of mine that was not part of the original text.
• You can contact me if you can solve the riddle of my email address from this challenging clue intended to reduce spam: I’m at fakename@gmail.com, but instead of “fakename” you use “glencperkins”.

This research on the origin of the Perkinses was made possible by my wife, Michelle. All along she has said that this was something she wanted to give to the Perkins family. It is, of course, dedicated to her with love and gratitude.

Note: I intend to keep the most recently updated versions of these pages at GlenCPerkins.com/history/perkins forever. I also intend to live forever, but please feel free to make copies for yourself as a safeguard in case my intentions are thwarted.

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