Where Did Richard Perkins Come From?

We Perkinses have been in America for centuries, and the story of our family back in the old world was lost long ago in the struggle for survival in the endless forests of the new world. Since the 1800s, family historians have been trying to recover the story of our family before we left our ancient home for America. They were able to trace our ancestry back to a tobacco planter (farmer) and cooper (barrel maker) named Richard Perkins, who lived at the north end of the Chesapeake Bay in the Province of Maryland in the 1600s, but no further—not back across the ocean. Government records showed us where Richard Perkins had lived in Maryland, and church records showed us the births of his children and grandchildren. Those children and grandchildren later moved to North Carolina. Their own descendants eventually went west to the Mississippi and joined the newly-established Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church or “Mormons”), but they remembered their Carolina roots. From the earliest years, Mormons valued their relationships with their ancestors and worked hard to identify and keep records of them. Our 19th century Mormon ancestors learned about their Carolina mountain roots from the old ones. Carolina historians taught them about the Great Wagon Road that brought the old settlers south to the Carolina backcountry. Following that road back north, our 19th century family historians rediscovered and taught us that we were descendants of Richard Perkins of Colonial Maryland. Unfortunately, they couldn’t tell us where this Richard Perkins had come from. They didn’t know. We’ve preserved what they remembered and discovered and added some details that they didn’t find, but we still haven’t been able to trace our Perkins family back across the Atlantic. We’ve always assumed that our family was from somewhere in England because of the surname Perkins, but where in England? The 1600s were so early in the settlement of America that Richard Perkins may have been the immigrant, but was he? If not, his parents probably were. If we could figure out where Richard came from—meaning either a place or a family—maybe we could discover where the family came from. If so, we might even rediscover the story of the Perkins family before we were Americans.

So, what do we know, and what can we figure out?

In Richard Perkins’s generation, Maryland had a serious labor shortage

It sounds strange today, but Maryland was a proprietary colony, a private manor that belonged to the Calvert family, granted to them in 1632 by King Charles I in the way kings had granted manors to their barons (noblemen) in medieval times. (Remember that a manor was not a house. It might include a manor house or not, but the manor itself was all of the land, property, and governing authority granted to the lord of the manor.) In each generation, the head of the Calvert family held the title Baron Baltimore, meaning he was referred to as Lord Baltimore. Since it was his proprietary colony, Lord Baltimore also held the title of (Lord) Proprietor, and he gave his manor the name Maryland. The manor included vast forests and waterways, but you can’t spend living trees and flowing rivers. For land to make you wealthy, you have to find a way to use it to generate cash. Because the private manor of Maryland was so large, any business model—selling wood from the forests, fish from the rivers, metals from the ground, crops from the soil—required thousands of workers.

Lord Baltimore’s plan was not to choose an industry but to grant settlers usage rights to pieces of land. They could decide for themselves how to use it. (Lord) Baltimore would let them “own” a piece of his land, which really meant they owned exclusive usage rights, but they would have to pay Baltimore an annual fee called a quitrent. How much money they made and how they did it didn’t matter in this system. He just charged them for the acres they owned, and if they didn’t pay, Baltimore would take back his land and let someone else own it. Of course, with so much land, this system still required thousands of settlers. (Note that in our system today, land “ownership” still only conveys usage rights, and fewer rights than under Lord Baltimore. The proprietor is now an organization, a government not a person, but if you don’t pay your quitrents, the Lords of the Manor will still send soldiers to remove you from what is ultimately their land, not yours.)

At this time, England had enough people per acre that they had a growing labor surplus, which was becoming a political problem. Large numbers of unemployed, landless peasants are a potential threat to the ruling class. The English needed more land or fewer workers.

The Chesapeake colonies (meaning coastal Maryland, Virginia, and part of North Carolina) had plenty of usable land with no one to work it. The major industry in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake was growing an Amazonian strain of tobacco for export to Europe. The Spanish had found a relatively sweet-smelling tobacco along the Orinoco River and had a monopoly on its production. John Rolfe, husband of Pocahontas, had bought seeds from smugglers in the Caribbean and brought them to Virginia. There were almost no roads in Maryland at the time, so planters (nicknamed “Orinocos”) grew this tropical tobacco along the shores of waterways—the Chesapeake Bay and the rivers that flowed into it. The Chesapeake had winters, but they didn’t matter, because tobacco was an annual plant. All it needed was a summer that felt like the Amazon rainforest, and the Chesapeake certainly did. Growing, harvesting, drying, and packing the tobacco into locally made barrels, loading it onto ships, and transporting it to England was more labor intensive than other forms of agriculture but was also the most profitable, given the Chesapeake climate.

The problem, then, was that the workers they needed were on the other side of the ocean and wanted to stay there. The harsh working conditions and Amazonian summers in the Chesapeake were famously deadly. Workers often died soon after arrival, increasing the demand for labor while making labor even harder to recruit.

So, Baltimore lacked the settlers he needed to generate his cash and lacked the cash to bring over more settlers—a classic business dilemma with a classic solution: use other people’s money. Ideally, settlers would pay for their own transportation, but after word got out that their lives in the Chesapeake were likely to be nasty, brutish, and short, those who thought it still sounded better than life at home were usually people who couldn’t afford to pay their own way.

The headright system was designed to solve the labor shortage

Before Maryland was split off from Virginia, Virginia had found a solution that brought much-needed workers to the Chesapeake and did not require cash up front from either the government or the settlers: headrights. The headright system gave land to anyone who paid to bring a settler to the colony. If you could prove to the provincial court that you had paid for someone’s transportation, even your own, into the province, you would be granted the rights to fifty acres of land per “head” (person) as reimbursement.

Maryland, which was even wilder and less settled than Virginia, went further. Until they ended the program in 1683, Maryland also granted fifty acres to the person who was transported. If you paid for your own transportation, you were called an immigrant, you had immigrated, and you were entitled to 100 acres: 50 for paying to bring in a worker and 50 for being the worker. If someone else paid for your transportation, which was far more common, you were called a servant, you had been transported, the person who paid got 50 acres, and you got 50 acres.

The headright wasn’t actually land. It was a land warrant, a certificate that entitled the holder to claim a certain amount of land whenever he decided to use it. If you transported someone, even yourself, you would go to court and prove it. They would often record the names of the people you had transported, so no one else could claim headrights for the same people. If you proved that you had transported new people into the colony, you would receive a warrant entitling you to claim 50 acres per head. You could sell the warrant or keep it for use at a later date. You could combine several warrants and claim one large piece of land instead of several small ones. When you were ready to claim some land, you would select your acres from the pool of land available at that time and pay to have it surveyed and patented. (A patent converts a thing into an ownable property with protected property rights.)

Making the “headright” a warrant instead of actual land made it a portable financial asset that the owner could use immediately, keep for later, or sell. The Chesapeake colonies had a lot of land, but hardly anyone had any money, which was gold and silver in those days, not paper. An economy without money has to figure out some sort of trade for every transaction, which severely limits economic activity. They used tobacco as money, but it was only harvested once a year. The headright warrants turned land into cash, a sort of paper money that the economy desperately needed. If you were holding a 50-acre headright warrant, you could exchange it for land or use it to buy other things.

Headrights and indentured servitude

The headrights system combined easily with indentured servitude as an effective solution to the labor shortage. An indenture was a contract. You literally stacked duplicate copies of a contract and pressed down on the stack with a pebble or the sharpened end of a stick, indenting all copies in the same spot. You did this in several spots, which resulted in a unique pattern of “indenture” (indentations) that could be used to distinguish a genuine copy of a contract from a forgery.

So, indentured servitude meant contractual servitude. You could write a contract—“I will work for four years for whoever owns this certificate”, which the court would enforce—and like a headright warrant, your service contract became a financial asset. You could sell or trade it like other property. The most common deal was to trade a service indenture (contract) for transportation to the New World. You would buy yourself a trip to America by handing over that certificate to the captain of the ship. (The actual details were more complicated but don’t matter here.)

If you did this, you were officially a servant when you arrived in Maryland (not an immigrant). A servant was not legally a free person. If the ship’s captain transported you at his own expense, for example, he could claim the headright worth 50 acres of land, and he would also own your service indenture worth four years of your service. He probably wouldn’t need the land or your service, unless you were a sailor, but he could sell them to someone who did.

You belonged to your master, meaning the person who bought your indenture, and were very much like a slave except that your indenture was time limited, and you might be treated worse than a slave. That may seem surprising, but an indentured servant was like a rental car, which had to be returned, while a slave was like a car you owned. Which do people usually take better care of? And you have to pay for significant damage to a rental car, but there was no such rule for indentured servants. In fact, if an indentured servant died, the 50 acres that Maryland would have given him at the end of his indenture would be given to his master instead to compensate him for his unfortunate loss. A Maryland servant approaching the end of his indenture had to be extra careful to avoid fatal “accidents” for which the master would be rewarded with the servant’s headright land.

In Maryland, masters had a reputation for cruelty, and the harshness of working conditions, living conditions, and climate killed roughly half of the servants during their indentures. Servants attempting to escape from their masters were apparently so common that unknown people who showed up in taverns or on the roads were often assumed to be runaway servants.

In Richard Perkins’s generation, most Maryland settlers arrived as indentured servants

People went to different colonies at different times for different reasons. In the New England colonies, most people arrived as groups of family and friends who paid their own way to America to live together among fellow religious Puritans. They were not usually aristocrats, but most were better educated and better off financially than average people back in England. The early Chesapeake colonists tended to be young, single men who were employed by the Virginia Company to help the company make money. That didn’t work out very well. Most of the men died, and the Virginia Company went out of business.

These differences mean that if you want to investigate an early American colonist, your first question would be, Who were most of the people in that generation in that colony?

About three out of four Europeans in the Province of Maryland in the mid- to late 1600s arrived as young indentured servants brought from Europe (mostly England) to work as laborers on tobacco farms. Dr. Russell Menard, a historian and specialist on Colonial Maryland, wrote the following:

Before 1645, in the mid-1650s, and after 1667, when there is less evidence of internal migration, fewer than 15% of the people in the headright sample were free [not servants], a figure that perhaps more closely represents the composition of the European immigrant community in the entire Chesapeake region during the seventeenth century. In any case, it is clear that the vast majority of immigrants—at least 70% and the proportion may have reached 85%—arrived as servants bound by some form of contract to serve long enough to pay their passage and earn a profit for all involved in the transaction, recruiting agent [in Britain], merchant, shipowner, factor [the agent or broker in the Chesapeake], and planter.

Menard, Russell R., “British Migration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century”, in Colonial Chesapeake Society, Carr, Morgan, Russo, eds., University of North Carolina Press, 1988. p. 121.

A free immigrant could claim land rights upon arrival. An indentured servant would have to wait until the end of his indenture. Servants who died before completing their indentures usually disappeared without record—Maryland wanted to attract replacements—but those who survived were given some clothing, farming tools, and their headrights for fifty acres of land.

They then emerged from their indentures as free people, able to begin living their lives as if they had just arrived as free immigrants. It was at this point that they could “appear” in the record as members of society. If they wanted to convert their headrights to actual land, they had to choose some available land and pay to have it surveyed and patented. (Patenting turns something into legal property with protected property rights.) These surveys, patents, and quitrents might start showing up in the government records. They could also get married and have children (usually forbidden to servants), which might show up in the church records.

Most indentured servants in Richard Perkins’s generation were young, single men in their late teens or early twenties

The usual term of indenture for a Maryland servant was about four years but could be longer for young teens. To be unencumbered assets, indentured servants usually needed to remain single during their indentures, so they were forbidden by law to marry without special permission from their masters. They needed to begin their service already old enough to do useful work, remain unmarried for those four years (making them valuable to the master), and still have enough time after their indentures to marry and raise more workers for the colony (making them valuable to Lord Baltimore). In seventeenth-century Maryland, parents needed time to have lots of children, because so many would die young, and they needed time enough to raise the survivors to self-sufficiency. And they needed to be finished with all of this by what we call middle age, because life expectancy for those who survived indenture was about 45 years. Grandparents were ancestors in most colonial Chesapeake families, not living people. The schedule was tight.

That tight schedule squeezed indentured servants into a narrow age window. Historians studying the records have found that most indentured servants were from about fifteen to twenty-four years old when they arrived in Maryland, with people who were approximately twenty being especially favored. They would work for four years—longer if they were at the young end of the range—then emerge from servitude and try to establish their own farms and families as free people.

Age at emigration concerns the generally humble social standing of indentured servants. The most likely age was 15-24, with 20-21 predominating.

Horn, James P. P. Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-century Chesapeake. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Among indentured servants, men significantly outnumbered women. “During the heaviest period of immigration to Maryland and Virginia, from the late 1640s to the late 1670s, men outnumbered women by about three to one among new arrivals.” (Menard, p. 129). This meant that men usually had to wait several years to find a wife if they were able to marry at all. The few locally born men could begin looking earlier, but a twenty-year-old who arrived as an indentured servant could not even begin looking for a wife until his mid-twenties, and even then the scarcity of women meant he would probably spend some additional years establishing himself as a planter before he could find a wife.

These constraints forced most Maryland men’s lives in that generation to follow a similar pattern. Matching the pattern of similar men to specific facts known about Richard Perkins—profiling him—could be useful.