But what about...?

But wasn’t there actually another Richard Perkins living there at that time?

That was his son, Richard Perkins II, born in 1689. After Richard I died in about 1705, a portion of his estate became the property of his “orphans” by law. They used the word orphan differently at that time. It meant the children of the decedent (the one who died), even though their mother, Mary, was still alive. Widows of child-bearing age such as Mary were needed as wives and were often remarried soon after their husbands died. The men who made the laws were very concerned that after they died their widows’ new husbands might steal the inheritance the deceased men had left for their children. They wrote laws to defend orphans’ assets from stepfathers.

Mary remarried soon after Richard’s death, and John Belcher (probably pronounced “Bellshair” as one clerk spelled it) became the Perkins orphans’ stepfather.

The only reason some people have speculated that there might have been another Richard Perkins in the same generation as our Richard Perkins I was this one item in the court records:

John Belcher to Perkins Orph: Know all men by these presents that we John Belcher Richard Perkins and Richard Smithers of Balt Coty do owe and stand firmly indebted unto Richard Perkins Wm Perkins Elisha Perkins Mary Perkins Martha Perkins orphans of Richard Perkins late of this County dec’d for the sum of 108 pounds 15 shillings and 8 pence dated 9 Nov 1710 but the condition of the above obligation is such that if John Belcher Richard Perkins and Richard Smithers or either of them or all of them shall pay the Orphans 64 pounds 7 shillings and 10 pence so much being the balance of the above Richard Perkins estate then the above obligation will be void. Dated 9 Nov 1710.

Signed John Belcher (his X mark) Richard Perkins (his R mark) Rich’d Smithers

Baltimore County, MD Court Proceedings IS#A-Folio 203. (Maryland Hall of Records 5007)

Everyone understands that the orphan Richard was Richard II. Even so, some have speculated that this was talking about two different Richards still living after Richard I’s death, because if both were the same Richard, he would have owed money to himself which, they believed, would not make sense.

But it makes perfect sense. This document is saying that Group 1, which includes the stepfather, has borrowed money from Group 2, the orphans, and the court is being informed to prove that this is a legitimate loan whose repayment can be enforced and verified, not a secret attempt to defraud the orphans.

The document states that if “either of [Group 1] or all” pay Group 2, the debt is legally settled. It’s not a complex debt among several individuals. The contract is a simple one: Group 1 owes Group 2 money, and how the members of each group choose to divide things up is irrelevant. All that is required is for Group 1 to somehow make its full payment to Group 2.

Under these circumstances, the fact that one of the three members of Group 1 happens to be the same as one of the five members of Group 2 would not change anything as far as the description of the legal obligation is concerned. One group can still be required to repay another even if there is a man who belongs to both groups.

And in 1710, Richard II was 21 years old. Was John Belcher more likely to have as a partner the Richard Perkins who was his adult stepson and one of the owners of the money they would be using, or some other person with his stepson’s name? And who else would have the same name anyway? Neither Richard I nor Richard II would have a brother named Richard, so the closest would have to be a cousin. Cousin? Where was the rest of that cousin Richard Perkins’s family? Where are their records?

No, four years after Mary remarried, her husband and adult son were trying some sort of business together using the adult son’s and his siblings’ inheritance, and the court required that the younger siblings be legally protected, so they were making it a legal contract.

And there was no other evidence besides this of any other Richard Perkins in Richard I’s generation. Our Richard Perkins was the only one in Maryland until his son was born, and the one record of a Richard Perkins arriving was his.

But many websites say Richard Perkins I was the son of Robert Perkins of Maryland

A Maryland journalist made that claim in a 1909 article on local history, and others have quoted it as a source, and they in turn have been quoted. But 1909 was centuries after our Richard lived, so the article wasn’t quoting some childhood friend of Richard’s. The twentieth-century journalist who wrote it didn’t cite any sources, and if he had had some special access to seventeenth-century records that weren’t publicly available, that would have been part of the story. It wasn’t. We have the same records he had.

Those records lead to the conclusion already reached, but it’s still worth looking at this Robert Perkins to make sure we don’t miss anything.

There was one Perkins couple in Maryland in our Richard’s parents’ generation: Robert and Anne Perkins of Portobacco, in Charles County, near where Richard probably spent his first years in Maryland. But there is no record of anyone from their family ever having any interactions with anyone from our family.

Robert Perkins’s will of 1668-Dec-30 says the following:

Perkins, Robert, Portobacco, Chas. Co., 30th Dec., 1668.
—– —– —– To Jane, wife of Arch. Wahob, Patrick Forrest, son of testator’s wife, and Richard Corner, personalty. Wife Anne, execx. and residuary legatee. Test: Bartho. Coates, Thos. Corker, Clement Theobald. 1. 354.

Annapolis, MD: Hall of Records. Will Books, Book 1, p. 354. Online in “Maryland, Calendar of Wills, 1635-1743” at Ancestry.com

According to Maryland Marriage Evidences, 1634-1718, by Robert William Barnes, Anne Perkins’s son, Patrick Forrest, and his wife Helena lived in St. Mary’s County, which adjoins Charles County in southern Maryland.

If our Richard Perkins wasn’t conceived by the time of Robert Perkins’s death at the end of 1668, he wasn’t Robert Perkins’s son. If he was conceived, why would Robert Perkins leave something to Anne’s son, Patrick Forrest, who apparently wasn’t his son, but leave nothing to his own son? Was he so angry at our little Richard that he cut him out of his will? Richard would still have been a boy in 1668.

There is no record of Robert Perkins having a son, and there is a record of a Richard Perkins (Parkins) arriving as a servant six years after Robert died. The Richard who had to pay for his ocean crossing with labor obviously wasn’t born in Maryland, so either Robert abandoned him as a child, moved to Maryland, cut Richard out of his will, and died, to be followed years later by a grown Richard, who avoided his Maryland family forever—or they just shared a fairly common surname but weren’t related.

The reason Robert, Anne, Patrick Forrest, and their family had no recorded interactions with Richard or any of his family was that they weren’t related.

But there were Perkinses in both New England and Virginia at that time, so maybe Richard came from one of those families

The short answer is still the same: Most of the men in Richard’s place and time arrived as indentured servants. Maryland has a single record of a Richard Perkins arriving as an indentured servant, which matches our Richard perfectly, and there were no other Richard Perkinses for it to match. That was our Richard’s arrival.

But we can still address the question directly for anyone who might be interested in the details. (I want to record what I found when looking into these reasonable objections in case someone asks after I’m gone, but that doesn’t mean you need to read them all now. History fans might be interested, but if your eyes are already glazing over and you’re more interested in where this is all leading, you won’t miss anything important if you skip ahead. You can always come back later.)

First, the earlier citation of historian Russell Menard, where he said, “Before 1645, in the mid-1650s, and after 1667, when there is less evidence of internal migration...”, was making the point that from 1667 to the tapering off of the headrights system by about 1683, people usually arrived as indentured servants and not by internal migration from other colonies. So, there is a record that the most likely thing to happen did happen, while there is no record of the unlikely thing.

New England colonists were not interested in the Chesapeake colonies. The cultures were too different. New England was a refuge for middle- and upper-middle-class Puritan families trying to get away from ordinary, worldly people to live among the enlightened and pure. The Chesapeake in those days was a rough, worldly place where rootless young men with no prospects in the Old World went to literally risk their survival for a chance at a real life with land and family. It was more like the later California or Yukon Gold Rushes or “roughnecks” working the oil fields, although the men planned to stay and settle rather than making their money and leaving. There was no going home from the Chesapeake. The reality was more nuanced than what I’m describing, but it was true enough that New Englanders seldom moved down to the Chesapeake to stay.

Virginians sometimes moved up to Maryland, though. Strictly speaking, the fact that Richard Perkins was transported in 1674 doesn’t rule out being transported from Virginia. Maryland just wanted workers. If a friend paddled him across the Potomac in a canoe, the friend could probably have claimed transportation headrights, and it would have been recorded as a transportation—in theory. In practice, if Richard had been in Virginia, he could have traded an afternoon’s work for a ferry ride across the Potomac, saved himself years of servitude, and collected the full 100 acres for himself years earlier. But then it would have been recorded as an immigration, not a transportation, so we can safely assume that he was not only transported but transported from overseas like almost everyone else who was transported. (“Overseas” wouldn’t have to mean England, but it would have to be a long-enough trip to justify years of indentured servitude.)

And now there is something more, although it’s still in its early stages: DNA evidence. If you are male, you have a Y-chromosome; if female, you don’t. If you are male, you inherited your Y-chromosome (nearly unchanged) from your father, because your mother didn’t have one. Your father, for the same reason, got that Y-chromosome from his father, who got it from his, and so on. If you are a male who inherited the Perkins surname from Richard Perkins I, you inherited Richard’s Y-chromosome, too, unless there was an adoption somewhere along the way.

If you are male descendant of Perkinses along your fathers’ line, you can now have your Y-chromosome sequenced and submit it to a DNA study of the Parkins/Perkins surname. Since Perkins just means Peter’s family, many unrelated families of men named Peter got the same surname, but they’ll have different Y-chromosomes, and this study is trying to group related Perkins lines together.

Our investigation of Richard is currently based on good evidence from non-DNA sources and doesn’t rely on this DNA study, which will need to collect more data. Even so, there is already some data, and it’s interesting to see that the New England Perkinses, the Virginia Perkinses, and our Maryland Perkinses do seem to have different Y-chromosomes. They are descendants of different medieval Peters. Perkins men who were descended from our Richard Perkins seem to have an R1b haplotype, unlike descendants of, say, the often-suggested candidate for Richard’s father or grandfather, Nicolas Perkins of Jamestown (haplotype R2).

Since this investigation doesn’t depend on the DNA evidence, and the chart takes time to figure out, you might want to come back to it later, but if you do, you’ll see that each row is one man’s data, and they are trying to cluster men with similar DNA into groups who share a recent common ancestor. The groups of men with closely-matching Y-chromosomes are separated by colored horizontal lines that show the group name (“Haplogroup E”, “Haplogroup R1b”, etc.)

When you are ready to dig into it, and if you want to watch the progress over the coming years, here it is:

Parkins/Perkins Y-Chromosome DNA Study

What happened to the other passengers?

“Richard Askee, Richard Parkins, Chr[istopher] Foster, Isaac Maude, Dorothy Parkinson, Ann Watterworth, Eliz[abeth] Brafitt” were transported together. We know what happened to Richard Parkins. What happened to the others?

Unless more evidence turns up, the only ones besides Richard Parkins himself who seem to have emerged from indenture and left a record were Richard Askee and Christopher Foster. There is no sign of the others, although any woman who survived would have been in high demand as a wife and would have changed her name immediately, becoming very hard to identify.

Richard Askew (Askee is a variant spelling and pronunciation of Askew) and Christopher Foster both emerged in the Maryland records in the 1680-90s like our Richard. They were probably coming out of indentures, too. They showed up a little later than Richard, which could mean they were a little younger and were indentured longer, but it could just have been challenges of finding land and wives or the incompleteness of centuries-old records. All three men were of the same generation. Askew and Foster both lived near the north branch of the Gunpowder River just a few miles south of our our Richard’s Mosquito Creek land, though Askew may also have had land at one point up in Cecil County, which was the county on the other side of the Susquehanna River from our Richard’s Atrip (Eightrupp) property. Askew’s 350-acre property was called “United Friendship”, which suggests that he (or whoever named it) was a Quaker.

So all the evidence we have from our Richard’s life leads us to conclude that he was the Richard Parkins transported in 1674, there is no other Richard Perkins that that transportation could apply to, alternative theories of how else our Richard might have arrived are refuted by the evidence, and two of the other passengers lived nearby. There were two Christopher Fosters who were transported to Maryland, one a few years before Richard Parkins and one with him, so the one in Baltimore County wasn't necessarily the only one, but there was only one Richard Askew. So, the Richard Perkins, Richard Askew, and Christopher Foster who later moved north to Baltimore County were either two or three of the passengers who arrived together in 1674.

All the evidence of all sorts leads to the same conclusion: the Richard Parkins who was transported to Maryland in 1674 was our ancestor, Richard Perkins I who lived in Baltimore County from 1683 until his death in 1705. He was transported with Richard Askew, Christopher Foster, Isaac Maude, Dorothy Parkinson, Ann Watterworth, and Elizabeth Brafitt. When he arrived in 1674, Richard was at least 18 years old, probably no more than 24 though he could have been older, and was most likely around 20 or 21. That means that he was probably born between 1650 and 1656—maybe a little earlier—and most likely in 1653 or 1654.