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Nov 2008 Issue
By LaRae Free Kerr
A cousin wrote, “Ephraim Perkins, born 1795 in NC, son of Joshua Perkins and Rebecca Sherrill has 5 wives listed for him—Mary Stubblefield md 9 Aug 1817, Lucinda Rushing md 1817, Lucinda E. Livingston md 4 Sep 1845, Milly J. Holmes md 7 Nov 1854, Mary Wylie Moses md abt 1865. Some of the children of Ephraim are connected to more than one of these wives. Can you clear this up?”
Could I resolve this request with materials available at home only? I decided to try.
Sources for Ephraim Perkins listed a 1985 packet from Mrs. Frank Perkins of Arkansas. There I found a one-page biography and three family group sheets: one each for a Lucinda, Milly J Holmes and Mary Wyly Moses with a total of nine children, two being named Mary.
Here I found additional problems. The first child, William Kinney Perkins was born in 1818 in St Clair County IL. The next child was born in 1829 in Tennessee, as were all remaining children. So what happened in Ephraim’s life that there was an eleven year gap between the births of the first two children? And why had he left America’s wild frontier of 1817 Illinois to go to Tennessee, against the usual flow of emigration traffic?
The short biography reported Ephraim was born in North Carolina, where he served in the War of 1812 for Absolum Tribble. He was a county commissioner in Benton County, Tennessee, a “land entry taker in 1844 in which capacity he served for 20 years. He was a trusted administrator of estates and guardian of orphans. He had intensely loyal friends and equally intense enemies. One of the latter… shot off part of his nose.”
This raised another question for me, why were so many younger women willing to marry the crotchety old Ephraim Perkins with a partially missing nose? Maybe he wasn’t as crotchety as the biography leads us to believe, but then again, as I discovered, he was rich, had many slaves, and exuded a certain amount of power until the Civil War destroyed it all.
For updated family records, I turned to Rootsweb’s WorldConnect Project, http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=donnamae&id=I06858 and discovered 1812 pension papers for Mary, widow of Ephraim Perkins, number WC 32233 did exist as did an estate settlement in Chancery in 1866. Neither of these documents was quoted in the entry. However, nine children had been mentioned in the will instead of ten, and none of them were named Mary. However, there was a Sarah not listed on any of the family group sheets.
In addition, the Rootsweb entry from Donna Mae Perkins Edwards included a letter from Ephraim to his son William written 13 Dec 1855 from Camden, TN which mentions his wife of that date as Milly.
Further, the biography sent by Mrs. Frank Perkins indicates more letters by Ephraim Perkins to his son William are the property of the State of Arkansas in the State Archives at Little Rock.
Ancestry.com provided two important marriages. An Ephraim G Perkins married a Lucinda Livingston 4 Sep 1845 in Macoupin County, Illinois. This could not have been the Ephraim Perkins of this report, because he was well ensconced in Benton County, Tennessee. In fact, on the 27th day of Sep 1845, Ephraim Perkins b 1795 was in the process of purchasing the following slaves: Peter, about 35 and Charity, about 23 with her son Henry, about four years old. Consequently, the marriage to Lucinda Livingston was eliminated.
The other marriage record from Ancestry.com showed Ephraim Perkins’ marriage to Milly J. Holmes, 7 Nov 1854 in Benton County, Tennessee. So when Ephraim Perkins wrote that Dec 1855 letter to his son, he had been married to Milly just over a year. Any children born 1855 to 1860 would be her children.
Another telling marriage record was found at the Illinois State Archives site, http://www.ilsos.gov/GenealogyMWeb/MarriageSearchServlet, which was a bit hard to find because Ephraim was spelled Aphrim. But this showed he married Mary Stubblefield 9 Aug 1817 in St Clair County, Illinois. Further, there were no Rushing families in St Clair County at that time. This marriage showed, then, that Ephraim did not marry both Mary Stubblefield and Lucinda Rushing in 1817. Mary bore him that first son, born 1819, then promptly disappeared from the scene, whether through death or divorce is at this time unknown.
The 1850 census shows Ephraim did indeed marry a Lucinda born about 1802 in Virginia. She must have died before 1854 when Ephraim married Milly. She appears in the 1850 census but has disappeared by 1860.
An Ancestry.com 1860 mortality schedule showed that Milly J Perkins, age 34, died in April of 1860 in Benton County, Tennessee. She had been sick with inflammation of the brain for two days. So of all the wives, we have the most on Milly – her approximate birth year and place, her marriage and her death.
Further censuses allow us to follow Ephraim’s last wife, Mary, through 1880 often with a group of children surnamed Askew or Ashew. At first, it appeared they were Mary’s children by a previous marriage, but the dates don’t work. In the 1860 census, Aron P Ahsew, 14, and Lem Ashew, 10, each worth a considerable sum of money in their own rights were listed as E. Perkins’ guards. The Civil War had started for Ephraim Perkins, and he lost everything.
WorldVitalRecords provided historical information and land transactions for Ephraim Perkins. I had hoped the deeds would provide his wives’ names to further define when each wife lived. But that hope was dashed. Footnote.com yielded one applicable census.
This is a very brief summary of what I found in my own files, books and through Internet database sites. Amazing. Further steps must be taken: peruse the original probate. Some of his letters exist!
They are in Little Rock, Arkansas. Will someone please copy each one if possible? His wife’s pension papers should be found as well.
And what about these Ashew/Asher/Askew kids: Aron, Lemuel and Dora? What happened to little Mary?
Are there two? If so, they must have died before Ephraim did in 1866 or they would have been mentioned in his probate materials? And who is Sarah, the minor child listed in the probate who was not found in any of the censuses? Could the Sarah of the probate possibly have been “Mary” misread?
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