I’m not particularly talented at any musical instrument, but I’m an excellent singer…in my own mind, or perhaps my own shower. (To hear my wife tell it, I shouldn’t quit my day job.) It wasn’t so for a few of my distant cousins, who had the talent and passion to make music their life’s work.
I’ve already told the story of my 5x-great-grandfather John Perkins, who served in several capacities in the American Revolution. After the Revolution, he moved his family from Middleboro, Massachusetts to Windsor County, Vermont. John and his wife Hannah had several children at the time of their move, among them Elisha Paddock Perkins, born in Middleboro on May 21, 1782. Elisha was named for his father’s cousin (John Perkins’s mother was born Patience Paddock), who initially served in the same company as John during the Revolution but died at the Battle of Saratoga in September 1777. Several other cousins named children after Elisha Paddock Perkins as well.
Elisha Paddock Perkins married Hannah Taft, eleven years his senior, in 1799. She was the sister of Stephen and Daniel Taft, who had founded the village of Taftsville, just east of Woodstock, in 1791. Stephen was the first husband of Elisha’s sister Patience Perkins, who later married Daniel Drake and moved west with the Mormons. The Tafts had come from Mendon and Uxbridge, Massachusetts, where they were cousins and neighbors of Aaron Taft, great-grandfather of President William Howard Taft. (In 1800 Aaron Taft, following a common migration pattern, would move his family from Massachusetts to Townshend, Vermont, some 20 miles south of Taftsville. President Taft’s father, Alphonso, was born there in 1810, before the family moved to Cincinnati.)
Elisha and Hannah had nine children between 1800 and 1815. Their second son, Orson, who’s the first character in this musical story, was born in Taftsville on December 17, 1802.
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