Charles, Geraldine, Arthur and Esther
The generations Grandpa knew, and the people who kept the family’s memory before him.
Charles and Geraldine
Charles Rice Perin, Ezra’s youngest, was born in 1860, at Council Bluffs, Iowa, according to Grandpa’s database, on 18 July where Glover says the 8th. Family chart He became a teacher. On 2 March 1884 he married Geraldine Allison at her home, the ceremony performed by Elder Taylor, the Christian minister of Andersonville, Indiana; they set up their first home at Columbia. Ten months later his father wrote to them both, the letter in chapter three. Seen in records
This photograph is on Grandpa’s blog and could not be shown just now. See Geraldine’s page.
Geraldine left something few women of her generation did: her own account of her life. She called it Permanent Record and Data, a memoir for her children, written in a book her daughter Mildred gave her in May 1946; its dated entries run from 1940 to 1957. Grandpa has transcribed it on his blog. Seen in records
To my children this book of memories is lovingly dedicated.
Geraldine Allison Perin, Permanent Record and Data
She was born on 18 February 1866, a delicate child who nearly died of an illness when she was three. Her schooling ended early: “I graduated from grade school when I was 16 and that finished my school life.” Between 1884 and 1908 she had eleven children, and her verdict on it is the best sentence in the book: “Being a mother is a great responsibility but after all, it is the most important job in the world.”
Charles and Geraldine’s children, as Geraldine listed them
Roscoe Charles, Kenneth Adrian, Donald Bernard, Gladys Geraldine, Keith T., Edith R., Arthur M., Una Cleone, Christine E., Stanley E., and Mildred F.
There is a story about those names. Charles badly wanted to name a son John, and Geraldine would not have it. With each new boy he asked again, and each time she said no. When the last child, Mildred, was born, he is supposed to have said, “I guess we’ll just have to name her John.” Six sons, and not one John, in a line that had passed through five of them. Family account, from one of Charles’s grandsons, as his father told it
Charles never got his John. Arthur’s son, born in 1934, is Daniel John.
Keith served in the Marines in the First World War and later worked as a weather forecaster at Boise, Idaho, where he died of influenza on 29 March 1928.
Geraldine lived to see her grandsons serve in the Second World War, and wrote about that too. She died in 1962.
Arthur and Esther
Arthur Perin was born in 1898, seventh of the eleven, and made his life in Portland, Oregon. He married Esther Minerva Marsh, born in 1902 at Valley City, North Dakota, the daughter of Frank Rufus Marsh. They were Grandpa’s parents. Seen in records
Like his brother Keith, Arthur served in the Marine Corps in the First World War: from 8 June 1917 to 29 October 1919, according to Grandpa’s database, which also records his burial in Willamette National Cemetery at Portland. Family chart
The two families were joined twice. Arthur’s sister Christine married Esther’s brother, John R. Marsh, so the two couples’ children were double first cousins. Grandpa’s own account, in Moments
Arthur kept the 1793 backsaw and square, which are with Grandpa now, and Stanley says he also owned one of Ezra’s violins. He died in 1981.
A small puzzle. Grandpa says his father had no middle name, and this history follows him. But Geraldine’s memoir lists her son as “Arthur M.,” and Stanley’s narrative calls his brother “Arthur M. Perrin of Portland, Oregon.” Perhaps the M was an initial he used without a name behind it, which was not unusual. Grandpa would know.
Esther died in 2002, a century after she was born. Her middle name was her grandmother’s: Minerva Sworden, who married John Powell Bowen, was Esther’s mother’s mother. Her family is in the next chapter.
The family historians
Every family that knows its history knows it because someone in each generation wrote things down. In this family the line of record-keepers is easy to follow.
Jesse Perrin kept Rehoboth’s town records for twenty-five years. Glover Perin compiled the genealogy of 1885. Geraldine wrote her memoir. Her son Stanley E. Perin, Grandpa’s uncle, wrote the family narrative that preserves John and the bear, Ezra’s mill and the backsaw, and the Internet Archive holds a book, John Perrin and His Family, by a Stanley Ernest Perin, very likely him. A 2001 newsletter of the Rice family association credits a Stanley Perin, very likely the same man, with finding the will of Rachel Rice’s probable father. And Grandpa’s database names a book of his among its sources: The John Perrin Family of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, published by Gateway Press of Baltimore in 1974. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has a copy; we have not yet seen one.
This photograph is on Grandpa’s blog and could not be shown just now. See Stanley’s narrative.
And then Grandpa, who has kept all of it together: the blog, the letters, the chart, the WikiTree pages. Most of what is in this history was found by following a trail he had already marked.
This photograph is on Grandpa’s blog and could not be shown just now. See Grandpa’s photo page.