In the spring and summer of 1934 Lovecraft appears to have been tracing his maternal Perkins ancestry into the English Midlands and the Welsh Marches. He wrote to Morton as from “Perkins Manor” in early March of that year. A letter dated 1st August 1934 to Edward H. Cole is catalogued in the archives as providing merely… “genealogical information on the Perkins family”. Presumably this is now in the volume of Cole letters, but I don’t currently have access to that book. Elsewhere in the letters we learn from Lovecraft that… “Perkins … didn’t reach R.I. [Rhode Island] till the 18th century” and it’s implied that he settled in “the Bay”. A letter to Barlow (O Fortunate Floridian, page 94) sees Lovecraft reveal more, with dates… “John Perkins (1590-1654) of Newent, Gloucestershire, who settled in Ipswich, Mass., in 1633. … son John Jr. (1614-1700)” also a forebear for Lovecraft, via John Jr.’s son Sam.

There was some local interest in this branch of the family, as Lovecraft tells Morton of the local Providence… “soulful poetess friend of my aunt’s — Miss Ada Perkins [who] was over [visiting in person] last week and calling up ancestral data”. Sadly it appears that Miss Perkins has left no trace in the online record, save that she may have had two sisters. It also appears from the same passage in the Morton letter that John Perkins (1590-1654) had arrived on the ship Lyon, and that a book then newly-added to the Providence public library had yielded up to Lovecraft the name of the wife of John Perkins, one “Judith Gater”. By this time Lovecraft’s “Perkins notes” had become a “stapled-together” bundle.

His pursuit of Perkins then merged into kitten-naming in his shared courtyard garden, which helped enshrine the sequence of the Perkins family-tree in print…

[I] called the little fellows “Newman Perkins” and “Ebenezer Perkins” after ancestors of my own — for I have a Perkins line. When the black kitten appeared, I went back along my Perkins ancestry and called him Samuel, after a forebear who fought in King Philip’s War in 1676. If there are any more kittens later on, I shall probably keep going back along my Perkins line (which is traceable to 1380 in Shropshire and Warwickshire) for names — John being the next in order.

A kitten name, ‘Sam Perkins’, then made it into one of the fantastical stories of his correspondent Duane Rimel. Lovecraft writes… [I] “was pleased to see his name in your new story!”  Poetry on the same kittie was also penned by Lovecraft himself, to be found in the new Cat Book.

The Perkins name also inspired a pen-name, with Lovecraft naming himself “Inspector Theobald-Perkins” during the assiduous hunt for a stamp-stealing clerk in a rural Post Office (a correspondent had sent a scarce and desirable stamp as postage, but it had been peeled off and replaced). By the Autumn and start of 1935 Lovecraft was styling himself “Theobaldus Perkins, Gent.” when writing to Morton as from “The Georgian Citadel”. By 1936 he was styling himself “Theobaldus Perkins-Field”, presumably reflecting another branch in the family-tree, perhaps newly discovered or documented.

Today such meanderings in Lovecraft’s life might seem fruitless. Certainly there is no use of a Perkins in his own fiction, unless one counts two spurious and passing uses (a hardware store in “Ermingarde” and a tiny bit-part in a Heald ghost-written tale). Still, spending a few minutes following such a burning and sustained interest on Lovecraft’s part can sometimes lead to new discoveries. Historians well know that the ‘irrelevant’ can become ‘relevant’ in the blink of an eye. Although here my only discovery was that the local Providence poetess “Miss Ada Perkins” was a visitor and friend of the family in the early 1930s, and had the Perkins family line in common with Lovecraft. Unfortunately she appears to have left no poetry or portrait.