A Brief History of the Pierce/Peirce Family
My Peirce/Pierce ancestry goes back to John Pers of Norwich, Norfolk County, England, who came with his wife Elizabeth and four of their children to Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1637. The Peirce name was also spelled Perse, Pearse, Pierce and Pearce. It was probably pronounced purse.1
John Pers was married in April 1610 in Norwich, Norfolk, England to Elizabeth.2 John was born about 1588 and Elizabeth about three years later, in 1591. Their eight children were all born in England, and all their baptisms,except Anthony and Barbre, can be found in the register as well. John, age 49, a weaver, Elizabeth and four of their children, John, Barbre, Elizabeth and Judith, sailed on either the John and Dorothy of Norwich or the Rose of Yarmouth in 1637.3 It is thought that some of their other children, Anthony, Esther, Mary and Robert, all emigrated to New England either before or after their parents.
My line of descent comes down through John Pers' son Anthony, and Anthony's sons Daniel and Joseph. Daniel’s great great grandson, Jarvis Peirce Sr., married the great great granddaughter of Joseph, Rhoda Darby. Jarvis and Rhoda were fourth cousins. They married in 1794 in Westminster, Massachusetts, moving sometime after 1800 to Rhode Island and then, between 1815 and 1820, to Illinois, first to Springfield and then to Gallatin County in the southern part of the state.
Image of the Mayflower is by artist Charles Austin Needham, created between 1900 and 1920, Detroit Publishing Company. Accessed at the Library of Congress digital collections.
Related Links:
Baptisms of six of the eight children of John & Elizabeth Pers of Norwich, England, and Watertown, Massachusetts
Pierce family, main page, with an image of the marriage record of John and Elizabeth Pers
Some researchers give Elizabeth’s surname as Trull. This cannot be from looking at the record of marriage because her last name is illegible, so it must have been from some other research which I have not found.
Information on John Pers and the early Peirce family of Massachusetts comes from the Peirce Genealogy, Being the Record of the Posterity of John Pers, An Early Inhabitant of Watertown, in New England, Who Came From Norwich, Norfolk County, England..., by Frederick Clifton Peirce, Worcester, Press of C. Hamilton, 1880.
Some online researchers have John’s father as Richard Pearce, of Norwich, Norfolk, England, born about 1540. Richard’s wife was Marguerite Coney, born about 1550 in Panington, Gloucester. John had a brother, Richard, born about 1563 in Norwich. This Richard had two sons, Thomas, born 1583, and Richard, born about 1590, both possibly adopted. One site has John as the brother of these two. Thomas had a son, Thomas, who married Elizabeth Cole in 1635 and two of his sons, James and Stephen, were the ancestors of Barbara Pierce Bush and President Franklin Pierce. Some in our family claim a relationship to these two descendants, but if Thomas was an adopted son, there would be no blood relationship. I have not done the research to verify these findings and John Pers’ parentage, so cannot say what facts are true and am cutting my research off with John Pers and Elizabeth.
