All my life, I have believed that my parents, myself and now my wife have been the only ones currently living on the planet with the surname of Pearkins. My father changed his name from Perkins in the mid-1940s.
Historical records, many available on the Internet, show several people with the name Pearkins. The inevitable misspellings of Perkins. Webster's first dictionary standardized spelling of common words in the U.S., but it was another generation or two before surname spelling saw less variation.
In the late 1990s, when there was lots of banner advertising money to be made on popular Web sites that offered lots of useful information, entire phone directories were typed into computers in non-English-speaking countries where labour costs were low. That language barrier led to a lot of typing mistakes. Searches showed several Pearkins still living in the U.S.
They all mysteriously disappeared by 2001 as telephone companies began offering electronic equivalents of their White Pages telephone listings with cross-country search capabilities.
Click here to try out this U.S.-wide official (AT&T) White Pages search for anyone named Pearkins. At last count, there were two listings, plus another with an unlisted number.
The Grave of Another PearkinsOn Feb. 17, 2007, the grave stone shown to the right was added to a popular web site that catalogues graves. It is located in Long Creek Cemetery in Panola County, Mississippi. It documents that G. W. Pearkins was born sometime in 1887 and died on March 14, 1945.
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