Author: Perkins, Elizabeth Steele
Biography:
PERKINS, Elizabeth Steele, later WOLFERSTAN (1797-1874: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 4 Aug. 1797 and baptised on 28 Sept. at Holy Trinity, Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, the youngest daughter of Shirley Farmer Steele Perkins (1768-1852), barrister and landowner, of Orton Hall, Leicestershire, and his first wife, Elizabeth Duncombe (1769-1801), who had married in 1793. The family lived in some comfort at the Moat House on the Sutton Coldfield estate which they inherited through her mother, daughter and heiress of Joseph Duncombe. In the 1851 census she was still living with her elderly father but in 1857 she moved to The Cottage, a large gentleman’s residence on the Sutton Coldfield estate where she is recorded as a landed proprietor in the 1861 census. She married Stanley Pipe Wolferstan on 8 June 1861 at St. George’s, Hanover Square, London. Elizabeth Pipe Wolferstan (q.v.) was therefore her mother-in-law. He died on 26 Jan. 1867 at his estate, Statfold Hall (Grade II listed), Tamworth, Staffordshire, aged 81. She died on 12 Mar. 1874 at Leamington, leaving a surprisingly modest estate of around £2000. The volume of verse listed here proved popular and reached a sixth edition in 1838 (no third edition has been located), with an 1872 edition appearing under her married name. She donated the profits of the 1854 edition to the building of a new church at Sutton Coldfield. She is frequently confused with Mrs. E. E. Perkins whose Elements of Botany (1837) is a more technical work. (ancestry.co.uk 15 Aug. 2023; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 15 June 1861; MH 29 Jan. 1867; Leamington Spa Courier 21 Mar. 1874; Ray Desmond, Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists [1994]) AA