ANCESTRY 5 
engaged in business in New York. In 1832 he brought his 
family from New York to Boston and entered the firm of 
his father-in-law, Perkins and Company, which had long 
been successfully engaged in the China trade. Six years 
later, however, the business was dissolved, and after a brief 
interval, Mr. Cary became treasurer of the Hamilton and 
Appleton Mills in Lowell, a position which he held until his 
death in 1859. His life, as Mrs. Agassiz describes it in the 
memoir quoted above, was that “of a quiet business man, 
never brilliantly successful so far as his own fortunes were 
concerned. His purity of character and unselfishness of con- 
duct alone gave him the honored place he held in the com- 
munity. Truly a good citizen and deeply interested in the 
charities and educational interests of the state, he was 
always ready to render unpaid service and was therefore 
often called upon to act as trustee or director of public in- 
stitutions. He was for many years a most active trustee of 
the Institution for the Blind endowed by his father-in-law: 
He was also the indefatigable friend of the Boston Athe- 
naeum, the affairs of which possessed the greater interest 
for him because he had marked literary tastes, for the pur- 
suit of which his busy life allowed him little time. His 
memoir of Colonel Thomas H. Perkins, printed only for 
private circulation was a very spirited biographical sketch 
and he left also a number of short, well-written papers on 
matters of finance and manufacturing interests.” 
Through their mother, Mary Perkins, his children had 
an ancestry no less stamped by individuality than through 
him. The Perkins family was first established in America 
at Ipswich, Massachusetts. Here John Perkins, who emi- 
grated to New England with Winthrop and Saltonstall 
