Joan Vokins
Quaker preacher and traveller
Joan Vokins or Joan Bunce (died 1690) was a British Quaker preacher and traveller.
Life
Vokins was born as Joan Bunce. Her father Thomas Bunce was a yeoman of Charney Bassett in (what was then) Berkshire. She married another local farmer, Richard Vokins, of West Challow and she joined the Quakers. She was an enthusiastic evangelist for Quakerism. She persuaded her family and then set about to preach. In February 1680 she went to America, arriving in New York in May. She visited Long Island, Rhode Island, Boston, East and West Jersey, and Pennsylvania. On the return journey she went to the West Indian islands including Barbados, Antigua and Nevis,
Even after she returned to England on 3 June 1681 she continued preaching in Kent. Five years later she travelled in Ireland.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Joan Vokins” as quaker preacher and traveller. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as quaker preacher and traveller. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18576436. VIAF identifies the subject as 32345693. The Library of Congress control number is n85115666. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1690, 1680 and 1681.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joan Vokins” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.