The Coffins of Nantucket

From Devon to the Island. c. 1605 to the 19th Century

Tristram

Tristram Coffin medallion

Tristram Coffin ↗ (c. 1605-1681, PID: L8BH-G24) was born at Brixton, Plymouth, Devon, about 1605; another account has him baptized there on March 11, 1609, at St. Mary’s Church. He marriedDionis Stevens (PID: MCCT-B3T) and emigrated to Massachusetts around 1642. The family moved through Salisbury, Haverhill, and Newbury before Tristram organized the purchase of Nantucket Island in 1659.

Tristram served as Chief Magistrate of Nantucket. He and Dionis had seven children, who together produced approximately seventy-five grandchildren, an extraordinary expansion that wove the Coffin name into virtually every family on the island within two generations.

TRISTRAM COFFIN HOMESTEAD MARKER, NANTUCKET

Leaving England

In 1642, the year the English Civil War began, Tristram left England with his wife Dionis, five children, his widowed mother Joan, and two unmarried sisters; he left no record of why. Allen Coffin (1881) assumed he was a Royalist and a Churchman rather than a Puritan, though by his own account this was an assumption, and Thomas Amory thought him “not over-fond of either party.” His only brother, John, was mortally wounded at Plymouth Fort; when, and on which side, is not recorded. Whatever the reason for leaving, it was not the rule of Oliver Cromwell, who did not become Lord Protector until 1653. The sources are footnoted on Tristram Coffin’s page.

A separate upheaval of the same era reached the other side of the family. Twelve years after Tristram left, in 1654, the Cromwellian land settlement in Ireland (the Civil Survey) confiscated the lands of “John Long, alias the O’Long, Irish papist”in County Cork, reducing the family from landholders to tenants. The O’Longs were not driven across the Atlantic then: their descendants crossed in the famine of the 1850s, two centuries later. Four centuries after Tristram’s crossing, the descendants of both families, one leaving Devon in 1642, the other leaving Cork in the famine, would meet in the marriage of Carol Perry and John Patrick Long. Full detail on the two departures: audit/07-17th-century-departures.md.

See the O’Long confiscation in Cork →

The 75 Grandchildren

The Coffin family tree. Tristram and Dionis’s seven children and their marriages produced a web of interconnection across Nantucket.

Tristram and Dionis’s children married into every significant family on Nantucket. Their daughter Mary Coffin ↗ married Nathaniel Starbuck, becoming the island’s most influential citizen, the “Great Woman” who brought Quakerism to Nantucket. Son James Coffin carried the name into the whaling industry. The marriage of grandson Jethro Coffin to Mary Gardner in 1686 resolved the Coffin-Gardner feud that had split the island.

By the early 1700s, the seventy-five grandchildren had scattered the Coffin name across every corner of the island and beyond. The Barney Genealogical Record at the Nantucket Historical Association documents over 40,000 islanders, nearly all connected to this single family.

Coffin arms: Azure, a cross between four plates,
each charged with a cross crosslet

John Coffin: The Direct Line

The direct descent to John, Perry, and Patrick Long runs through John Coffin(1647), a son of Tristram and Dionis, born at Haverhill. John’s daughter Hannah Coffin (1686, PID: M7FZ-T6T) married Benjiman Gardner; their son Robert Gardner (1708) carried the line forward through five generations of Nantucket-rooted Gardner, Macy, and Folger descendants to Harriet Ann Folger and the Perry chain. A 2026 review read her father as James; Starbuck and Allen Coffin name John. The downstream descent was verified end-to-end via the FamilySearch relationship view.

John’s elder brother James Coffin (1640), a Nantucket magistrate, headed the collateral Revolution-era branch: his son Capt. Nathaniel Coffin (1671) fathered the line that split into Patriots and Loyalists a century later. Tristram is the shared ancestor of the direct line and of the Loyalist and reformer cousins. See A House Divided: The Coffins in the Revolution for that story.

Tristram’s father was Peter Coffin of Brixton, whose will of 21 December 1627 names “Tristram Coffyn my Sonne” as his heir and his wife Joan as executrix; it was proved on 13 March 1627/8. No record names Peter’s parents, and the archive does not carry the line further back. Joan is named in the will as Peter’s wife; that she was Tristram’s mother rests on the FamilySearch tree, with no record yet attached.

Notable Descendants

Tuckernuck

On 10 October 1659 Thomas Mayhew sold “all my Right and Interest in Tuckanuck Island” to Tristram Coffin Sr. and his sons Peter, Tristram Jr. and James, jointly, for six pounds; the sachem Wamachmamack sold them half the island on 20 February 1661 for ten pounds.⁷ Allen Coffin writes that Tristram had first tried to have his fellow purchasers buy it with him, and bought it with his three eldest sons when they would not.⁸

On 3 December 1678 (“3d 10th 1678”), “in Regard of my Natural afection unto my Grand Children,” Tristram gave every grandchild, living or yet to be born, “ten acres of Land upon the Island of Tuckernuck” to plant, with the right to keep four sheep on every acre sown to English hay for life; his sons James, John and Stephen witnessed the deed.⁸ The same autumn a French ship was wrecked on the Nantucket shoals, and the salvage of her hides brought him before a Court of Admiralty in 1680.⁷

From Nantucket to the Mainland

As whaling declined and the Great Fire of 1846 devastated the island, Coffin descendants scattered to the mainland. They settled in New Bedford ↗, Fall River, and across Cape Cod, the same coastal towns where the Winter and Swift families were building their lives. The Winter-Swift connection, documented elsewhere in this archive, traces the path from Nantucket’s founding families to the New Bedford marriages that produced the current generation.

Sources

1. Starbuck, Alexander. The History of Nantucket: County, Island, and Town. Boston: C. E. Goodspeed, 1924.
2. Hinchman, Lydia S. Early Settlers of Nantucket: Their Associates and Descendants. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Friends’ Book Association, 1901.
3. Coffin, Louis. The Coffin Family: The Life of Tristram Coffyn of Nantucket and His Descendants. Nantucket Historical Association.
4. Williams, Alicia Crane. “The Coffin Cluster.” Vita Brevis, American Ancestors (New England Historic Genealogical Society), November 15, 2019. vitabrevis.americanancestors.org ↗.
5. Tyler, Betsy. “Tristram Coffin Homestead Site Marker.” Nantucket Historical Association Properties Guide, 2015. The 1879 granite-and-marble monument near Capaum Pond, funded by Owen Tristram Coffin and Charles G. Coffin to mark the homestead of Tristram Coffin (c. 1605-81), progenitor of the American Coffin family, has been maintained by the NHA since 1981. nha.org ↗.
6. Anderson, Robert Charles. The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England 1620-1633. Vol. 1. Boston: NEHGS, 1995 (entry for Tristram Coffin).
7. Hough, Franklin B., comp. Papers Relating to the Island of Nantucket. Albany: J. Munsell, 1856. 10 and n. 1 (Tuckernuck deed, 1659; the 1661 Indian deed); 118–23 (the wreck, 1678–80). archive.org ↗.
8. Coffin, Allen. The Coffin Family: The Life of Tristram Coffyn, of Nantucket, Mass.Nantucket: Hussey & Robinson, 1881. 32, 40. archive.org ↗.

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