The Coffins of Nantucket
From Devon to the Island — 1609 to the 19th Century
Tristram Coffin is your ~8th great-grandfather. He purchased Nantucket Island in 1659.
Tristram
Tristram Coffin medallion
Tristram Coffin (1609–1681) was baptized on March 11, 1609, at St. Mary’s Church in Brixton, Plymouth, Devon. He married Dionis 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.
Why Tristram Left England
Tristram Coffin was a Royalist— loyal to King Charles I. He was not a Puritan. When Cromwell’s Roundheads won the English Civil War and seized Brixton Manor, the Coffin family estate in Devon, Tristram fled to Massachusetts in 1642 with his wife Dionis, five children, his widowed mother Joan, and two unmarried sisters.
This flight — caused directly by Cromwell — led to the purchase of Nantucket in 1659 and the founding of the community that shapes this archive.
Remarkably, the same Oliver Cromwell who drove the Coffins from England also destroyed the O’Long family in Ireland twelve years later. In 1654, Cromwell’s Civil Survey confiscated the lands of “John Long, alias the O’Long, Irish papist”in County Cork. Four centuries later, the descendants of both families — one driven west from Devon, the other eventually driven west from Cork — would merge in Fall River, Massachusetts.
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
Notable Descendants
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) — Through Abiah Folger, who married Josiah Franklin. Abiah was the granddaughter of Peter Folger, who was connected to the Coffin circle on Nantucket. Franklin is your 1st cousin, 11 times removed. Read the Folger–Franklin connection.
Sir Isaac Coffin (1759–1839) — British Admiral who rose to the rank of Admiral in the Royal Navy, despite being born in Boston. Founded the Coffin School on Nantucket in 1827 for descendants of Tristram Coffin. A Loyalist who fought against the colonies yet returned to endow his ancestral island. Read about the Coffins in the Revolution.
Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880) — Born on Nantucket. Abolitionist, women’s rights pioneer, co-organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention. Descended from the Coffin and Folger lines. Read her full story.
Tuckernuck & Salvage
Research in progress. The Tuckernuck period and salvage controversies are being documented from oral history recordings. Details forthcoming.
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.