The Eleven Families of Nantucket

1659. The Island Purchase

In 1659, Tristram Coffin and eight partners bought Nantucket Island; the next year the owners grew to twenty proprietors. Within a generation, these eleven families would form the core of the island’s community, interconnected by marriage, bound by the sea, and documented in Eliza Starbuck Barney’s genealogical record of 40,000 islanders.

The Purchase

On July 2, 1659, Tristram Coffin ↗ and eight other men purchased Nantucket Island ↗ from Thomas Mayhew ↗ for thirty pounds and two beaver hats. Mayhew held the patent from the Earl of Sterling; the Wampanoag sachems who had lived on the island for thousands of years were not party to the transaction. The nine purchasers were Tristram Coffin, Thomas Macy, Christopher Hussey, Richard Swain, Thomas Barnard, Peter Coffin, Stephen Greenleaf, John Swain, and William Pile (or Pike); with Mayhew, who kept a twentieth share, they made ten owners. In February 1659/60, at Salisbury, the ten agreed to admit ten more partners, among them Tristram Coffin Jr. and James Coffin, making the twenty original proprietors (Alexander Starbuck, The History of Nantucket, 1924, 17–19). By the end of the decade, these families formed the core of the English settlement.

The Eleven Founding Families

The Coffin-Gardner Feud

The power struggle between Tristram Coffin’s faction. English settlers holding full shares, oriented toward land and political control, and the half-share men led by John Gardner, tradesmen who demanded equal voice in island governance, split Nantucket for a generation. Peter Folger, the schoolmaster, sided with the tradesmen and was jailed for it. The feud was resolved only by marriage: Jethro Coffin wed Mary Gardner in 1686, and their wedding gift, a house at 16 Sunset Hill Lane, still stands as the Oldest House ↗ on Nantucket. This archive documents descendants of both sides.

The Whaling Era

By the early 1700s, Nantucket had become the whaling capital ↗ of the world. The founding families. Coffin, Starbuck, Macy, Folger, Gardner: captained the ships, processed the oil, and built the economy. At its peak, Nantucket whalers ranged from the Arctic to the Pacific, and whale oil lit the lamps of colonial America. The sinking of the Essex ↗ in 1820 and the Great Fire of 1846 ↗ marked the beginning of the end. Families scattered to the mainland, to New Bedford ↗, Fall River, and Cape Cod, where the Winter-Swift family would later settle.

From Nantucket to the Perry Family

The island families reach the Perry line through Harriett Ann Folger (c. 1829), who married Francis Perry at New Bedford on 14 December 1848. Her father, Frederick William Folger, carries the Folger, Coleman, Myrick, Pinkham, Trott, Marshall, Macy, and Gardner lines. Her mother, Phebe Long, carries the Long, Foster, and Swain lines. Generations below are counted from the Long brothers on the live family tree and checked against the Vital Records of Nantucket.

Earlier versions of this page listed the Fosters as collateral relatives and left out the Colemans and Mary Trott. The records show otherwise: Phebe Long’s mother was Betsey (Elizabeth) Foster, daughter of James Foster and Lydia Swain, and Harriett Ann Folger’s father descends from Charles Folger and Lydia Coleman and from Frederick Folger and Mary Trott. Sources: Eliza Starbuck Barney, Barney Genealogical Record (Nantucket Historical Association), vol. III, pp. 167 and 181 (Frederic W. Folger and Harriett Ann Folger); Vital Records of Nantucket, Massachusetts, to the Year 1850, vol. 1 (Births), pp. 482 (Harriett Ann Folger) and 514 (Betsey Foster); vol. 2 (Births), p. 247 (Phebe Long); vol. 3 (Marriages), pp. 240 (Enoch Coleman and Mary Myrick as parents), 444 (Charles Folger and Lydia Coleman, 1778), and 448 (Frederick Folger and Mary Trott, 1751; Frederick W. Folger and Phebe Long, 1828); vol. 4, p. 288. See Peter Folger & Benjamin Franklin for the routes to Peter Folger.

Founding Ancestors

The first generation on the island. Each reaches the brothers through Harriett Ann Folger (KZDT-ZC5); the generation shown is the closest of their several routes.

Research Resources

Connections to the Archive

The Nantucket founding families connect to nearly every other line in this archive. The Coffins came from Brixton, in Devon. The Swains and Macys intermarried with every founding line on the island. And from Nantucket, the families spread to the mainland, to the Cape Cod towns and New Bedford harbors where the Swift and Winter families built their lives.

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