52 Ancestors Week 15: Fire

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 15's theme is "Fire." Fire played a crucial role in our ancestors's lives, whether it was providing heat for homes and cooking or providing power for forges and engines. Of course, fire can also be destructive, both on a personal level or in our research (such a record loss in a courthouse fire). Think, too, about place names that make you think of fire. (One of the best names I've seen for a cemetery is Hell's Half Acre Cemetery in Whitley County, Indiana.)

We didn't start the fire. It was always burning as the world's been turning!

"Hell's Half Acre Cemetery" certainly sounds like a badass name for a cemetery doesn't it? Of course there are a ton of places named after Hell. Hell's Kitchen in New York City is notable for comic fans as that's the home of Marvel's man without fear, Daredevil. Hell's Kitchen is also the name of a  cooking show by chef Gordon Ramsay. There's no doubt about it. Fire and Hell by extension has been ingrained in our media and our lives in general. However, there's another type of fire we should talk about. The fire which drives an ancestor to go from one place to another. That, my friends, is a different type of fire!

You're probably sick of seeing this image showing
up as a hint on Ancestry.

When we talk about that ancestor crossing the Atlantic, most people conjure up imagery of a wooden sailing ship on a perilous journey across the sea. What drove people to make that journey in the first place? What put the fire in their belly and had them decide that "France/England is no longer the place I want to be. I want to get away from here!"

For many people religious persecution forced people to set sail. This mass migration would later be known as the Great Puritan Migration and it lasted between the 1620s and 1640s. One person who made the trip from England during that time period was my 11th great-grandfather, Tristram Coffin Sr even though he wasn't a Puritan himself.

Out of all of my ancestors who took part in one of humanity's largest migrations, Tristram was probably one of the more notable ones. He has a page on Wikipedia! That's got to count for something! Yeah, right. I have a page on IMdb and I'm a Z-grade Internet personality. Still, we shouldn't discount his life because he WAS a big deal.

Ponce de Leon's got nothing on me!

Tristram was born to Peter Coffin and Joanna Kember  on March 11th, 1608 in ye olde England. His reasoning for leaving his homeland after marrying his wife Dionis Stephens is somewhat up for debate. While he wasn't a Puritan, he likely crossed the ocean at age thirty-seven because of the crisis brewing between King Charles I and Parliament. He was one of the landed gentry and wanted no part of the drama unfolding in London.

After arriving in the New World, he wasn't done making a name for himself. He helped to settle the city of Haverhill, Massachusetts in the 1640s after finding nearby Salisbury and Newbury. By 1643 he had a tavern and eventually left to help settle the island of Nantucket where he'd spend the remainder of his life.

Tristram was notable for helping to settle many great colonies which would give rise to the cities my French-Canadian and Italian ancestors called home. The obvious one being Haverhill. Whatever his real reason for leaving England was, you can believe he and his family definitely had an impact on New England. Check out some of his notable descendants:

1. Levi Coffin, the president of the Underground Railroad.

2. Elizabeth Coffin, daughter of a wealthy merchant from Nantucket, was mother of the prominent Massachusetts industrialists Henry Coffin Nevins and David Nevins, Jr

3. Elizabeth Coffin (1850-1930), an artist, educator and Quaker philanthropist, was known for her paintings of Nantucket and for helping revive Sir Isaac Coffin's school with a new emphasis on craft.

Not bad, huh? There's more to Tristram's story than I've covered here. His wife supposedly brewed the best beer in town. He made many deals over the course of his life and certainly ingrained himself in local history.

Growing up I only heard about the Hamels who helped settle Quebec in the early 1600s. I had no idea who Tristram was until much, much later. After reading up on him and his family's exploits in New England, I get a better understanding of what it must have been like sailing across the ocean and dealing with the colonial hardships of early New England. Sure I read about it in history class. But, now you get a very real sense of it because the actions somehow become more real when you have a personal stake in what was going on in the world.

It took a lot of guts and certainly fire in your belly to make the trip to the New World. You have to appreciate it even though sometimes some ancestors may not have been altruistic. Reading up on Tristram gives me a sense that he was. It's certainly an interesting story and like I said his founding of Haverhill and other Merrimack Valley towns paved the way for my Quebecois and Italian ancestors to settle in the area by the 20th century.

As the song goes, we really didn't start the fire. It was always burning as the world was turning.