Ancestor Archives Special: Nantucket

 

by Rocky Macy

President Biden and his family are spending their Thanksgiving holiday on the island of Nantucket, a Biden family tradition that goes back many years.  I have some family history connected to Nantucket - and thought that the Biden's holiday visit there might serve as a good excuse to share some of that history.

Nantucket is a small island (less than fifty square miles) that sits out in the Atlantic Ocean about 30 miles from Cape Cod.  It is a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  The island, which had long been a home to the Wampanoag Tribe of indigenous Americans, was "discovered" by Bartholomew Gosnold sailing for England in 1602 and was part of a stretch of territory claimed by England that extended from Cape Cod to the Hudson River.

In 1641 Thomas Mayhew, a merchant in Watertown, Massachusetts, purchased a tract of land from English authorities that included Martha's Vineyard (an island larger than Nantucket) and the island of Nantucket.  Mayhew headquartered his business operation on Martha's Vineyard, and used Nantucket for grazing sheep.  Mayhew, who referred to himself as "Governor," also worked at "Christianizing" the 1,500 or so Wampanoag natives on Nantucket.  Those whom he was successful in converting became known as "praying Indians."

"Governor" Thomas Mayhew was approached in 1659 by a group of nine men who wanted to buy the island of Nantucket.  One of the group was Thomas Macy, Mayhew's cousin, who was a Baptist and experiencing some conflict with the Puritan authorities in Massachusetts.  The group succeeded in their attempt to purchase most of the island from Mayhew, but the seller retained one tenth ownership for himself.  The purchase price for nine-tenths of the island of Nantucket was thirty pounds and two beaver hats, one for "Governor" Mayhew and one for his wife.

The new "owners" of Nantucket Island, except for the land set aside for the island's native population, were:  Tristram Coffin, Peter Coffin (Tristram's son), Thomas Macy, Christopher Hussey, Richard Swain, Thomas Barnard, Stephen Greenleaf, John Swain, William Pile - as well as Thomas Mayhew.

The original purchasers of Nantucket were shareholders in a closed corporation and an agreement was reached where each of the ten (including Mayhew) could name a partner who would also have the same rights and privileges as the original shareholders.  The ten full partners were:  Tristram Coffin, Jr., James Coffin, John Smith, Robert Pike, Thomas Look, Robert Barnard, Edward Starbuck, Thomas Coleman, John Bishop, and Thomas Mayhew, Jr.  All twenty of these men were shareholders on equal footing.  They and their heirs were "the Proprietors." 

Thomas Macy and his family were actually the first of the group to settle on Nantucket.  Macy had run afoul of the Puritan authorities in Massachusetts in 1657 when they learned that he had given sanctuary to four  Quakers during a severe rainstorm.  (This incident is the subject of Nantucket descendant Stephen Greenleaf Whittier's poem, "The Exiles.")  Macy had paid a fine of 30 shillings to the General Court, but fearing for the safety of himself and his family, he decided to move to Nantucket in the fall of 1659.  It was apparently a hard winter, and most accounts indicate the family would have perished but for the kindnesses extended to them by the native population of the island.

The natives were repaid for their kindness over the next few decades with disease and death.  The native population on Nantucket by 1700 was down to about seven hundred, while the white population had increased to three hundred.   From there on, of course, the plight of the natives steadily worsened.

As some of those first purchasers and their partners, collectively known as "the Proprietors,"  began settling the island, they quickly determined that if their settlement was to succeed they would need to attract people trained in various skills to the island, and to do that they offered what were known as "half-shares" to draw in practitioners of certain occupations.  One of the "half-share" individuals who came to Nantucket at the invitation of "the Proprietors" was Peter Folger.  Folger was the island's school master and the local government's bookkeeper.   Peter Folger and his wife, Mary, are also historically significant in that they were the maternal grandparents of Benjamin Franklin.

Nantucket became a bastion of independent thought and action.  Over the years it not only served as a refuge to Quakers, a religion reviled by the Puritans who controlled Massachusetts, the small island also became a center of abolitionist and suffragist activity.  And, of course, for many years the name "Nantucket" was synonymous with whaling.

The earliest European settlers on the island thought they could survive by farming and raising sheep, but by the early 1700's it was becoming apparent those endeavors would not be enough to sustain the island's growing population.   There were people on the mainland who were beginning to practice the art of whaling, and the Nantucketers, who could see large numbers of whales frolicking near their shores, brought a master whaler over to teach them how to be whalers.  Before the end of the century, Nantucket had become the recognized world leader in whaling, and ships out of Nantucket  were dominating the seas.

Because the first settlers of Nantucket led a fairly isolated existence, the original families who lived on the island tended to inter-marry, and anyone today who can trace their lineage back to one individual who was living on Nantucket in the last half of the 1600's or the first half of the 1700's, is likely to find many more ancestors there as well.    Genealogical trails through early Nantucket tend to be quite knotted.

Fortunately, the early settlers kept good family records, and there have been some highly detailed genealogies that came from that era and location:  "Genealogy of the Macy Family from 1635-1868" by Silvanus J. Macy (1868)  and "The Coffin Family" by the Nantucket Historical Association and edited by Louis Coffin (1962) are two examples.  Most of the island's early genealogical history through the late 1800's is also contained in the "Barney Genealogical Record" which is maintained on-line through the Nantucket Historical Association and may be accessed free of charge.

As I indicated in an earlier "Ancestor Archive" my Nantucket lineage comes down on my mother's side of the family.  My maternal g-g-g-g-grandmother, Hannah (MACY) COOK, was a Quaker who was born in New Guilford, North Carolina, in 1784.  He parents, Paul and Bethiah (MACY) MACY were second-cousins who moved from Nantucket to North Carolina sometime between 1761, when they were married on Nantucket, and 1784, when Hannah was born.  Both Paul and Bethiah were descendants of several of the Proprietors, some of them multiple times.

My ancestors include Thomas Macy, Tristram Coffin, Thomas Barnard, Edward Starbuck, and Thomas Coleman.  I am also a descendant of half-share man Peter Folger.  It's an interesting lineage and one of which I am proud, but trying to explain it in a narrative format without the aid of family tree charts is something akin to chasing a mouse through a rabbit warren.

When I finally consolidate the "Ancestor Archives" into a book format, those family tree charts will be included.

But for now I wish President Biden and his family a wonderful holiday on modern Nantucket - where the average price of a one-family home was $2.3 million in 2018!   I hope to make it there myself one day!

Happy Thanksgiving!