Sarah Folger Coffin (1761-1822)

As I said in the brief story of Sarah last month, she was a widow in her 50s with young and unmarried children still in her care when she left Nantucket and migrated to Cincinnati.  While I don’t know the path she followed, she must have had crates of household goods with her since she was leaving her home to establish a new one.  It is likely that she and her family traveled in a group of fellow Nantucketers who were also migrating to Ohio, and that they traveled much of the way by water finishing by coming down the Ohio River to Cincinnati.

Sarah was born on Nantucket on the 28th of June 1761 to Christopher and Abigail Barnard Folger.  She was only 2 years old when her mother died, and her father remarried twice more before dying at sea in 1774 when she was only 13.  In all likelihood Sarah lived with her father’s 3d wife, Susanna, and several younger half brothers and sisters until she married Isaiah Coffin at age 18.  She was born into and raised in the Society of Friends and kept to this her entire life.

Sarah married Isaiah Coffin on the 29 of March 1780.  Their first child, a daughter named Mary, was born the following December and in all 13 children were born to this marriage.  Eight of the children survived to adulthood including my g-g-g-grandfather Cyrus Coffin who was their second child.  And all but one of the 8 surviving children either migrated ahead of or with Sarah to Cincinnati in 1814.

Sarah was received into the Miami Monthly Meeting on 31 Aug 1814, and became a member and an Elder of the Cincinnati Monthly Meeting.  While Cyrus Coffin offered the use of his house in the very early days of the Cincinnati Meeting before they had a Meeting House, he did not become a member and that was the place in the Coffin family line that my direct ancestors stopped being Quakers.

I have found a will that Sarah wrote, dated 2 Sept (“ninth month called September”)1816, which referenced the “uncertainty of this mortal life” as her reason for a will allthough she was not sick or dying at that time.  In fact, in 1817 she married again, to Oliver Martin who was also a Quaker.   I haven’t had much luck finding out anything about Oliver Martin, although I do find him in the 1820 federal census living, presumably, with Sarah and 3 younger people including 1 male under 16, 1 male between 16 and 26, and 1 female between 16 and 26.  These were likely to be Sarah’s children: Christopher, age 14, Reuben, age 24, and Eliza, age 18, all of whom had been received in the Miami Monthly Meeting with their mother.

Sarah did not live many years with Oliver; she died 14 Sep 1822 at age 61.  So far I have found no regisration or other official evidence of her death so I don’t know the cause.