Interesting In-Laws




Matilda Waterman (23 Jul 1862 - 13 Mar 1934) is the daughter of Richard Clark Waterman and Catherine Coffin, who is the daughter of Joseph Coffin, son of Edward and Sybil. Matilda married a man named Elijah D. Fulford. E.D. Fulford was considered one of the greats in trap shooting at the turn of the 20th century, especially in the shooting of live birds. In 1895 he was the Grand American Handicap (GAH) champion. He invented the Fulford Single Trigger and the Fulford Live Bird Trap. He was so well known across the country, that when he died, friends sent in money to a sporting newspaper for the erection of a monument in his home town of Utica, New York. Even Annie Oakley sent in a donation. (Thanks to Ken Estes for this information.)

George Jarvis Coffin, son of Lewis Augustus Coffin, M.D., married Louise Raven, sister of Henry Cushier Raven, better known as Harry Raven. As a collector for the Smithsonian institute, he spent years in the wilds of Borneo, Celebes, Africa, Australia, and Greenland. He was renowned for his dissection work, and lectured at New York University and Columbia university. He has written many well regarded articles as a result of his studies. He is best known, however, for one particular primate whom he adopted from the French Cameroun of West Africa. Meshie-Mungkut ("The little swaggerer"), a young chimpanzee, became a part of his family, and went on to become quite a celebrated actress. The Harry Raven page linked above links to a couple of other interesting articles about Meshie in the Raven family. I may even be related to Meshie, as we both are lovers of Ice Cream.

George Jarvis and Louise (Raven) Coffin had a daughter, Nancy Coffin, who married Marion Sims Wyeth Jr., the son (of course) of Marion Sims Wyeth, a renowned architect and designer of over 100 homes in Palm Beach, Florida. Wyeth graduated from Princeton in 1910, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1914. Among his works are the Florida Governor's mansion, and Mar-a-Lago, for Marjorie Merriwether Post, which Donald Trump bought in 1985 for $10 million. Wyeth popularized the Mediterranean Revival style throughout Florida, and was the first Palm Beach architect to be elected a fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

James D. Coffin

A very nice and helpful Coffin cousin, Dorothy Brickhouse, sent me a fax of some papers regarding the Civil War service of her great-great-grandfather, James D. Coffin. It appears that James was a week shy of his seventeenth birthday when he enlisted as a private in Company D of the 2nd regiment of the New York Heavy Artillery Volunteers, on 29 Feb 1864. On May 9th of that year, at Spotsylvania, Virginia, he was shot in the left hand, and lost his left forefinger. On December 9 of the same year his regiment was engaged in a skirmish with the enemy on Vaughan Road, towards Hatcher's Run, Virginia, when James received a gunshot wound to his right arm, resulting in the amputation of that arm. He was discharged from Jarvis General Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland on March 30th, 1865.

James returned to his father's farm in Newport, New York, and in 1870 married Huldah Nichols. They had a son, Leon H. Coffin, the following year, but Huldah passed away before the child reached his first birthday. Some time afterwards he left his son Leon with his parents, Worden and Elizabeth Coffin, and went out to the Black Hills of North Dakota, in the Deadwood area, and became involved with mining operations. In July of 1876, he was elected recorder of Lead City, and is also listed as one of the founders of that 'city'. Page 82 of Gold, Gals, Guns, Guts: Deadwood-Lead '76 Centennial (Bob Lee, 1976) puts it this way: "The new town was called Lead City and two officers were elected - Robert Charles "Smokey" Jones as secretary and James D. Coffin as city recorder. No other officers were chosen since the miners, inasmuch as any civic acts would be without legal status, thought it would be better to let local unwritten mining laws govern disputes." He was also Vice-President of the Caucasian League in that area.

James died suddenly on 21 Nov 1879 of Pneumonia at the young age of 32. His grandson, Leo Worden Coffin, married Myrtle Mykel, and together they had 18 children, many of which grew up in Herkimer County, New York. The early Deadwood newspapers contain several articles concerning James D. Coffin, which I am in the process of ordering.

Wills and Deeds

I had been reading about the value of probate records and deeds in genealogical research, but didn't know where to begin. I was looking for a volunteer to find an obituary from Oneida county; what I found was a very reasonably priced researcher that knew how to find probate records and deeds in Oneida and Herkimer and other nearby counties. Nancy J. Silkey, a wonderful lady from Syracuse, has been such a help in obtaining many pages of records from the Oneida and Herkimer county courthouses. I am putting them on my Wills and Deeds page on my website, as I get time to transcribe them. Her and her husband made good use of their digital camera during a recent trip to Herkimer County, and sent me a disk of many images of Coffin family Wills.

One Will and probate file was of particular interest, that of Joseph R. Coffin. Joseph was born in Newport, Herkimer county, NY in 1818, and died there in 1872. His first wife, Mary Ann Rathbun, died childless in 1851; he married Sally Wilson the following year. They had one daughter, Lucy, but she died in 1866 as a thirteen year old girl. When Joseph made out his will, with no children to claim his estate, he named all 22 of his nieces and nephews, and to which family they belonged. When his wife Sally died in 1891, his estate was not yet settled, and so the probate papers list again all of his nieces and nephews (or their heirs if they had died), as well as the city where they were living in 1892. What a tremendous help in finding the descendents of Joseph Sr. and Matilda (Cummings) Coffin.

Of the deeds, perhaps the most interesting is the partitioning of the estate of Edward Coffin in 1824. It describes how his 200 acres, on the west side of West Canada Creek was sliced into seven equal pieces, and divided among his sons and their wives, which are all named in the deed. Later deeds tell how they sold off their portions to one another, or to other persons, or deeded them to their children. I look forward to taking a trip across the United States and visit the areas where my Coffin family relatives have lived for the last 200 plus years.

John Coffin, born 1753, Dutchess County, New York

I received an e-mail last week from Barry Moses, asking about John Coffin, who married Marytje Van Tassel. Barry descends from John Coffin through his son Isaac Coffin, through his son Isaac Jr., through his daughter Maria Elizabeth who married Aaron Stone Lee. Mr. Lynn Alitz, another descendent of Aaron and Maria (Coffin) Lee, was kind enough to send me a copy of the Lee family Bible, which had been used by Aaron and Maria's daughter Elizabeth, widow of Alexander Ray, as documentation for her Civil War pension.

John Coffin appears to have been a private in the Revolutionary War. "New York in the Revolution as Colony and State" (Albany, NY, 1904) lists a John Coffin on page 136 as an enlisted man in the Second Regiment of the Dutchess County Militia. "Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York" (Berthold Fernow, 1887, Albany, NY), pages 278, 279, and 345, indicate that John Coffin was a private in the Second Regiment, which was from Rombout Precinct. John Coffin is found in the Tax Lists of Rombout Precinct for 1772-1775, and 1777-1779. It is interesting to note that Tucker F. Morian, in his S.A.R. application, erroneously used this resource to show that the John Coffin who married Mary Davis was a Revolutionary War soldier, and then used Cutter's "Genealogical and Family History of Northern New York" to prove that he descended from that John Coffin.

The records of The First Reformed Dutch Church of Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York, show a marriage between Marytje Van Tessel and John Coffin on 16 Jan 1772. "The Genealogy of the Van Tassel and Allied Lines of North America", by Mary McRae (Van Tassel) Pazurik, shows the family of Hendrick and Mettie (Kraukheit) Van Tassel, who lived in Fishkill, New York. They had a daughter, Marya, baptized 10 Apr 1743, which is almost certainly the Mary Van Tassel that married John Coffin.

Census records of 1790 and 1800 show John Coffin living in Albany county, New York. The 1800 census, in the town of Bethlehem, seems to indicate that John's son Isaac and family were living with John and Mary. The 1810 census of Bethlehem shows Isaac Coffin, with the same neighbors as were living near John Coffin in 1800. One researcher lists John's death as 12 Apr 1833, supposedly using a family Bible as a reference, but I haven't seen a copy of that family Bible or any other records to confirm that.

Introduction

Greetings, fellow Coffin family researchers. I created this blog to keep you informed of recent contacts, information I have found, or anything I discovered that may be of interest to someone researching this family. The Coffin family I am researching is not currently connected to the immigrant Tristram Coffin, from whom so many Coffin's in the United States descend. My Coffins appear to be connected to the early Dutch of New York state. I have a website for this family, and also have my family tree on-line with Rootsweb.

The earliest currently known ancestor of this family is Isaac Coffin, born about 1720, and lived in Fishkill/Rombout, and Beekman, in Dutchess County, New York, for much of his life. On 28 Jul 1739, Isaac married Anna Churchill, daughter of Edward Churchill and Wentjie Ryder, according to the records of the Dutch Reformed Church of Fishkill, Dutchess, New York. Isaac appears on the taxpayers lists for Fishkill/Rombout for the years 1738, 1740, 1741, and 1743-1747. In the will of Edward Churchill, dated 15 Apr 1757, his daughter Anna is mentioned as the widow of Isaac Coffin. Frank Dougherty has a brief chapter on Isaac Coffin in his book "The Settlers of the Beekman Patent". Some of this information is contained on my website on the Isaac/Anna page.