Humphrey Tiffany

Biography

Humphrey Tiffany appears in a town entry from Rehoboth, in what is now southeastern Massachusetts, dated January 1663 as a man permitted to stay and to buy or hire property. The entry, reproduced in the Tiffany family history, provides a practical starting point for his New England life. His wife was Elizabeth, and their children included Ebenezer and James.

By 1683, a record from nearby Swansea named Humphrey and Elizabeth as the parents of a daughter, Sarah, born on July 6. Two years later, Humphrey died while travelling toward Boston, Massachusetts. Samuel Sewall's diary records that lightning killed him and Frances Low on the afternoon of July 15, 1685. The account also reports the deaths of horses and the survival of another rider who was stunned by the strike.

Sewall's entry is specific about people and circumstances. It identifies Frances as Anthony Low's daughter and places the incident beyond Billings's farm. The familiar later story of shelter beneath a great tree is a separate tradition; the contemporary account is the firmer basis for describing the deaths.

The consequences continued in the household Humphrey left behind. On October 27, the General Court of Plymouth Colony granted Elizabeth administration of his estate, requiring an inventory and a bond with two sureties. The family history reproduces the court's order. In December, another town entry recorded that their son Hezekiah had drowned in the Swansea River.

The surviving sequence is stark: a traveller's sudden death, a widow's legal responsibility for the estate, and the loss of a son before the year ended.