Lemira Tiffany Carpenter

A household across the census years

Lemira Tiffany was born in 1802, a daughter of Ebenezer Tiffany and Mary Anna Bullock. She married Edmund Carpenter, and their son Francis Wood Carpenter was born at Seekonk, Massachusetts, in 1831. The family’s surviving records place her in the Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts communities from which Francis later entered Providence business.

Census abstracts give more substance to that household than the single mother-and-son connection suggests. In 1850, Edmund and Lemira were recorded at Seekonk with nineteen-year-old Francis, fifteen-year-old Sarah T. Carpenter and ten-year-old Ann E. Carpenter. Lemira’s name was rendered “Lemyra,” and her birthplace was recorded as Rhode Island. Five years later, the Massachusetts state census again placed Edmund and Lemira at Seekonk, with Sarah and Anna; Francis was no longer in that household listing.

The sequence continues in 1860, when Sarah and Anna still appear with Edmund and Lemira. In the 1870 abstract, Lemira was sixty-eight, living with Edmund, Sarah and seventy-seven-year-old Esther V. Martin. These entries preserve the changing membership of a household over twenty years. They also give Lemira a place in the family story beyond her connection to her commercially prominent son.

Edmund died in 1873. Lemira survived him until 1888; her memorial gives September 30 as the date and records her burial at Newman Cemetery in East Providence, Rhode Island. She had lived long enough to see Francis establish himself in the Providence business community, but died before the 1892 incorporation of the company he would head.