Mary Anna Bullock Tiffany

Biography

Mary Anna Bullock married Ebenezer Tiffany at Barrington, Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay, in February 1783. Their household grew over nearly twenty years: Elizabeth, Sarah, Althea and Mary Ann were followed by twins, Esther Viall and Susanna Kent, born on February 13, 1793. Later children included Ebenezer, Lydia, Hezekiah and Lemira. These recurring family names connected the children to the Bullock and Tiffany generations before them.

The twins did not both reach adulthood. Barrington's published vital records record Susanna Kent's death on April 5, 1803, when she was ten. Mary Anna's youngest daughter, Lemira, had been born the previous year. The household thus combined the care of a very young child with the loss of an older one.

Ebenezer died in 1826. Mary Anna lived another twenty-two years, long enough to see family arrangements change well beyond the years in which she was raising children. Lemira married Edmund Carpenter in 1830, while Esther Viall married Sullivan Martin in 1843.

Mary Anna died in December 1848. Her memorial places her burial at Princes Hill Cemetery in Barrington, where the Tiffany family is represented across generations.

The family chronology places Mary Anna’s birth in 1758 and identifies William Bullock and Susannah Kent as her parents. It places Lemira’s birth at Barrington in 1802; that birthplace remains an attributed family claim.