Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880)

FamilySearch PID: LRBB-TZH

MATERNAL LINEDistant cousin (via Coffin & Folger lines)

Capt. Nathaniel Coffin→...→Carol Perry→John, Perry & Patrick Long

Lucretia Coffin Mott is your distant cousin through two independent Nantucket lines: Tristram Coffin and Peter Folger.

Lucretia Coffin Mott was born January 3, 1793, on Nantucket, the daughter of sea captain Thomas Coffin and Anna Folger Coffin. She is one of the most important figures in American history: a Quaker minister, a leader of the abolitionist movement, a co-founder of Swarthmore College, and the driving force behind the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, where the women’s rights movement was born.

She connects to your family through two lines. Through her father, she descends from Tristram Coffin (PID: L8BH-G24) via James Coffin → Capt. Nathaniel Coffin → Benjamin Coffin → Thomas Coffin → Lucretia. Through her mother Anna Folger, she descends from Peter Folger (PID: 99BX-1P2), the same ancestor who connects your family to Benjamin Franklin. Tristram Coffin and Peter Folger are both in your direct line, making Lucretia a distant cousin through two independent Nantucket founding families.

Lucretia’s grandfather Benjamin Coffin (1705–1780) was a Quaker elder and the first banker on Nantucket. His brother William Coffin (b. 1699) moved to Boston and became the patriarch of the Loyalist Coffins who fought for Britain in the Revolution. The same father, Captain Nathaniel Coffin (1671–1721), produced both the line that gave America its greatest reformer and the line that gave Britain its generals and admirals.

Lucretia became a Quaker minister at twenty-eight. She helped organize the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, sheltered fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, and in 1840 was denied a seat at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London because she was a woman. That insult led directly to the Seneca Falls Convention of July 1848, where she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented the Declaration of Sentiments demanding equal rights. Her sister Martha Coffin Wright co-organized the convention. Frederick Douglass attended and helped pass the suffrage resolution.

In 1848, five delegates at the Liberty Party convention voted for Lucretia for Vice President of the United States, making her the first woman nominated for that office. She will appear on the redesigned U.S. $10 bill. She died November 11, 1880, at her farm near Philadelphia. At her funeral, a long silence was broken when someone asked:

Who can speak? The preacher is dead.