The Comfort Family

An overview of the ancestry of Margaret Comfort (1833-1916), wife of John Kennedy (IV), of St. Anns, Gainsborough Tp., Lincoln Co., Ontario. She was entirely of American ancestry, all her great-grandparents (except for Catharina Lent, who died in New York) being Loyalists or “late Loyalists” who came to Canada in the late eighteenth century. Despite her English surname, she was more than 1/4 Dutch and German.

Our most recent direct ancestor in the Comfort line, Margaret Comfort (1833-1916), along with her husband John Kennedy (IV) (1832-1897), of St. Anns, Gainsborough Township, Lincoln County, Ontario, was a subject of the life-long genealogical investigations of their granddaughter, the late Cecelia (Coon) Botting (1905-1994), of Tucson, Arizona, who with her husband Roland B. Botting co-authored the booklet Wilcoxes and McIntyres of Lincoln County as well as their magnum opus, Comfort Families of America (1971), which treats Margaret Comfort’s paternal lineage and her Maul ancestry (therein spelled Mould). These works — which collectively cover all the ancestry shown in the chart above — and correspondence with Cecelia and Roland before their deaths, have provided the basis from which the present writer’s work on these lines has proceeded.

Many of Margaret Comfort’s ancestral lines have been previously explored in print. Most crucial, for our purposes, is a major paper by Roderick Bissell Jones, “The Harris Family of Block Island and Dutchess County, N.Y.,” which provided the names of over a dozen of her direct ancestors and supplied valuable clues to the identity of several others. A little remarkable, perhaps, is the number of genealogical scholars, both of the past and of the present, with whose ancestries hers overlaps. She shares at least one line of descent with some of the most eminent American genealogists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as James Riker (1822-1889), John Osborne Austin (1849-1918), Henry Edwards Scott (1859-1944), Clarence Almon Torrey (1869-1962), George Andrews Moriarty (1883-1968), Walter Goodwin Davis (1885-1966), Donald Lines Jacobus (1887-1970), and Lewis D. Cook (1895-1981). She also shares descent with a number of fine genealogists of our own day, including (in alphabetical order) Carl Boyer 3^rd, Jane Fletcher Fiske, Henry B. Hoff, Dorothy A. Koenig, Harry Macy Jr., Gary Boyd Roberts, and Eugene Aubrey Stratton. All of these writers have published something on these shared lines, or edited source materials which we have been able to draw upon in our account.

More material on the Comforts and allied families will be added to this site as time permits. The first installments are:

Some Sites of Related Interest

Comfort Family board at RootsWeb
<http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec?htx=board&r=rw&p=surnames.comfort>

Comfort Family Genealogy Forum
<http://genforum.genealogy.com/comfort/>

Benjamin Comfort of Newtown, Long Island, NY by David R. Jansen (archived version)
<http://web.archive.org/web/20010802055105/ http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/3265/comfort.html>