Humility Cooper

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Humility Cooper was a young girl who was among the settlers who traveled from England to North America on the Mayflower.

In 1620, Humility embarked on the Mayflower with her relatives Edward and Ann (Cooper) Tilley. William Bradford wrote that among the passengers were "Edward Tilley and Ann his wife, and two children that were their cousins, Henry Sampson and Humility Cooper."

However, soon after arriving in America, both Edward and Ann died. Edward's brother John Tilley and his wife Joan, who came with them, died, too. Of all the Tilley family and their relatives who came on the Mayflower, only three were alive by the end of the winter: Humility, Henry Sampson, and Elizabeth Tilley (John's daughter, about age 13).

On what happened to Humility, Bradford wrote, "Edward Tilley and his wife both died soon after their arrival, and the girl Humility, their cousin, was sent for into England and died there." Genealogical researcher Eugene Aubrey Stratton has found evidence that this Humility was the Humility Cooper who was the daughter of Robert Cooper and was baptized in 1638-9 in London at the age of nineteen. If this true that would mean that Humility Cooper of the Mayflower was about a year old when she came.

[edit] References

Bradford, William, Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647.

Robert Leigh Ward, "The Baronial Ancestry of Henry Sampson, Humility Cooper, and Ann (Cooper) Tilley," The Genealogist 6:166-186.

Eugene Aubrey Stratton, Plymouth Colony : Its History and People, 1620-1691 (Salt Lake City : Ancestry Publishing, 1986), p. 273.