Ephraim Tiffany

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/130895065/ephraim-tiffany

• Reference: WikiTree Genealogy - SmartCopy: Aug 21 2016, 23:56:24 UTC
• Reference: WikiTree Genealogy - SmartCopy: Apr 12 2017, 2:30:15 UTC

Ephraim Tiffany and his brother, Consider, seem to have found their way to the town of New Shoreham which was admitted to the Colony as Block Island on May 4, 1664. Ephraim, the fourth child of Humphrey and Elizabeth Tiffany, had been born on December 26, 1677, in Norfolk, Milton, Norfolk, Massachusetts. About 1700, Ephraim married Bethia (Leshia) Tosh in New Shoreham, Washington, Rhode Island, the town of her birth in September 1676. She was the daughter of daughter of William and Jael (Swilvan) Tosh. The Tosh and Tiffany families were close neighbors on Block Island, and William Tosh, Bethia’s brother, was the first husband for Consider Tiffany’s sister-in-law, Penelope Niles. The couple had three sons born on Block Island, and two more sons and two daughters were probably born in Lyme, Connecticut.
Settlement of Joshua’s Town began in 1702 when the Bannings moved there from Block Island. The first official survey took place four years later in 1706 when surveyors officially divided Joshua’s Town into three parts “as to quantity and quality.” They had first excluded the so-called “Indian Planting Field” which they also divided into three parts. Within ten years the whole tract was settled: Ephraim and Bethia Tiffany with their four sons on the west side; John and Abigail Banning with his son and her two Niles sons in the center; and the wife and children of Consider Tiffany who had died in 1708, on the east side.

Ephraim and his brother, Consider, bought a large tract of land in Lyme in June 1701. Judging, however, from an agreement between him and his two partners, Ball and Banning, Ephraim did not settle in Lyme
until late in 1706 or the first of 1707, probably soon after his brother Consider’s death. Ephraim became freeman at Lyme in 1714 soon after buying their third of the Joshua’s Town property, Ephraim Tiffany and Edward Mott agreed that Mott should take two-thirds of it. When Mott decided to move to the Rhode Island mainland instead of to Lyme, he sold his two-thirds to Peter Ball. Ephraim finally bought out Peter Ball in 1721 but had difficulty staying solvent. He sold his part of the planting field to Edward Brockway and mortgaged the rest to Samuel Brown of Salem, Massachusetts.

Bethia signed herself Bethia Tiffany when the couple took out a mortgage in 1724.
Ephraim died on July 15, 1727in Lyme, New London, Connecticut. Bethia, as the name appears in her bond of November 14, 1727, was named as Administratrix to Ephraim’s estate. The inventory had been taken October 11, 1727.
In 1734, Ephraim’s eldest son, Samuel, with the agreement of his adult brothers, Consider, Humphrey and Ephraim, paid off the mortgage for £236. They sold the whole “300 acres of farm and barn, dwelling house and half a sawmill” to three Brockway brothers for £760.