Comfort Families Website

 

 

The Comfort Families

This website is open to all member of the COMFORT families, wherever they may be. While the initial focus will be on my own Comfort family lineage, I heartily invite all other Comfort descendents to share research with me so, together, we can present as complete a picture as possible of the spread of the Comfort families over the last few centuries.

Blessed be God. . .the God of all comfort;
Who comforteth us in all our tribulations, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.
—II Corinthians 1: 3-4

There is a family tradition —which I have as yet to definitely confirm from additional sources— that we are descended from a branch of the Montfort family: aristocrats, one of whom, Simon de Montfort (c.1200-1265) was made Earl of Leicester by King Henry III and married the king's sister Eleanor in 1238. Over the years, on several occasions, he broke with his brother-in-law King Henry over royal policy, and in 1258 he became the central figure in the first English Parliament, the Parliament of Oxford, in 1258.

The Parliament was rejected by Henry. Backed by the nobility, Simon de Montfort made war on the King and defeated him in the Battle of Lewes in 1264. He then controlled England for about a year as a military dictator supported by the younger nobles, especially in London and the towns and cities of the south & east of England.

In 1265 he called a new Parliament of nobles and churchmen. Though it did not represent all sections of England, it is regarded as the forerunner of the mature Parliaments that appeared in the 14th Century. On 4 August, 1265 he was killed at the Battle of Evesham by Henry's son, Edward, who became King Edward I when Henry died in 1272.

The above is history. The Comfort family tradition is that at the time of the Puritan reformation, a pious branch of the Montforts dropped use of the aristocratic name and changed it to "Comfort," presumably based on the scripture passage quoted above.

I have not yet been able to establish the accuracy of this tradition, nor, if it is true, exactly what year (or generation) it took place. Nevertheless, our first ancestor who arrived here in 1698, Robert, already bore the Comfort name, although he sometimes spelled it "Cumfort."

Thus far, there are two webpage documents here that I hope you fill find useful:

Descendents of Robert Comfort

History of the Comfort Ancestors


suggestions/requests for specific Comfort research
(page coming soon)

 

Please see also:

Rootsweb surname page: COMFORT

Please check back regularly. I hope to add more pages and genealogical links soon.

 

Notice:

This webpage is written to be viewed by MS Internet Explorer, in the standard SVGA 800 X 600 pixels resolution. I used to be a Netscape fan 'way back when they made a browser that didn't freeze up or crash at the slightest provocation. Sorry, but I no longer even bother to check what my pages look like in Netscape when I write HTML. They don't follow standard HTML 4.0 in the Netscap 3 & 4 series --although they're trying with the Netscape 6.0 series. I wish them luck --I'd like to be able to have an alternative to Microsoft's screwy peculiarities. But at least MSIE 5 rarely crashes!

webpage written 24 March, 2001
by John G. Boice [email protected]

last updated on: 28 March, 2001