BIRTH: About 1619, probably in Leiden, Holland
DEATH: Sometime between 1639 (her baptism) and 1651

Humility Cooper was just an infant when she was brought on the Mayflower in the custody of her uncle and aunt, Edward and Agnes (Cooper) Tilley. Humility was the daughter of Robert Cooper, who was originally from Henlow, Bedfordshire, England., and most likely became an exile in Leiden along with the Tilleys.

She was born about 1619, based on the record of her baptism as an adult, years later. For a child of about a year to have traveled on the Mayflower without a parent suggests that her mother had died, possibly due to childbirth. It seems likely that her widowed father then turned the baby over to his sister Agnes’ care. When both Edward and Agnes Tilley died the first winter at Plymouth, Humility was left without adult relatives in the colony. It appears that she was taken into the Brewster family. In 1627, she was listed in the Division of Cattle at Plymouth as part of William Brewster’s household.

Sometime after 1627, she returned to England or Holland. By 1638, at the age of 19, she was living in the parish of Holy Trinity, London, and was baptized there, as an adult, on March 17, 1638/9. No further record of her has been found, other than William Bradford’s writing in 1651 that she had returned overseas and later died.