Eliza Starbuck Barney

Eliza Starbuck Barney (April 9, 1802 – March 18, 1889

Biography Eliza Starbuck was the third child of Joseph Starbuck and Sally Gardner, a Nantucket family that had become wealthy in the whale oil industry. At 18, Eliza married Nathaniel Barney. Despite their wealth, the couple shared a home with Eliza's sister, Eunice, and her husband William Hadwen. The husbands became business partners, opening a whale oil refinery on the site of the current Nantucket Whaling Museum.

Eliza Starbuck Barney was secretary to Nantucket's Anti-Slavery Society from 1839 to 1840. The families welcomed William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass to their home at 100 Main Street in 1841 and hosted an anti-slavery meeting; Nathaniel Barney refused his dividends from the New Bedford Railroad to protest its refusal to carry black passengers.

In 1851, Eliza attended the first women's suffrage convention in Massachusetts. Barney's genealogical record contains some idiosyncratic flourishes, such as appending "Jr." to the names of women with the same names as their mother.