Birth of Son: 23 MAY 1770
Name: Gardner Jolls
Birth of Son: 09 JUL 1771
Name: Sylvester Jolls
Birth of Daughter: 03 JUN 1774
Name: Abigail Jolls
Note: During the Revolutionary War in 1777, Ebenezer Jolls’ property was confiscated and he was banished from the state of Rhode Island, he with his family, including his seven year old son Gardner, (nicknamed “Garner”), “went west”. He chose the route to Canada along the Mohawk River to the Niagara frontier. The Mohawks were friendly to the English. In their long tedious trek across New York State, ten children were born, the first in Albany, the last in Penn Yan. None had the benefit of much, if any, schooling. Another descendant of the old sea captain Jeremiah Jolls also “went west” but only as far as Steventown, Ren. Co. where he settled and as his family grew, developed the Jolls Cemetery, on Presbyterian Hill.
“Garner” and his father’s family was thirteen years going from Bristol to Columbia Co., N.Y., through the Berkshires, inhabited by western Massachusetts Indians. With this woodcraft experience, this young seven year old “Garner” became a first class boy scout, so when he got to New Lebanon, Col. Co., this then twenty year old young English, Indian trained, hunter and warrior, according to Indian custom, was qualified and so was selected by an Indian mother for her 18 year old daughter Clarissa Stevens, who was a ward of Abel Stevens.
More About His Son, Gardner: Marriage among the Early Indians, was not founded on affection. The young Indian boy was kept too busy learning to hunt and fight, and the girl’s time was too fully filled with skinning and dressing the game brought in by the men, and tending the corn squash and bean patches. Marriage was a matter of necessity arranged by the mothers, and was final.
Three years more of “going-west” found this young Loyalist and his Indian bride in Albany County, where their first child, a girl, Lucy was born. Descendants of Lucy’s still live there. Here, too, Abel Jolls was born in 1799. Continuing their “Going-west” through the lands of the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onandagas, the Cayugas, they arrived in the Genesee Valley lands of the strongest, most powerful tribe of the Iriquois, the Senecas.
By this time this experienced “boy scout” with a hickory English long bow, instead of a rifle, was quite grown up. He was 40 years old.
Having lost a leg while in Penn Yan, during the war of 1812, he afterward, with his Indian wife and his six sturdy boys, migrated to Cattaraugus County and settled on land from the Holland Land Co. in 1817.
He built a cabin on this land where the Jolls Cemetery is now located. He could not hunt much, having a wooden leg, so he sat in his cabin door and shot deer that wandered too near with this good English long bow of his own make.
This bow is still in the family archives.
“Garner” Jolls died in 1850. His wife in 1851. They were buried in the front yard, near their cabin’s door, which was the beginning of the Jolls Burying Ground in 1876. This was later enlarged by a donation from Alanson Dewey, a distant cousin, who, about the same time, took up adjacent land on the north. This Cemetery has been further enlarged to over three acres, by subsequent donations from both families.
Birth of Son: 27 SEP 1777
Name: Samuel Wheaton Jolls
Place: Genessee Co, New York
1790 Census: Stephen Town, Albany, New York
Note: 3 Free White Males > 16; 2 Free White Males < 16; 3 Free White Females
Death: 12 MAR 1829
Place: Bethany, New York
Click here to see parents: Thomas Jolls and Mehitable Ormsbee