Ebenezer Jolls

When Ebenezer Jolls, in 1777, had his property confiscated, because he was a Tory, and was banished from the State of Rhode Island, he with his 14 year old son, Gardner, chose the route to Canada along the Mohawk river to the Niagara frontier. While in Steventown, N.Y., young Gardner met Clarissa Stevens, a young Mohawk Indian girl, ward of Abel Stevens. 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.

Source: http://www.caskey-family.com/genealogy/EbenezerJolls.htm

During this period this Legend of the origin of the Jolls Family in America was handed down to his grandchildren; "Two brothers, pirates, from England were shipwrecked off the coast of Long Island. They were shipbuilders by trade. They built a new boat, sailed up the Hudson river and founded our family." The facts are that Gardner's Great Great Grandfather, Thomas Jolls, Captain of the ship Richard, was bringing documents from the King of England and was shipwrecked (with his brother John) off the coast of Rhode Island in 1682. see p 2

     Records of the families of John, brother of Capt. Thomas Jolls (1), and of Thomas and John, brothers of Robert Jolls (2) so far, have not been found.

From descendants:

It seems that wherever a group of Capt. Thomas Jolls' descendants grew up they always had their private cemetery. I have seen several.

     In 1682 King Charles II of England engaged Captain Thomas Jolls, skipper of the ship Richard (a windjammer), to deliver a proclamation to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Captain Jolls descends from an ancient family with a variant spelling (Joll, Jolls, Jolles) dating back to the time of William-the-Conquorer (1024-1087) Joll is their name for our Couldron kettle.
This was sixty years after the Landing of the Pilgrims and during the third generation of their descendants.
Capt. Jolls was around three months crossing the Atlantic. One son was born to him by Abigail, his wife, enroute. This son was named Thomas, Jr.
A violent storm arose near the coast of Rhode Island and wrecked his ship.
He delivered the papers to Gov. Winslow of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and did not return to England. His wife and son Thomas, died and he later married into Gov. Winslow's family.

     Another son Robert grew up in Bristol, R.I. and married a Holbrook girl from the village of Holbrook, Mass.

Their son Thomas, (named for the old sea dog), married an Ormsby whose son Ebenezer, married a Wheaton.
These were all influential English families and of course, Loyalists.
During the Revolutionary War in 1777, Ebenezer Jolls' property was confiscated and he with his family, including his seven year old son Gardner, (nicknamed "Garner"), "went west". 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.
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.
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.