Isabel Foley
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 9 May 1901 - Michigan
Baptism:
Death: 18 Sep 1984
Burial: in Snow cemetery, Truro
Cause of Death:
Parents
Father: Reuben Pratt Foley (1863- )
Mother: Edith Jones (Est 1865- )
Spouses and Children
1. *J Robert Whelan (Est 1900 - )
Marriage:
Status:
Notes
Marriage Notes (J Robert Whelan)
Provincetown was their residence in 1950s.
of Cambridge, 1961
Reuben Pratt Foley
Sex: M
Individual Information
Birth: 1 Jun 1863 - Wellsboro, Tioga, Pennsylvania
Baptism:
Death:
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Spouses and Children
1. *Edith Jones (Est 1865 - )
Marriage: 24 Oct 1888 - Saint Ignace, Mackinac, Michigan
Status:
Children:
1. Edith Jeanette Foley (1893-1961)
2. Isabel Foley (1901-1984)
3. Frances Foley (1905-1996)
Notes
General:
Father:ANDREW FOLEY
Mother:MARY CELINDA PRATT
Abiah Folger
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 15 Aug 1667 - Nantucket
Baptism:
Death: 18 May 1752 - Boston, Massachusetts
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Parents
Father: Peter Folger (1617-1690)
Mother: Mary Morrill (Est 1620- )
Ann Folger
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 1762 - Nantucket, Massachusetts
Baptism:
Death: 26 Jun 1830
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Spouses and Children
1. *Cotton Gelston (17 Dec 1757 - 3 Oct 1816)
Marriage: 1 Apr 1784 - (Nantucket, Massachusetts)
Status:
Notes
General:
Father: Benjamin Folger b: 12 MAR 1739/40Marriage Notes (Cotton Gelston)
Mother: Phebe Worth b: ABT 18 OCT 1743 in of Sherborn, Nantucket, MA
Children
Charles Gelston b: 26 JAN 1786 in (26th, 1 mo. 1786)
Samuel F Gelston b: 1 JAN 1788 in (1st, 1 mo. 1788)
Frederick B. Gelston b: 19 FEB 1790 in (19th, 2 mo. 1790)
Phebe W Gelston b: 9 JUN 1791 in (9th, 6 mo. 1791)
Frederick B. Gelston b: 8 OCT 1793 in (8th, 10 mo. 1793)
John Cotton Gelston b: 19 MAR 1796 in (19th, 3 mo. 1796)
Eliza Cotton Gelston b: 3 SEP 1798 in (3d, 9 mo. 1798)
Roland Gelston b: 9 OCT 1801 in (9th, 10 mo. 1801)
Anna Gelston b: 4 DEC 1803 in (4th, 12 mo. 1803)
(coffinfamily)
Emmazette Folger
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: Est 1850
Baptism:
Death:
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Spouses and Children
1. *Willis Higgins (19 May 1844 - 1930)
Marriage: 23 Dec 1888
Status:
Jediah Folger
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 22 May 1711 - Nantucket, Massachusetts
Baptism:
Death: 2 Oct 1757 - Nantucket, Massachusetts
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Spouses and Children
1. *Robert Gardner (1 Mar 1708 - 13 Jul 1797)
Marriage: 16 Jan 1730 - Nantucket, Massachusetts
Status:
Notes
General:
Father: Jethro Folger b: 17 Oct 1689, NantucketMarriage Notes (Robert Gardner)
Mother: Mary Starbuck b: 31 Oct 1692, Nantucket
Children, on Nantucket
Abishai Gardner b: 25 Jul 1731
Lydia Gardner b: 6 Oct 1732
Anna Gardner b: 25 Sep 1734
Rebecca Gardner b: 7 Aug 1736
Robert Gardner b: 9 Aug 1738
Jethro Gardner b: 19 Jul 1740
Prince Gardner b: 21 Nov 1742
Eunice Gardner b: 11 Oct 1744
Christopher Gardner b: 24 Aug 1746
Jedidah Gardner b: 27 Dec 1748
Miriam Gardner b: 25 Oct 1750
Jedidah Gardner b: 10 Dec 1753
Elizabeth Gardner b: 10 Jan 1756
Lucretia Folger
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 9 Mar 1787 - Nantucket, Massachusetts
Baptism:
Death: 22 Sep 1832 - Nantucket, Massachusetts
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Parents
Father: Tristam Folger (Est 1760- )
Mother: Rhoda Hussey (Est 1760- )
Spouses and Children
1. *Peleg Macy (9 Mar 1787 - )
Marriage: 9 Feb 1809 - Nantucket, Massachusetts
Status:
Children:
1. Alexander Macy (1821-1846)
Lydia Folger
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 3 Aug 1795 - Nantucket, Massachusetts
Baptism:
Death:
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Parents
Father: Tristam Folger (Est 1760- )
Mother: Rhoda Hussey (Est 1760- )
Spouses and Children
1. *Peleg Macy (9 Mar 1787 - )
Marriage: 3 Nov 1833 - Nantucket, Massachusetts
Status:
Peter Folger
Sex: M
Individual Information
Birth: 1617 - Norwich, England
Baptism:
Death: 1690 - Nantucket
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Spouses and Children
1. *Mary Morrill (Est 1620 - )
Marriage: 1644
Status:
Children:
1. Abiah Folger (1667-1752)
Notes
General:
Folger, Peter (1617-1690), translator and government official, was born in Norwich, England, the son of John Folger and Meriba Gibbs. Around 1635 Peter Folger immigrated to Massachusetts with his widower father. During the voyage to America on board the vessel Abigail, he met and fell in love with Mary Morrill, an indentured maidservant. Living at first in Dedham and Watertown, Folger worked as an artisan for nine years (he was variously skilled as a weaver, miller, surveyor, and shoemaker) to raise the sum of twenty pounds necessary to buy Morrill's freedom from Hugh Peters, a well-known Salem minister. The couple were married in 1644.Marriage Notes (Mary Morrill)
According to family tradition, Folger referred to his purchase of Morrill's indentures as "the best appropriation of money [he] had ever made." Together he and his wife had nine children who survived infancy, founding a family that generated several famous Americans with a flair for science and politics. Their daughter Abiah became the mother of Benjamin Franklin. Other lineal descendants of the Folger-Morrill union include whaling captain and marine geographer Timothy Folger, who charted the Gulf Stream; lawyer and congressman Walter Folger, who invented an astronomical clock; abolitionist and founder of the women's rights movement Lucretia Coffin Mott; and astronomer Maria Mitchell, discoverer of a comet and advocate of college education for women.
In the 1640s Folger moved with his growing family to the island of Martha's Vineyard, where he worked as a surveyor and became part of a Puritan mission to the Indians run by a father and son both named Thomas Mayhew. Quick to master the Algonquian language and described by Cotton Mather as "well learned in the scriptures," Folger acted as both schoolmaster and minister to the Vineyard Indians. In 1648 or 1649 Thomas Mayhew, Jr. extended the mission, including Folger's services, to nearby Nantucket Island. The mission's strategy favored the gradual replacement of the Indians' shamanistic religious leaders, called "powwows," with Indian pastor-preachers.
In 1659 Folger, who had radical spiritist tendencies, publicly declared himself a Baptist at a town meeting on Martha's Vineyard. That same year he aided a group of English settlers, led by Baptist Thomas Macy, in surveying Nantucket island, recently purchased from Thomas Mayhew, Jr. and populated by an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Indian inhabitants. Folger, who may have quarreled with Mayhew about his declaration, then appears to have moved for a time to Rhode Island, a more tolerant colony created in the 1630s by religious exiles from Puritan Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, the Nantucket settlers, twenty in number, formed a "proprietorship"--owning and governing the island in common according to a system of purchased shares. Conflict with the Nantucket Indians over land use was inevitable. In 1663 the proprietorship voted to grant a half-share to Peter Folger provided that he settle on the island with his family and "atend the English in the way of an Interpreter between the Indians and them upon al necessary ocasions." Folger developed close ties with the Indian elders and was highly successful at his assigned task. In a letter of 1677 Folger recalled his early days on Nantucket: "[N]o Englishman but myselfe could speake scarse a Word of Indian. . . . I am sure some of these men [the English] . . . had felt Arrows in their Sides for reall Wrong that they did them [the Indians] . . . had I not stepped in between them and made peace."
In 1665 Folger helped defuse a particularly dangerous situation when the Pokanoket sachem Metacomet ("King Philip") and a war party arrived on Nantucket to capture and execute John Gibbs, a Harvard-educated Indian who had offended Metacomet by speaking the name of his dead father. Folger persuaded the English to back him in negotiating for Gibbs's life. Impressed that the English would take risks to protect an Indian, a substantial number of Nantucket Indians supported them in defying Metacomet, who left the island without incident after being paid a small ransom for his intended victim. Gibbs later established the island's first Indian church.
The mainland was not so lucky when in 1675 an Indian informer against Metacomet was murdered and Puritan judges had three Wampanoags executed for the crime. The incident torched an Indian uprising, known as King Philip's War, that involved most of New England, as Metacomet had already been at work organizing an alliance of tribes to try to halt English encroachment on Indian lands. Nantucket remained at peace. Folger, however, was moved by the tragedy of King Philip's War to compose a pamphlet, A Looking-Glass for the Times, or The Former Spirit of New England Revived in This Generation (1676). Written in ballad quatrains, the pamphlet treats the Indian war as God's punishment upon the Puritans for "the sin of persecution" and "crualty to brethren" both red and white. Folger calls on "magistrate and minester" to "heale the lande" by repealing "cruel lawes" and ceasing "to cheat and to oppress." In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin found his grandfather's work notable for being "in favour of Liberty of Conscience, and in behalf of the Baptists, Quakers, and other Sectaries, that had been under Persecution," and judged it "written with a good deal of Decent Plainness and manly Freedom."
In addition to acting as an interpreter on Nantucket, Folger also worked as a teacher, surveyor, and miller, and became the island's clerk of courts. Like many of the growing community of "half-share men" assembled to support the original proprietors' development of Nantucket, he was an indispensable citizen. In the 1670s Folger became caught up in an island political struggle known as the "Half-Share Revolt," an event that brought half-share men and Indians together against the original proprietors, who had reserved to themselves and their descendants all future distributions of land and decisions about its use and governance.
A half-share man himself and spokesman for the Indians, Folger was briefly jailed for contempt of court in 1676 when he refused to hand over records vital to the dispute. According to Folger, in a March 1677 letter of complaint to Governor Andros, his imprisonment "set a fire to the whole island, for I . . . was so well known and so well beloved of English and Indians." The Half-Share Revolt was waged in town meetings, legal actions, and petitions to the governor before settlements were reached in the early 1680s allowing half-share men to participate in future divisions of land and addressing Indian grievances about grazing rights.
Folger died on Nantucket. His importance resides not only in his role as biological sire of a great American family, but as an intellectual forefather whose early concern with religious liberty, racial tolerance, freedom of expression, and democratic government would, through his own work and that of his descendants, help to shape the nation.
Bibliography
Biographical information on Folger can be found in Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1771-1778); Franklin B. Hough, ed., Papers Relating to the Islands of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Other Islands Adjacent (1856); Lydia S. Hinchman, Early Settlers of Nantucket: Their Associates and Descendants (1896); Alexander Starbuck, A History of Nantucket County, Island, and Town (1924); Florence Bennett Anderson, A Grandfather for Benjamin Franklin (1940); Edward Byers, The Nation of Nantucket: Society and Politics in an Early American Commercial Center, 1660-1820 (1987); and Nathaniel Philbrick, Away Offshore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602-1890 (1994).
Susan F. Beegel
Citation:
Susan F. Beegel. "Folger, Peter";
http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-02014.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Joanna FOLGER b: ABT 1645 in Martha's Vineyard
Eleazer FOLGER b: 1648 in Edgartown, MV
Bethiah FOLGER b: ABT 1645
Dorcas FOLGER b: ABT 1647
Bathsheba FOLGER b: ABT 1650
Patience FOLGER b: ABT 1652
Experience FOLGER b: ABT 1654
John FOLGER b: 1659
Experience FOLGER b: ABT 1661
Abiah FOLGER b: 15 AUG 1667 1
Tristam Folger
Sex: M
Individual Information
Birth: Est 1760 - Nantucket, Massachusetts
Baptism:
Death:
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Spouses and Children
1. *Rhoda Hussey (Est 1760 - )
Marriage:
Status:
Children:
1. Lydia Folger (1795- )
2. Lucretia Folger (1787-1832)
Anne Eleanor Folin
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 8 Oct 1904
Baptism:
Death: 21 May 1995 - Worcester, Massachusetts
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Events
• Soc Sec Num, 019-36-0748 in Massachusetts
Spouses and Children
1. *Walter Edmund Hildick (21 Aug 1906 - )
Marriage:
Status:
Children:
1. William Thacker Hildick (1936- )
2. Patricia Frances Hildick M.D. (1940- ) 2
Elizabeth Folland
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: Est 1660
Baptism:
Death: 1711 - Yarmouth, Massachusetts
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Parents
Father: Thomas Folland (Est 1620-1687)
Mother:
Spouses and Children
1. *Samuel Hall (Cir 1636 - 20 Jan 1694)
Marriage:
Status:
2. Nathaniel Jones (Est 1660 - )
Marriage: 27 Apr 1699 - (Yarmouth, Massachusetts)
Status:
Margaret Folland
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 4 Nov 1677 - Yarmouth, Plymouth colony 3
Baptism:
Death:
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Spouses and Children
1. *Benjamin Lewis (22 Nov 1671 - Cir 1726)
Marriage: 10 Feb 1697 - Barnstable, Massachusetts 4
Status:
Children:
1. Mary Lewis (1698- )
2. Lewis (Cir 1701-1701) 5
3. Seth Lewis (1704-Cir 1751)
4. Elizabeth Lewis (1711- )
5. Mercy Lewis (1712- )
6. Benjamin Lewis (1716- )
Notes
General:
Father: William FOLLAND
Mother: ELIZABETH
Mary Folland
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: Cir 1630
Baptism:
Death: Cir 1715 - Yarmouth, Massachusetts
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Parents
Father: Thomas Folland (Est 1620-1687)
Mother:
Spouses and Children
1. *John Whelden (4 Oct 1630 - 20 Nov 1711)
Marriage: Cir 1653
Status:
Children:
1. Joseph Whelden (Cir 1654- )
2. Elizabeth Whelden (Cir 1656-After 1721)
3. John Whelden (Cir 1658-1743)
4. Jonathan Whelden (Cir 1658-1743)
5. Thomas Wheldon (Cir 1660- )
Notes
Marriage Notes (John Whelden)
Maclean W. McLean, "John and Mary (Folland) Whelden of Yarmouth, Mass.," The American Genealogist, vol. 48, no. 1 (January 1972), pp. 4-11, infers that John Whelden married Mary Folland (born c. 1627 and died between 1711 and 1721) about 1653 based on information in several Folland family wills, there being no other evidence of the marriage and no probate records for either John or Mary, in addition to no records of the births or baptisms for their children.
Thomas Folland
Sex: M
Individual Information
Birth: Est 1620 - England
Baptism:
Death: May 1687 - Barnstable, Plymouth Colony
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Events
• Will, 1 Oct 1686 in Barnstable, Plymouth Colony
Spouses and Children
Deborah Lee Fondren
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 3 Jul 1954 - Wellfleet, Massachusetts 6
Baptism:
Death:
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Parents
Father: James D Fondren (Est 1930- )
Mother: Audrey L Gardner (Est 1930- )
James D Fondren
Sex: M
Individual Information
Birth: Est 1930
Baptism:
Death:
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Spouses and Children
1. *Audrey L Gardner (Est 1930 - )
Marriage:
Status:
Children:
1. Deborah Lee Fondren (1954- )
Ethel L Fontaine
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 1885
Baptism:
Death: 1946
Burial: Pleasant Hill Cemetery, Wellfleet
Cause of Death:
Spouses and Children
1. *Howard C Atwood (4 Jun 1896 - Jul 1980) 7
Marriage:
Status:
Notes
Marriage Notes (Howard C Atwood)
1929 res Quincy
John Alfred Fooker
Sex: M
Individual Information
Birth: Est 1880 - (New York)
Baptism:
Death:
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Spouses and Children
1. *Charlotte Elizabeth Rogers (Est 1880 - )
Marriage: 1905 - Maine
Status:
Sarah Elizabeth Foote
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 18 Nov 1810
Baptism:
Death:
Burial:
Cause of Death:
Spouses and Children
1. *John Tallman (16 Dec 1810 - Jun 1885)
Marriage: Jan 1837
Status:
Children:
1. Harriet Tallman (1840- )
Notes
Marriage Notes (John Tallman)
Not seen in census searches yet.