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Hitchen
Holland
Hitchen Holland probably was the son of Henry Holland and Jenny Seeley. His place of birth is unknown but perhaps he was named for Henry Holland's mother's family - the Hitchens.
About
1735, he married twenty-year-old Margaret Collins
- the daughter of a garrison officer. The couple
had at least eight children between 1736 and 1756.
Only the last five were baptized in Albany churches
after 1749 - permitting the inference that they were
not living in Albany before then.
Hitchen
Holland's career seems to have been as a soldier,
officer, and then official at the trading post of
Oswego. By the late 1740s, he was referred to as
the commander and commissary at Oswego. Beginning
in 1747, he also held a commission as lieutenant
in the New York Regiment of the British army.
In
1751, he unsuccessfully sought the apointment as
Albany sheriff. In that year, he was commissioned
a justice of the peace for Oswego. Holland served
as commissary at Oswego until 1756 when the concentration
of British forces there relegated the Oswego caretaker
to a subordinate position. He endured the seige and
capture of Oswego by the French. According to William
Johnson, Holland "suffered greatly" there.
"In poor health," Hitchen Holland was sent home from Oswego in August 1756. He retreated to his home south of Albany to convalesce. At that point, he retired from public life - with his Albany home coming under the care of his new son-in-law, postmaster Henry Van Schaack.
His
will filed in February 1761 stated that he was "of Rensselaerwswyck" and in "good health." Although his wife was dead, he mentioned their four living children who were to share his real and personal property which included three slaves. Hitchen Holland died in July 1762 and was buried from the Albany Dutch church.
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Notes: The
life of Hitchen Holland is CAP biography number
8489. Our presentation on the Holland family is further
informed by the work of genealogist Henry Hoff
in an article published in New
York Genealogical and Biographical Record volume 111:219-20,
and in notes on file at the project offices. However,
Hitchen Holland was not mentioned in the will of
Edward Holland - filed in 1756. Also, because he
married a woman born in 1715 and continued to father
children until 1756, perhaps he was a very young
son of Henry and Jenny or was a young kinsman brought
over from Europe during the second decade of the
eighteenth century!
By Stefan Bielinski, Colonial Albany Social History Project [http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany]
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