Joseph Cole was born 11 Jan 1746 in Harwich, Massachusetts. He was the third of eleven children born to Elisha and Hannah (Smalley) Cole. The Smalley and the Cole families were longtime residents of Cape Cod. Joseph’s great-great-grandfather, Daniel Cole, had come from England in the 1630’s with two of his brothers. Joseph’s great-grandmother, Hannah Snow, was a descendant of Mayflower passenger Stephen Hopkins. Even so, before Joseph was a year old his, father, Elisha Cole, moved the family to Fredericksburg, Dutchess (now Putnam) County, New York. There, Elisha built a cabin near a branch of the Croton River and set up a grist mill. He also served as a Baptist minister.
Nearly thirty years passed between the time the Cole family settled in Dutchess County and the start of the American Revolution. Elisha and Hannah had raised eleven children to adulthood by then. Many of them were married with families living in the same area.
During the Revolution, Joseph Cole served as a private in the Col. Ludenton’s 7th Regiment of the Dutchess County Militia. He served alongside his father, Elisha, three brothers and a nephew. He was married at the time to Rebecca Berry and her father, Jabez Berry, was a member of the 7th Regiment as well. By the start of the war, she and Joseph had three children. They would eventually have 12.
Rebecca died in February of 1801. Their youngest child was just six years old. Joseph then married Susanna Knapp, the widow of Obadiah Chase, who had also been a member of the 7th Regiment. She had eleven children from her first marriage.
Joseph Cole died 24 Feb 1814 at the age of sixty-eight. He was buried in a family cemetery on the Cole farm in Carmel, Putnam County, New York.
References and Notes
Roberts, New York in the Revolution, p149, 150.
Joseph O. Curtis, Descendants of Elisha Cole (New York, Tobias A. Wright, 1909), 31-32.