The following information about the Moland family is excerpted from “The Thirteen Days of August” by Helen H. Gemmell which was published by the Bucks County Historical Society in the Fall issue of their 1975 Journal (Vol. 1, No. 8). An abridged version of the can be viewed at http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/winter96/august.html
“John Moland was an important man in the province. Born in London about 1700, he studied law at the Inner Temple. Commissioned King’s Attorney in Pennsylvania, he came here by way of the West Indies. The earliest record of him in this country is a deed of purchase in 1737, which refers to him as being “of the island of St. Christophers.” The deed shows he bought 308 acres in Rockhill township in upper Bucks County from Thomas Freame, the husband of William Penn’s daughter Margaret. About the same time he married Catherine Hutchinson, of New Castle, Delaware.”
“In 1740 Moland petitioned the court in Newtown for admittance as attorney of the Court of Common Pleas, and was accepted “according to his request”. During the next two decades his name appears in connection with cases before the Bucks County court, and several times he is referred to as “Justice.” Sometime prior to 1742 he was admitted to the Philadelphia bar, and acquired a reputation of being one of its ablest members.”
John Moland died in 1761. “John Moland’s will left his wife ‘free use of the house and plantation’ (plus 14 pounds a year out of the rent of the Northern Liberties estate), provided she remain ‘sole’ and did not ‘convere’ with her son Thomas. His three daughters – Elizabeth, Hannah and Grace and the youngest son, Joseph, inherited the estate.”
“She had been left with eight children, six of them under twenty one. “
“According to Moland’s will, two younger sons, Robert and William, were to be ‘Bred up and put out Apprentices’ out of the profits of the estate.”
“With three daughters abroad, one son in the British Army, one in the American Army, and the other three sons out of the picture, the widow Moland was quite alone by the time of the Revolution.”
Ancestry.com history of family
The following is an biographical summary of John Moland’s son, William, which was submitted to us by Adam Boyd, direct descendant of William.
MOLAND, William, born 5 Nov 1749 in Philadelphia; lost his father at the age of eleven; educated in the field of medicine; said to be a man of culture and talents; married Hannah Noble 19 Oct 1773 in Pennsylvania; served as a surgeon in the Revolutionary army; said to have been present with General George Washington in several of his most important battles; went to Philadelphia in the spring of 1778, when it was under the control of the British, and sailed to the West Indies seeking financial assistance from his brother; returned Aug 1778; attainted of high treason 8 May 1778 by the Pennsylvania Supreme Executive Council; listed in the sixth class of the militia in Plumstead Township, Bucks County 19 May 1781; recommended for pardon to John Dickinson, whom his father had trained in law, 28 Jul 1783; referred to at the time he was recommended for pardon as an imprudent young man who cared little about the cause of the Revolutionary War; granted a pardon 5 Sep 1788; owned 110 acres in Warminster Township in 1785; worked as a physician and had, at one time, a lucrative practice; divorced 20 Mar 1811 by an act of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania; said by his wife to be a man of intemperance who mistreated and abused her; driven by alcoholism to life at the alms house, where he is said to have died a miserable death; died 24 Apr 1826 at the alms house in Warwick Township; interment in a private graveyard in Bucks County.
Sources: [Anonymous], Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, passed at a season which was begun and held at the borough of Lancaster, on Tuesday, the second day of December, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and ten, and of the independence of the United States of America the thirty-fifth (Philadelphia: John Bioren, 1811), 74.[Anonymous], Notices of Marriages and Deaths in Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, 1826-1830, Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, volume 79 (Philadelphia: no publisher, 1905), 140. [Anonymous], Bucks County Intelligencer deaths, 1804-1834, transcribed from the several newspapers which preceded the Bucks County Intelligencer as well as the Bucks County Intelligencer (Doylestown, Pennsylvania: Bucks County Historical Society, 1989), 71.