St. Alban the Martyr UEL Memorial Church
St. Alban the Martyr Memorial Church (http://www.uelac.org/St-Alban/), Adolphustown, Ontario, was built in 1884 as a memorial to United Empire Loyalists. The interior of the church is encircled by an exceptionally beautiful tile frieze consisting of sixty-four tiles bearing inscriptions commemorating early Loyalists.
The tiles have long been valued for their historical significance as testimony to lives of early Loyalists but it was only recently, when work was begun on a book to compile biographies of the individuals memorialized that the intrinsic artistic value of the tiles themselves came to be appreciated.
SILLS, John Conrad: 1738 - 1817
Tile ordered and paid for by Geoffrey Wright, Belleville, Ontario, January 1889 Conrad Sills is the pioneer ancestor of the Sills family, well-known in the Adolphustown and South Fredericksburgh, Ontario area where the small hamlet of Sillsville is located. Family descendants are widespread throughout Canada today. Born in Rothenbergen, Hesse, Germany in 1738, Johannes Conrad Sell (as he was christened) was known as Conrad Sills. He came with his family to America in 1763 and the family name, at the hands of various civil servants and officiating clergy, became Sill, then Sills, thus assimilating to a name, probably English, that had been in North America from the 1600s. Conrad married and eventually settled in Pennsylvania where he farmed on the Susquehanna River until 1777 when, swept up by the American Revolution, he joined the Loyalist forces. He served with Butler’s Rangers until 1780. His wife died in 1779 and only he and his daughter, Margaret, and three young sons, Lawrence, John and George, are listed on the muster roll of a refugee camp in Quebec near Three Rivers after the war.
In his petition for compensation for his losses in the war, Conrad states that he sent his three sons, as soon as they were old enough, into Sir John Johnson’s regiment, the King’s Royal Regiment of New York (KRRNY). At the time of enlistment, George was nine, John eleven, and Lawrence thirteen. On the KRRNY muster roll, a notation for George reads “He is the second youngest lad to serve in the KRR.”(1)
Conrad later worked as a carter in Montreal, where his son George recalled having lived. In 1782, in Three Rivers, Conrad married Anne Macnab, the widow of Dr. James Macnab (Tile # 60). Conrad and Anne had one son who remained in Quebec, when in July 1784, along with other members of the disbanded KRRNY, the Sills men, and their sister Margaret moved to settle in Fredericksburgh. The boys drew lot 1, concession 1, Fredericksburgh.
Conrad soon made a trip to Niagara where his former company of Butler’s Rangers had settled, perhaps to check on his prospects there, but he returned and settled in Fredericksburgh. His three eldest sons later transferred the original homestead to him, while they acquired more land elsewhere. Lawrence settled in Loughborough Township, north of Kingston; John died in 1800; George remained in Fredericksburgh (Tile # 7).(2)
Conrad was married for a third time in 1790 to Sarah Blanchard and they settled to raise a large family of seven daughters and two sons, in the Fredericksburgh area. Each of these, as a child of a U.E.L., was entitled to 200 acres of land.
* The 1784 date on the tile refers to the date of recognition of U.E.L. status, not date of birth.
References
1. Ernest A. Cruikshank, King’s Royal Regiment of New York, rev. ed. ( Global Heritage Press, 1984), p. 308.
2. Robert Freeman (descendant), personal letter to St. Alban’s History Committee Chairperson (Toronto, 1996).
A book about the tiles is available at http://www.uelac.org/St-Alban/book-Loyalist-Tiles-of-St-Albans.php