Deep Roots: The Enduring Wisdom of Our Ancestors’ Approach to Family History
By E.R. Van Kleeck, Assistant State Commissioner of Adult Education
de Halve Maen, July 1952
I am not even as an amateur in this field; I am purely a novice. Also, I cannot discuss “Shaking the Family Tree” without talking about my own family, as I know in any detail only my own lines.
There has been a greatly increased emphasis in recent years on the study of American history in our New York State schools. In this State, a larger proportion of high school students study more American history today than ever before. This matter of interesting young people in history and especially in local history is of great importance. We can be sure that we can never properly appreciate the blessings of our form of government and of our way of life if we have no knowledge of the struggles and hardships that made America.
The fact of the matter is that most Americans don’t know much about their ancestors. Of one hundred randomly selected adults, how many do you suppose could give the maiden names of all of their four great-grandmothers, even if you gave them a few months to look up the data?
Names and dates, and the relationships of names and dates, are the stuff of genealogy; hence our preoccupation with names. With Dutch ancestry especially, proper names pose a knotty problem. Let me illustrate with my own ancestors in the seventh, eighth, and ninth generations.
The immigrant was Barent Baltus, that is, Baltus’ Barent. He was Barent (Bernard), the son of Baltus. (No family name at all, as you see). The emigrant’s son, also an emigrant, though he came over as a child, wasn’t a Baltus. He was Baltus Barentsen, sometimes written Baltus Barents; that is, he was Baltus, son of Barent. He obviously was the eldest son, for he was given his grandfather’s name, which procedure I shall discuss a bit later. He it was who added the “Van Kleeck” (in any one of half a dozen spellings as fancy dictated). Thus, his eldest son, fortunately for genealogists, was of course Barent Van Kleeck. Had the family name not meanwhile been added, this child would have been Barent Baltus, right back where we started with the emigrant.
But take the case of sons other than the first, in the years back before the family names were assumed by most of the emigrants, Jan Barents (that is, John, the son of Barent) might name a son Pieter. He would, of course, not be Pieter Barents. He would be Pieter Jansen. If Pieter Jansen called one of his sons Thomas, the child would be neither Thomas Barents nor Thomas Jansen. He would be Thomas Pieterson!
Or take the name of Martin. A good many boys in Holland in the century after 1517 were given the name of Martin, just like our Douglas MacArthur Joneses. A generation later, Martinsens therefore abounded, most of them not related to each other, despite their common last name. So far as I know, for example, the Roosevelts (Claes Martensen van Roosevelt) were not relatives of the Van Benthuysens (Paulus Martense van Benthuysen). Luckily, in this case, each of these two Martensens added a family name, one showing that he came from the rose field and the other from Benthuysen.
An unhappy result of this early Dutch system of names was that sons of the same family would in turn have sons with quite different family names. The Ryerson and the Adriance families of Dutchess County are a good example. Some Dutchman had two sons, one of whom he named Adrian and the other Ryer. To this day, the descendants of Adrian are known as Adriance, a corruption of Adriansen, or Adrianse, whereas the descendants of Adrian’s brother Ryer form the Ryerson family.
Or take the case of my Van Blaricum line. (Van Laer would use the small “v” and put a comma ahead of the “van,” to emphasize that the family name was not really Van Blaricum when they emigrated, but that they came from Blaricum, near Naarden, in the province of North Holland. However, we must not be too fussy about that, or nearly all of us will also lose our “vans,” one fears!) At any rate, the wheelwright, Lubbert Gysbertsen van Blaricum, with or without the comma, obviously was Lubbert, the son of Gysbert. His sons, three of whom accompanied him and their mother in 1634 to New Netherland, were not Gysbertsens but were Lubbertsens, and later records of them can be found under that name in New York and Brooklyn. Lubbert’s daughter, similarly, had no Gysbertsen in her name. She, the one who became the mother-in-law of my Van Kleeck ancestor, was known as Ybetje (Ida) Lubberts, in other words, Lubbert’s Ida.
There is an interesting little article on Dutch names in the 1896 Yearbook of the Holland Society. It mentions that family names were taken from a man’s place of birth or of residence, so that Jan, born in Deventer, became John Vandeventer, while Jan, born in the Wyck, became John Van Wyck, or John Vander Wyck. Or one’s occupation furnished the name, so that Jan the cooper became Jan Kuyper, and Jan, the mason, was Jan Metselaer.
As various writers advise, it is easy to confuse the Dutch and the French “de.” The French “de” usually has the same meaning as the Dutch “van,” that is, it means “of” or “from.” “De le Mer,” like “Van der Zee,” means “from the sea.” The Dutch “de,” however, means simply “the,” as do the variants “den” and “der” or even “ten.” “Ten Eyck,” as you know, means simply “the oak.” “Van de Bogart” means “from the orchard.” “Van Buren” means “from” or “of” the city of Buren.
Those of the Dutchmen who wrote good Dutch were often not very literate in English, and both English and Dutch did a great deal of what we can most complimentarily call phonetic spelling. When, after the English occupation, for example, a French family name like Le Comte was translated by Dutch neighbors into DeGraeff and then expressed in what was thought would be a suitable English spelling, the results were often strange and wonderful.
Michael Pieterse Palmatier, who came over to New Netherland in 1663 with his father, Pierre Palmatier, married Neeltje (Cornelia) Jans Damen, and named one of his sons Damen for his wife’s family. A grandson of this Damen signed himself at times Daimon, and the name was also often spelled Damas. From this, someone apparently got the idea that it was a “Dutchy” mispronunciation of Thomas (“Damas”)! (!) and that is how the Thomases got started in my Palmatier line.
The Larroways down in Schoharie County similarly are really Le Roys, and there is a story that the males christened Jonas in the Freer family of New Paltz resulted from someone’s well-meaning attempt to correct what he thought was a misspelling of Jonar. The Jonar being in turn some Dutchman’s way of writing what he had understood to be the sound of a sort of Dutch-English pronunciation of Leonard!
Dutch equivalents of given names are not so troublesome. One just translates:
Fytie — Sophia
Tryntje — Catherine
Divertjen — Deborah
Neeltje — Cornelia
Antje — Anna
Ariantje — Harriet
The Dutch had an ingenious system for naming the first four children born to any marriage. Under this plan, the first-born son would be named for his father’s father. The second would be named for his mother’s father. The first-born daughter would be named for her mother’s mother, and the second for her father’s mother. Thus, if one can get the names of the first four children of any marriage, and if, by the dates it is evident that they were the first four and that there was no time for any other children to be born in between and perhaps to have died very young (as so very, very many of the children did in those days, as witness the First Church burial records), one can very easily identify the parents of the father. Often one can also identify the parents of the mother, even if the record of her marriage has never been found.
A serious drawback of the Dutch system may be illustrated by Van Kleeck reference. Colonel Barent Van Kleeck, son of the first settler of Poughkeepsie, had at least fourteen children. Each of the sons would automatically name his first son Barent. Thus two generations after the Colonel there were enough Barent Van Kleecks in Dutchess County to make possible a generous representation on both the patriot and the Tory sides in the Revolution!
The Dutch were not so much given to the practice of christening children, even after the first four, with names of desirable abstract qualities, like Faith and Hope and Charity. The English were, however, great for this custom, as the distinguished New Haven genealogist, Donald Lines Jacobus, reminds us in his delightful book. I have found no girl named Obedience in my New England lines, but I do find a Mindwell Taylor and an Experience Woodward and Honor Treat. And, of course, in both Dutch and English lines, one finds the Biblical names. When the baptism of little French Huguenot Jeanne Freer (Frere) of New Paltz was recorded in the Dutch Church records at Kingston in 1713, it went in as Jannetje, but by the time she was an old lady—the women who survived to age 45 usually did live to ripe old ages, you know—the English had become so numerous in western Dutchess County, where she spent her married life, that she was Jane!
You will find that it is usually much more difficult to trace female lines. The males, who apparently kept the records while the women often signed with their marks, not their names, were just a bit careless at times. I have been reading Governor William Bradford’s “Of Plimouth Plantation,” and also Bradford Smith’s recent “Bradford of Plymouth,” a fascinating book based in part on the Governor’s account. Smith says that William mentions his first wife, Dorothy, only once in the entire volume. And what shall we think of the Rev. Samuel Dudley, eldest of the sons of Governor Thomas Dudley of the Massachusetts Bay Colony? He had eighteen children by his three wives, including eight by the third one. He was a great writer, but no single word has been discovered wherein he set down her maiden name!
Also, in your searching, don’t let the word “cousin” mislead you. It didn’t convey the meaning three centuries ago that it does now. You might then address your nephew or your niece as “cousin;” in fact, that was the custom. Similarly, “Junior” was closer then to its etymological base than it is today. Among the Dutch especially, a son was rarely given his father’s name until at least two and often four or five other Christian names had been bestowed upon earlier sons. “Junior” usually meant just what the Latin says, “younger.” Hugo Freer, Junior, was far more likely to be just the younger of two men of that name living in the same general locality and is far more likely to have been a nephew or a first or second cousin than a son of Hugo Freer, Senior.
Then there is the weak branch in the family tree that is caused by lost records. The First Church at Albany goes back to 1612, when as you know it was located down on Broadway, near where Albert Andriessen Bradt’s daughter, Eva Albertse Bradt de Hooges, lived during her first marriage and presumably at the time she married her second husband, Roeloff Swartwout. But there are no baptism records before 1683. My friend, Mr. Howard McConville, the Schenectady genealogist, asked me, therefore, how it was that I claimed that Barent Van Kleeck (who accompanied his parents, Baltus Barentsen Van Kleeck and Tryntje Jans Buys, to Poughkeepsie when they founded that place in 1687) had been born in Albany in 1677, six years before there are records of baptisms here. The answer, this time, was easy; when Barent married Antoinette Palrnatier in 1701 in the Kingston Dutch Church—and its baptism and marriage records are marvelously helpful—his year and place of birth were both recorded.
A record may not be lost but it may be inaccurate. For example, O’Callaghan and Munsell erred on the immigration dates for the early Dutch settlers of Albany, as Van Laer proved. From a statement made about 1687 by Roeloff Swartwout concerning his late father-in-law, Albert Andriessen Bradt, de Noorman (that is the Norman from Frederikstaad, Norway), to the effect that Albert had been one of the oldest and earliest settlers in Rensselaerswyck, it was assumed that this meant 1630, whereas the truth was that Albert arrived in 1637. There can be no doubt about that, as is well known to you who have read the thirty pages in the Van Rensselaer-Bowier Manuscripts, wherein is reprinted verbatim the ship’s log. It is here, you recall, that the thrilling story is told of that perilous and stormy trip of five months, as well as the story of the birth at sea during the storm of one of the children of Albert and his wife, Annetie Barents Van Rotmers. The infant was christened Storm van der zee, the child whose descendants later dropped the name Bradt and became the Vanderzecs of our membership. If you haven’t read the Van Rensselaer-Bowier Manuscripts, be sure to do so, as they are extremely interesting, with their long letters from the first patroon to his colonists, our ancestors.
In aiding you in shaking the family tree, some public officers are most helpful. That is true of Miss Griffiths, the Deputy City Registrar in Albany, and Miss McNamara in the Bureau of Vital Statistics of the State Health Department. The latter has marriage and death records for most of the State since 1880, and often these will show the names and places of birth of the parents of people who died seventy years ago. For fifty cents a name—a dollar now under a new law—they will search these for you, and you may thus be able to determine places of burial, dates of death, ages, etc.
A slippery branch on the family tree is the old “three brothers” story. According to this, practically every family that emigrated to America was headed by “three brothers who came over.” I never heard this particular story about my own Van Kleeck family until just recently; and then I heard it almost the same week from two different sources. As in the cases of most families, there is not a word of truth in it.
In shaking the family tree, there is one danger you must avoid if possible. Much to my regret, I didn’t and now it is too late. Do not wait until all your parents, grandparents, uncles, and great-aunts have passed on. Begin while they are living to drain from them every drop of genealogical information (or misinformation) that they possess. Even though a large share of what they, in all sincerity, may tell you may be wrong, these rumors, or to give them a nicer name, these traditions, often afford you valuable leads to accurate data.
One can sometimes get help from the wills and the letters of administration to be found in surrogate’s offices. Similarly, in the offices of county clerks, many a missing fact can be discovered through consulting first the various indexes, like those of the mortgages, the deeds, the satisfactions of mortgages, etc., and then the documents themselves.
Albany County covered so much territory until the end of the eighteenth century that records which one might expect to find elsewhere, as for example at Troy or Schoharie, are often there. When the first federal census was taken in 1790, the present Rensselaer County was part of Albany County, for example. Albany has printed in book form an alphabetical list of the wills, and the surrogate’s office has marked one copy of it to indicate for a particular will whether they have additional papers bearing on it. I believe also that the Van Rensselaer Estate still has an office in Albany, as matters connected with the old quit-claims, the rents, and other land transactions still come up in connection with land titles. Incidentally, the February issue of Bookmark, the monthly publication of the State Library, has four pages of bibliography on the Albany area, including much fiction.
In tasting the fruit of the family tree, you must be prepared to take the bitter with the sweet. As nearly as I can determine from rummaging in the various books in which the State has reprinted verbatim the court records of Fort Orange, one of the early settlers and his immediate male descendants must have furnished the police and civil courts, particularly the former, with a good share of their work for a decade or more!
In searching for our ancestors, we must not make the mistake of thinking that all of them who came here were Dutch. Most of them were, but I believe that the only one of the settlers represented in this Society who emigrated before 1630, namely Joris (George) Jansen de Rapalje, who, with his wife Catalina Trico, came from Rochelle, France, in 1624, or 1623 as the earlier accounts erroneously had it, wasn’t Dutch. The other settlers represented in this Society, who came starting in 1630, were mostly Dutch as the distinguished consulting genealogist of this Society, Dr. A. J. F. van Laer, retired State architect, shows in his list in the monumental Van Rensselaer-Bowier Manuscripts, which he translated and edited. It was this list which straightened out the O’Callaghan and Munsell errors, and thus this Society, unlike most other older ancestral organizations, escaped some troublesome, not to say amusing, mistakes with respect to genealogy.
In this connection, Gilbert H. Deane, whose delightful and really indispensable book, “Searching for Your Ancestors,” I commend to all of you, recounts an especially entertaining anecdote. In the chapter which he devotes entirely to one of the most eminent of all these groups, he tells of a prominent lady who joined that distinguished organization years ago (back before it had assembled its corps of genealogists and its own library of thirty-odd thousand volumes, I hasten to add) and who based her lineage papers on the Revolutionary Services of “a brave young man who marched to the defense of Bennington in 1777.” Later, fortunately after it was too late to be of any importance to the lady in this life, it was discovered that there was another man of exactly the same name; that he was a notorious Tory; and that it was from the latter rather than from the patriot that the by-then deceased Regent was descended!
But as to the nationality of our emigrant ancestors, Van Laer lists 23 male adult immigrants to Rensselaerswyck for 1630-34. I find that it is impossible to be sure of the nationality of 4; that 17 were definitely Dutchmen; one was Swedish; one a Dane; and three Norwegian. These last three did not include old Albert Andriessen Brack, de Noorman, who arrived in 1637, and who I think has more descendants in this Society than has any other emigrant, nor did it include his brother, Arent Andriessen Bradt. Thus if we assume that the four doubtful were Dutch, 21 of the 26 were Dutch and the remaining 5 were 1 Scandinavians and 1 Dane.
As to the 1636-37 voyagers, I count twenty-nine adult males aboard that ship, including Albert, and I suppose they include the ancestors of a good many of us here. Albert, as you well know, is the ancestor of all the Bradts in this Society except those descended from his brother, and Albert (through three daughters) is also the ancestor of some of the Slingerlands, the Swartwouts, the Van Eckelens, as well as of the Van der Zees (through his son Storm.) Nearly all of the 29 men who arrived in 1637 were definitely Dutch. I have mentioned the two Norwegians, and there may have been a third. There was also “Jean Labatie fransman,” that is, Frenchman. That would make 25 Dutchmen among the 29.
Thus of the 26 adult males, 1630-1634, and the 29 who arrived in 1637, a total of 55, 42 were surely Dutch and probably 4 more, or all but 9 of the 55. Of the 9, six were Norwegians.
As to how many of the immigrants to New Netherland before 1630 weren’t really Dutch but were, for example, either French Huguenots or perhaps Belgian Walloons, and as to how many immigrants were Walloons from the part of the Low Countries that we now know as Belgium, I wouldn’t assume even to guess. About the time of the tercentenary of New Amsterdam, a Mr. Henry G. Bayer, who was quite sure that most of the people in the original Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island were really Belgian, published a whole book to try to prove his point. I refer you to it — “The Belgians, First-Settlers in New York and the Middle States,” he calls it. He quotes the historians’ statements that the thirty families who sailed in March, 1624, on the ship the New Netherland, were “mostly Walloons.” Of the 30 families, eighteen you recall, came up the river in the ship to the patroon’s colony here. Only one of them, Joris Jansen de Rapalje, is thus far represented in this Society’s membership, due to the absence of records of the names of the others.
To get some of the more delicious fruit by shaking the family tree, various specialties can be investigated further. For example, you can consolidate the materials concerning all of the forebears who fought in the Colonial wars, or in the Revolution. Or you can bring together everything about the immigrant ancestor of each line. After that, you can take those who were first or original settlers of various communities. You can take their religious affiliations and see how many were dominies or rectors, or elders and deacons. You can develop the material on their houses, or you can run down the communities named for families from which you are descended. Other points of interest will occur to everyone.
Or you can follow up further some of the unsolved problems. Some questions are never answered. You can jot down in anecdotal form some of the more interesting incidents you discover, for some branches of the family tree are heavy with juicy fruit. For example, the members of one branch of the New Paltz Freers, ‘though well enough off to be able to furnish a substantial percentage of the funds of the Huguenot Church, nevertheless were accustomed to walk into the village on Sunday from Bontecoe (named for the ship, the Spotted or Brindled Cow, on which so many came from Holland), barefoot, carrying their shoes in their hands. When they arrived, they put on the shoes for the service.
When old Baltus and Tryntje Van Kleeck, the first settlers of Poughkeepsie, died, one of their sons occupied the old homestead. He died, leaving his wife with six young children. Shortly after, she married a Mr. Francis Filkins, author of the noted diary of a country storekeeper and by him she soon had seven more children. Two of them died, leaving eleven children and two adults in their house. However, it was spacious—quite grand, indeed, for those days. In fact, besides the cellar, which was used as a kitchen, it had fire rooms. So Tryntje — she was a Tryntje too — took in roomers and boarders! One of these was a bright young lawyer, Bartholomew Crannell, who later became Poughkeepsie’s most prominent Tory. He married one of the Van Kleeck step-daughters of Filkins, also a Tryntje, named for her father’s mother, the first settler, and for a while they lived with the in-laws.
I have been much amused by the story of how Poughkeepsie, rather than the then-larger Fishkill, got the Anglican rectory when the two new parishes got their first rector who served them both, and of how Bartholomew and Tryntje married off one of their five daughters to this first rector.
One can speculate, too, as to how Jannetje Freer of New Paltz and Ahasuerus Van Kleeck of Poughkeepsie became acquainted. There was the Hudson River and twelve miles of wilderness between them (unless Ahasuerus didn’t go directly west to New Paltz, but instead went up the river to Kingston and then southwest over the rude road to New Paltz). You and I could literally get to San Francisco in about the same time and far more conveniently today than he could go from Poughkeepsie to New Paltz 200-odd years ago.
Perhaps the marriage records of the two families give the key to this romance. For we find that when Michael Van Kleeck, older brother of Ahasuerus and named for their maternal grandfather, Michael Pieterse Palmatier, married Blandina Freer, older sister of Jannetje, and named for one of their Le Roy ancestors, their attendants were the then-unmarried Ahasuerus and Jannetje. Is it far-fetched to imagine that this wedding was the occasion of the first meeting of this young couple who later became husband and wife?
Then there is a whole grist of well-documented yarns about Roeloff Swartwout, who lived in Beverwyck for a few years after he married Anthony de Hooges’ widow (Albert, de Noorman’s daughter, Eva) before he went down to Esopus (Kingston). Roeloff must have been a very ingenious young man, for on a trip back to Holland he somehow persuaded the Dutch West India Company to commission him as Scout, or Sheriff, of Esopus. The job at that time carried large judicial and executive functions in addition to those that we nowadays associate with the office of sheriff. When Roeloff came back with that order, old Pieter Stuyvesant, who, unlike the rest of us Dutch, was never noted for his sweet disposition, literally “blew his top.” He “told off” the West India Company directors in no uncertain terms. There weren’t enough people in all Esopus and Wiltwyck for any such office and court, he wrote the directors, and, even if there were, about the last person he would want as Schout would be this immature and incompetent Roeloff. Pieter, in fact, overdid his objections to the point where the Directors, in order to show who was boss, had to turn on him with almost equal force. They directed him to honor their orders, and honor them he did when it came to the showdown.
Do not get started on genealogy unless you are prepared to keep going. An interest in genealogy is often a fatal bug or disease. The germ is insidious; the prognosis is bad. There is little that anyone can do for the patient. Sulfa, penicillin, or even aureomycin, will not reach this virus. I will not say that the ailment is contagious; people in the same family, though closely exposed, often show remarkable resistance to infection. Indeed, they may develop complete immunity. But, for the afflicted person himself, there is often no permanent cure, and release for the sufferer comes only when the final date is written after his own name on the family’s genealogical chart.
(The above is taken from an address given by Mr. Van Kleeck, a member of this society, before the Dutch Settlers Society of Albany)
Image: Ahnentafel von Hezog Ludwig (1568-1593), by Jakob Lederlein (1550-1604