Part V · THE PEOPLE WHO KEPT THIS · Chapter 18

Copied for Frank K. Swain

Fonthill, Doylestown · The Hague · Denver · 1896–1998

In the record Frank King Swain (1876–1954) · Anne Price Raike (d. 1985) · Marie Metzgar · Lewis Wayne Nelson (d. 1996) · Shirley Ann Cruzen Stevens · William B. Bogardus · Warren D. Cruise · Wilma Day Cruise · A. A. M. Stols

At the foot of the 1729 will of Derrick Kroesen — the one that gave Henry³ the east end of the house and "my Negro man Fortune" — there is a line in square brackets that this book has quoted again and again without stopping to read it: "[Copied March 14, 1932 by Mrs. F.W. (Anne) Raike for Frank K. Swain. Book 1, Page 155, file 30.]" [1]. Under the 1720 Borden deed: "[Copied by Warren Cruise from copy of original deed furnished by Spruance Library, Bucks County Historical Society, Doylestown, PA.]" Under the 1712 deed: "[Copied from original document by Ann Raike for Frank K. Swain in 1933]." Under a note on the children of Derrick and Elizabeth: "FRANK KING SWAIN 'Fonthill' (Descendant) wrote the following note in 1933: (Anne Raike Files)" [1]. Parts II and III of this book are made of documents, and every one of them came down a chain of hands. Part V is about the hands.

The man at Fonthill

Frank King Swain was born in 1876 and was twenty years old when Henry Chapman Mercer hired him — to dig. Mercer was the Doylestown archaeologist, collector and tile-maker whose Moravian Pottery and Tile Works supplied the floors of the Pennsylvania State Capitol, and whose house, Fonthill, he poured in reinforced concrete between 1908 and 1912: forty-four rooms, eighteen fireplaces, two hundred windows, every surface set with his own tiles. Swain went from the digs to the pottery, became its manager, married Mercer's housekeeper, Laura Long, in 1925, and when Mercer died in 1930 and left the castle in trust as a museum, it was on the condition that the Swains could live in it for the rest of their lives. Frank did — he inherited the pottery, ran it, and died at Fonthill in 1954; Laura stayed on giving occasional tours until her death in 1975 [2].

He was also a Kroesen. Cruise calls him "Frank King Swain 'Fonthill' (Descendant)" and dates his family research from the 1920s to "the late 1940s" [3]. So the earliest keeper of this family's record was a man who spent his working life inside another man's monument to the idea that ordinary tools and ordinary papers were worth keeping — Mercer's museum in Doylestown is tens of thousands of pre-industrial hand tools in a concrete tower — and who, in the middle of the Depression, sent a woman to the Bucks County courthouse to copy his ancestors' wills. The book cannot say whether Mercer's example made Swain a genealogist or only made him a man with the leisure and the county connections to be one; the two are hard to separate in a man who lived in that house. What survives of his work survives because of the woman.

Anne Raike's seven volumes

Anne Price Raike of Pennsylvania, "Mrs. F.W. Raike," died in 1985. Cruise's tribute is the fullest thing anyone has written about her:

"Book 1, Page 155, file 30" — the citation under Derrick's will — is a page in one of those seven volumes. Every Bucks County document in this book that is not from the Spruance Library is from them: the 1712 and 1720 deeds, the wills of 1729, 1758, 1783 and 1788, the codicils, the note on the date-stone of the 1730 house ("Built by D.K. 1730. Rebuilt by A.C. 1871"), which Raike wrote up in 1935 when a new house was raised on the old foundation and the stone "again placed in the east gable" [1]. She also supplied the one piece of pure inference the book has adopted about Elizabeth Cregier's arrival in Bucks County — that "Derrick and Elizabeth lived with Neeltje and Carl when they first arrived," which Cruise thought "would make sense" and which an earlier chapter used [1]. Where the seven volumes are now, the book does not know. Cruise had them in Denver in 1998. That is the first entry on Part V's list of things to find.

The Hague, 1943

The strangest keeper in the chain never knew the family existed. In 1943, in The Hague, in the fourth year of the German occupation, a Mr. A. A. M. Stols compiled a genealogy of a Dutch couple named F. J. Kroesen and M. J. Fibres, tracing their line back to 1752 and noting references to the name "back to the early Middle Ages" and a farm or hamlet called Kroesenhof [4]. His introduction records a loss: a written "Family tree" of the Kroesens, drawn up by an archivist named Hingman of the Algemeen Rijksarchief, had been in the couple's possession in 1891; when the widow died that year it passed to her sons, who were in the Dutch East Indies, and when the last of them died in 1897 "what the fate of that 'Family tree' further became is unknown … It is certain that it did not come into the possession of another member of the family." The oldest living Kroesen in 1943, a Mrs. M. J. Blankert-Kroesen, "remembers this document very well" [4]. The Kroesens, she said, had belonged to the brewers' guild.

Cruise prints this and is careful: "no connection has ever been established between this family and our Garret in the Netherlands." General Kroesen, commanding the American army in Europe in the early 1980s, "tried but was unable to learn of any direct linkage to people in the Netherlands because no records of personal histories could be found pre-dating 1650, thus Garret's parents and siblings, if any, remain unknown" [4]. So the Dutch end of this family is a document that was lost in the East Indies in 1897, remembered by an old woman in 1943, and written down by a man doing genealogy in an occupied city in the worst year of the war — "ironic," Cruise says, and leaves it there. The book leaves it there too, with one observation: that a Dutch family tree lost between two sons abroad, and a Bucks County will burned by a son at home, are the same event in different centuries, and that both times a stranger wrote down what was left.

The work book

Between Raike's volumes and Cruise's book there was a stage the Tributes page calls "the earlier 'work book,'" assembled in the early 1980s by Marie Metzgar of Pennsylvania — "approximately fifty years" of research — with General Kroesen as "a major contributor" [3]. Around it Cruise names the rest of the chain: Lewis Wayne Nelson of New Jersey (d. 1996), who wrote the 1979 study of the Cruser family of the Stony Brook and the "Voorlezer" article this book's chapter 6 leaned on; Shirley Ann Cruzen Stevens of Michigan, who traced the Cruzen line and photographed Winschoten in the province of Groningen, where the name may have begun; William B. Bogardus of Ohio, a descendant of Anneke Jans and the Dominie, who edited the text and "has been so important in defining Dutch traditions and names" [3]. Six people, two states away from each other, each with a shoebox. A family that "never built up what other families did" had, by the 1980s, a research collective.

Denver, 1998

Warren D. Cruise, P.O. Box 100966, Denver, Colorado 80250, was "a tenth-generation descendant of Garret's," and the preface says what the book cost him: "After some twenty years of my own research, coupled together with the vast works done by other family members, Volume I is the completed text of at least a portion of that effort encompassing the Croesen Family History during the 1600s. Originally, it was never intended to be a multi-volume work, but as the genealogy and history began to unfold it became apparent to focus on certain time periods of that early time, giving more detail and life to the text" [5]. Gateway Press of Baltimore printed it for him, as Gateway printed family histories for authors who paid; Sharon DeBartolo Carmack edited it; the maps were drawn in Denver and the photographs enhanced in Larkspur [6]. The Library of Congress gave it a card number. A copy is catalogued at the Groninger Archieven in Groningen — the family's book, back in the family's province — and the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record was still citing "Vol. 1" in 2017 [7]. There was never a Vol. 2. Michael has looked for years; the book's own search found nothing in any catalogue, bookseller or citation; and the preface's own sentence — "never intended to be a multi-volume work" — is the likeliest explanation. Warren Cruise wrote the 1600s, which was the part he could document, and the 1700s and 1800s stayed in the shoeboxes. What is in this book about the Bucks County generations is what Cruise printed of Raike; what is in it about Ohio and Iowa is from the census, because no one kept that box.

The dedication is to his mother, Wilma Day Cruise, "whose love, understanding, and perseverance have greatly influenced my life. It was her genealogical research started in the 1930s that developed our family history back to Illinois in the 1850s." Four years before the book, after her husband died, she had begun writing poetry, "which isn't bad for a lady who started to write poetry when she was 96 years young," and he printed her poem, "The Wind in My Face," in full: a girl on a hill on her father's farm, a dog, a horse, the wind; school; "Mr. Wonderful"; a family gathered; and at the end, "as I stand here with the wind in my face, I wish each and every one to win their race" [5]. A woman born about 1898, doing genealogy in the 1930s — the same decade as Swain and Raike in Pennsylvania — and alive at a hundred to see her son's book: the record, in this family, was kept by people who lived long and started late.

What the keepers kept, and did not

The book can now say plainly what the chain preserved and what it lost. Preserved: every Dutch church record of the 1600s, through the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society's transcriptions that Cruise reprinted; every Bucks County will and deed of 1710–1790, through Raike for Swain; the Staten Island patents and the Labadists' journal; the Winschoten photographs; a Dutch family tree's ghost. Lost, or never kept: the 1800s entire — Ohio, Iowa, Lewis's war, Charles's marriages, the reasons for 1935; and Raike's seven volumes themselves, last seen in Denver. Michael's copy of Vol. I — the one Al never read — is in the family's own archive now, every page scanned, two hundred and eighty-two files of OCR text in a private store, which is how this book could quote the will of 1729 by page and check "Krewson" against the scan of page 231 when the OCR was doubtful [8]. That is a keeper's job too, and it is the one the last two chapters are about.

The ground it happened on

Period-general, as always. Fonthill stands in Doylestown Township at the edge of the borough, the Bucks County seat — a poured-concrete house of no style but its own, on a hill above the Moravian tile works, with the Mercer Museum's concrete tower across town; in 1932 Doylestown was a courthouse town of five thousand where the county's deed and will books were kept in the Recorder's and Register's offices a few blocks from the Bucks County Historical Society's library [2]. The Hague in 1943 was the seat of the German civil administration of the Netherlands, its Jewish population being deported, its archives open; a genealogist working there that year worked under the occupier's eye. Denver in 1998 was a city of half a million at the foot of the Front Range, and a post-office box was where the family's book could be ordered from its author for as long as he was alive to answer [6].

1. Warren D. Cruise, The Croesen Families of America, Vol. I, Croesen Families in the 1600s (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1998): the bracketed copying credits under the 1712 deed, the 1720 Borden deed, the 1729 will and codicil, the 1783 will (pp. 178–179, 191–193, 301–305); Raike's 1935 note on the date-stone (p. 191); "Ann Raike stated in her notes that Derrick and Elizabeth lived with Neeltje and Carl"; "FRANK KING SWAIN 'Fonthill' (Descendant) wrote the following note in 1933: (Anne Raike Files)." Read from the family's OCR of the whole volume.
2. Frank King Swain (1876–1954): hired by Henry Chapman Mercer at twenty for his archaeological digs; manager and later owner of the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works; married Laura Long, Mercer's housekeeper, 1925; Mercer's 1930 trust let the Swains live at Fonthill for life; Frank died at Fonthill in 1954 and willed the pottery to his nephew Frank H. Swain; Laura died in 1975 — the Mercer Museum / Bucks County Historical Society's published histories and newsletters; The Magazine Antiques, "Great Estates: Fonthill"; Laura May Long Swain's Find a Grave memorial (76417877). Fonthill's construction (1908–12) and Mercer's biography: the same.
3. Cruise, Vol. I, "Tributes," pp. vi–vii: William B. Bogardus; General Frederick J. Kroesen (retired); Marie Metzgar; Lewis Wayne Nelson (deceased 1996); Anne Price Raike (deceased 1985); Shirley Ann Cruzen Stevens; Frank King Swain (deceased). Quoted verbatim.
4. Cruise, Vol. I, pp. 6–9: the A. A. M. Stols genealogy of F. J. Kroesen and M. J. Fibres, The Hague, 1943; the Hingman "Family tree" of 1891 and its loss in the East Indies by 1897; Mrs. M. J. Blankert-Kroesen; the brewers' guild; General Kroesen's search in the Netherlands during his USAREUR command; "no connection has ever been established."
5. Cruise, Vol. I, "Preface" and "Dedication," pp. iv–v, quoted verbatim, including Wilma Day Cruise's poem "The Wind in My Face."
6. Cruise, Vol. I, copyright page: © 1998 Warren D. Cruise; P.O. Box 100966, Denver, CO 80250; Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 97-71 7715 (as printed); Gateway Press, Inc., 1001 N. Calvert Street, Baltimore; edited by Genealogists' Literary Services, Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, Simla, Colorado; maps by South Design Associates, Denver; computer enhancements by Digital Imaging Associates, Deborah Thurlow, Larkspur, Colorado.
7. The Groninger Archieven catalogue entry for The Croesen families of America; The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 148, no. 2 (2017), citing Vol. 1; Google Books and WorldCat listing Vol. I only. The search for a Volume II: the family record's story "Volume Two Was Never Found" (11 September 2026).
8. The family archive: 282 OCR text files of Vol. I in the private store (CROESEN-FAMILIES-OF-AMERICA-P###-###-*.TXT) with page scans, from which every Cruise citation in this book was read; the page-231 scan check is described in chapter 11's notes.