https://mistertranslation.com/west/ The Krewson family's four centuries in America — Croesen, Kroesen, Kroessen, Kreuso, Cruse, Krewson — from a cooper who landed at Breuckelen around 1660, through Staten Island, Bucks County, Ohio, Iowa and the Pacific. Non-fiction, read from the family's own record and the colonial church books, published a chapter at a time by Michael V. Krewson. en https://mistertranslation.com/west/should-not-have-come-off-alive.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/should-not-have-come-off-alive.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The flag over Gowanus changed twice in the 1660s and 1670s and Garret Croesen never moved an inch. What moved was the family around him — a feud with the miller next door that ran ten years, from a punch in 1669 to a bloody Sunday in a grape arbour in 1679; a patent for 172 acres on Staten Island, taken the same day as his brother-in-law's, under an English governor; and then, six months after the grapes, a one-line entry in a minister's list of communicants: died 7th March 1680. His will burned. His widow sold the farm to the neighbour's family and married the other neighbour. His eldest son, eighteen, crossed the Kill. https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-name-came-from-her.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-name-came-from-her.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The family's other immigrant was not Dutch. Jan Pietersen came from Husum, on the North Sea coast of Schleswig, arrived in New Amsterdam around 1637 with a wife named Elsje, and made a living from timber, tobacco, cattle and a small yacht — signing everything with an X. Elsje is named in exactly one record in her life. Then she died, and her sons began calling themselves Staats. This is the chapter about the woman whose name the family carried and whose own name nobody wrote down. https://mistertranslation.com/west/two-strangers-walk-across-staten-island.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/two-strangers-walk-across-staten-island.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Six weeks after the fight in the grape arbour, two Dutchmen were rowed across from Gowanus at dawn and spent three days walking the length of Staten Island, writing down everything — the cross Englishwoman who would not show them the road, the seven houses of the Oude Dorp with three still lived in, a sick man in a brush shelter in the woods, a seventy-year-old Frenchman who leaped for joy at the sound of his own language. Their journal is the only eyewitness account of the island in the year the family took its land there. This chapter walks it with them, and then follows Derrick onto it. https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-voorlezers-hand.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-voorlezers-hand.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Of Garret's two sons, one could write and one could not. The one who could became the first Voorlezer of the Staten Island church — bell-ringer, schoolmaster, keeper of the records — and lived in a small house built for the purpose that is now the oldest schoolhouse standing in America. Nobody knew his name for more than a century and a half, until a minister noticed that whoever kept the baptismal book had written, of one child, "my daughter." The witness at that baptism was his brother. The next year the two of them were in front of the Governor over their father's burned will. https://mistertranslation.com/west/six-hundred-pounds-of-lawful-silver.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/six-hundred-pounds-of-lawful-silver.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 In November 1712 Derrick Kroesen, who could not write, paid six hundred pounds of Pennsylvania silver for the farm his daughter had died on and put his mark on a deed that begins at a Spanish oak. The family's next hundred years happen inside its lines. This chapter is the deeds — 580 acres, then 500 more, then the gifts to the children — and the will Derrick made in 1729, which leaves his eldest son his gold and silver buttons and one cow, makes his widow's income depend on the life of "my Negro man Fortune," and is the first place a person the family owned is named. It ends with a stone house and a date stone carved with a dead man's name. https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-x-on-the-will.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-x-on-the-will.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 On 4 January 1758 — twenty-nine years to the day after his father sat down to make a will — Garret Kroesen, seventy-two, dictated his own. The clerk wrote the family's name the way it is written now: "I Garret Krewson of the Township of Northampton, Bucks County, Yeoman." Garret could not read it. He signed with a mark, and his brother Henry, a captain in the French and Indian War, witnessed it. This chapter is the eldest son's life — the ferry-keeper's granddaughter he married, the church he helped build, the stone he set for his father, the son he buried — and then the scatter of his brothers and sister to Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and the row of stones at Feasterville. https://mistertranslation.com/west/lydia.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/lydia.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 In the spring of 1784, "sick and very very painful and weak in body," an old man in Southampton Township dictated a codicil to his will and put his mark on it. It set the terms on which three people he owned could stop being owned: Jude, freed outright, with four bushels of wheat a year and the right to live in the kitchen; Striffin, free on paying fifty pounds, fifteen the first year and fifteen the second and twenty the third; and "my Negro girl Lydia," free on paying ten pounds a year until thirty was paid. This is the chapter about the family's direct ancestor Derrick Kroesen, who lived from Queen Anne's War to Yorktown, and about the three people whose names survive only because he wrote down the price of their freedom. https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-flying-camp.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-flying-camp.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The family fought the Revolution on both sides of the lines — Bucks County Kroesens as militia lieutenants and privates, Staten Island Crusers with a Loyalist brigade headquartered in their house — and the one man in the middle of it who matters most to this book, Simon Krewson, born in 1755 three miles from where the British burned wounded militiamen in buckwheat straw, is the one the record cannot see at all. This chapter is the war as the family's documents have it: two gravestones at Richboro that say "Revolutionary Veteran," a lieutenant's commission in the Flying Camp, a dead soldier at Feasterville, and a silence where the direct ancestor should be. It closes Part II. https://mistertranslation.com/west/ten-faces-circa-1890.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/ten-faces-circa-1890.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 For a hundred and fifty years after Simon, the family has no wills, no deeds and no church book — only names and dates from other people's trees. Then it has a photograph. Ten people sat for a photographer around 1890, and decades later a man in Portland, Oregon, turned the print over and wrote all ten names on the back, positioned where each person stood. This chapter is Part III's opening and the thin middle of the book: how the Krewsons got from Bucks County to Ohio to Iowa, what the record does and does not hold about it, and what can be read off one print. It says where the gaps are and how to fill them. https://mistertranslation.com/west/lest-his-father-find-him.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/lest-his-father-find-him.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 In 1935 a machinist of thirty-eight left his father's household in southern Iowa and did not come back. His father died the same year, and nobody could find the son to tell him. The reason, as two of his cousins told his own son thirty years later, was that the father "was after my dad's blood" — he blamed him for the deaths of two of his other sons — and that the son "was on the run lest his father find him and blow his brains out." This chapter closes Part III with the last Iowa generation: Charles, the twin from the photograph, and Galen, who ran to California, took a new name off a birth certificate's misspelling, and started the family this book's last part is about. It says what the record holds about the rift, what the DNA says about the family's oldest legend, and who the man was who wrote the names on the back of the photograph. https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-four-hundred-dollars.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-four-hundred-dollars.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 In 1946 an English grandmother arrived in Los Angeles to find her daughter married to a Los Angeles mechanic with four babies, and, in her own words, "despised him and made no two bones about it." She lent him four hundred dollars for a down payment on a farm in Oklahoma. He took the children to his sister's place near Tulsa, and the money to the bars, and did not come back. This chapter is that year, and the bell-tent in the desert two years later, as one of the four children reconstructed it sixty years on — a windmill, a tractor, potato bugs thrown to chickens, a train with rounded windows, a rocking horse they were not allowed on — and what he decided, at the end, to do with it: "I forgive him and hope to find him in the resurrection." https://mistertranslation.com/west/not-irish-by-blood.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/not-irish-by-blood.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 One of the four children went to Ireland. He was raised there by his grandmother and a British Army major with a Military Cross in a glass case who would not talk about it, finished school in Dublin, and became the only Krewson who could claim an Irish upbringing — "but I do NOT have Irish blood in my veins." This chapter is the major, the estate in the mountains, the medal that could not have been won where the family says it was, and the two brothers who each wrote Michael their own account of that house — from opposite sides of it. https://mistertranslation.com/west/incommunicado.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/incommunicado.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 In 1963 the two boys from the train were a soldier in West Berlin and a sailor on a guided-missile destroyer in the Pacific. Between them, in Ireland, the major died without a will. One brother could not get leave to cross the Iron Curtain for the funeral; the other was at sea and did not hear until the estate had gone to cousins. This chapter is the Wall, the ship, the last of the family's farms — lost this time not to a lie but to a will nobody wrote — and Al's road home: a military train through the Russian checkpoints, London, Dublin, an Air Force base, an Irish family's bed in Manhattan, and California. https://mistertranslation.com/west/vietnam-twice.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/vietnam-twice.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Two of the four children from the train went to Vietnam. One came home and would not talk about it, and the government wrote the one line he allowed on his headstone. The other was a nurse on the helicopters, lost the man she loved to Agent Orange, and "was never the same after that war." This chapter is what the family knows of both — three sentences, one gravestone, and an SF-180 not yet mailed — set against the roll the book has been keeping since 1755: a family that never built anything up, and put somebody in nearly every war the country fought. https://mistertranslation.com/west/finding-bill.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/finding-bill.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 In September 1969 a twenty-six-year-old ex-sailor wrote a letter from Ottawa, Illinois, to a man in Hammond, Indiana, who might be his father's cousin. The man phoned and set a test: what was your father's middle name? This is how the boy from the train found the family his father had run from — a photograph he recognised, an aunt who took him in, an aunt who would not meet him and why — and, thirty-five years later, the two emails to his nephew in which he named the thing the book has been following since 1662: "Seems like the whole Krewson line all the way back to the 1600s had these problems with rifts … but no one was talking about what they were." The last chapter of Part IV, and the one in which Michael, in 2005, asked for this book. https://mistertranslation.com/west/copied-for-frank-k-swain.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/copied-for-frank-k-swain.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Every will and deed in Parts II and III of this book reached it through a chain of people who were not paid to keep it. The chain begins in a concrete castle in Doylestown in 1932, where Henry Mercer's right-hand man — a Kroesen descendant — had a woman named Anne Raike copy the family's wills out of the county books; runs through a Dutch archivist tracing a Kroesen family in The Hague in 1943, the worst year of the occupation; through six researchers and a "work book" in the 1980s; and ends in Denver in 1998 with a tenth-generation descendant, his hundred-year-old mother's poem, and a Volume I whose Volume II was never written. This is Part V: the keepers. https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-cousin-who-kept-the-name.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-cousin-who-kept-the-name.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Michael remembered "some retired World War Two general Kroesen" among the people who helped with the family's book. He was right. General Frederick J. Kroesen — the first Officer Candidate School graduate ever to wear four stars, commander of the American army in Europe, the man the Red Army Faction fired a rocket at in Heidelberg in 1981 — spent sixty years on the family's genealogy in his spare time, kept the original spelling of the name, and descends from Elizabeth Cregier by her other son. The Flying Camp lieutenant on the Richboro gravestone in chapter 10 is his ancestor, not Michael's. This chapter is the cousin who could search the Dutch archives with an army behind him, and what he found and didn't. https://mistertranslation.com/west/two-witnesses-at-the-font.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/two-witnesses-at-the-font.html Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 On 5 July 1662 a baby named Elizabeth Cregier was baptized in the Reformed Dutch Church of New Amsterdam. The two men who stood as her witnesses were her grandfathers — the city's Burgomaster and the colony's Schout-Fiscal. Twenty-six months later both of them signed the surrender of New Netherland to the English. This is where the family's American story begins: not with the cooper, but with the girl his son would marry, born at the top of a world that was about to end. https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-tree-thief-of-breuckelen.html https://mistertranslation.com/west/the-tree-thief-of-breuckelen.html Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 In March 1662 a twenty-two-year-old cooper from Winschoten went into the woods on a day of prayer and came home with some fruit trees. Within weeks the village of Breuckelen was calling Garret Dircksen Croesen a tree-thief, his minister had barred him from communion, and Garret had done the one thing nobody did in 1662 — he had the minister summoned to court. The consistory record of what followed runs ten pages, and it is the first time the family's founder speaks.