Part V · THE PEOPLE WHO KEPT THIS · Chapter 19

The Cousin Who Kept the Name

Phillipsburg, New Jersey · Jebsheim · Heidelberg · Arlington · 1923–2020

In the record Gen. Frederick James Kroesen Jr. (1923–2020) · Roween Wilder McCray Kroesen · Adriana Goedbloed Kroesen · Jan⁴ (John) Kroesen (1729–1812) · Garret³ Kroesen · Elizabeth Cregier

On the Tributes page of the family's book, between William Bogardus of Ohio and Marie Metzgar of Pennsylvania, is the entry that Michael half-remembered before this project began — "some retired World War Two general Kroesen" — and it reads:

Elizabeth Cregier's other son

Cruise printed his own descent and the general's side by side on page ix, and the two columns are the same for two generations and then part [2]. Both begin with Garret Dircksen Croesen and Neeltje Jans; both go to Derrick² Kroesen and Elizabeth Cregier — the girl at the font in chapter 1, the spine of this book. Then Cruise's column takes Francis³, and the general's takes Garret³ Kroesen and Arientje Nevius. Michael's line, which Cruise does not print, takes a third son, Derrick³ — the one whose 1783 will freed Jude. So Michael and the general are cousins through Elizabeth Cregier and no closer: her sons Derrick and Garret are where the two lines separate, on the 580 acres in Northampton Township, around 1730.

The general's column then runs: Jan⁴ Kroesen and Jannetje Nevius; Derrick⁵ and Abigail Ten Eyck; Tunis⁶ and Jane Abbott; Samuel Lilly⁷ and Sarah Gordon; John⁸ and Emma Morrow; Frederick⁹ and Jean Shillinger; and "General Frederick J.¹⁰" and Roween Wilder McCray [2]. The book has met the fourth generation already without knowing whose it was. Jan⁴ — John — Kroesen, baptized at Bensalem on 3 May 1730, married Jannetje Nevius in 1755, was "a first lieutenant in the army of the Revolutionary War on 10 June 1776 when the 'Flying Camp' contingent was organized," and lies under the stone at Richboro that reads "John Kroesen, Revolutionary Veteran, Born 1729, Died June 17, 1812 in 83rd year" — the stone chapter 10 stood beside [3]. He is the general's great-great-great-great-grandfather. When the general's biographers write that his "Revolutionary War ancestor Johannes Kroesen served as second lieutenant in the Bucks County Pennsylvania Militia," this is the man, and the rank is a matter of which roster one reads [4]. The book is glad to have it settled: the Flying Camp lieutenant belongs to the cousin who became a general, and Michael's own Revolutionary-generation ancestor, Simon, born at Bustleton in 1755, is still the one the record cannot see.

The career

Frederick James Kroesen Jr. was born on 11 February 1923 in Phillipsburg, New Jersey — on the Delaware, forty-odd miles upriver from the Bucks County farms; the line had not gone far in two hundred years — to Frederick Kroesen, who worked for the state, and Jean Shillinger [4]. He took a degree in agriculture at Rutgers, was commissioned through the Infantry Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning in 1944, and went to France as a platoon leader in the 254th Infantry Regiment of the 63rd Division. In the last week of January 1945 the regiment fought in the Colmar Pocket, the German bridgehead west of the Rhine in Alsace, and at Jebsheim on 26–27 January — a village taken house by house in snow and freezing fog, at a cost the regiment remembered for the rest of its existence [4]. He came out of the war with a Silver Star and a Bronze Star with "V," a company commander at twenty-two.

Then Korea, with the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team. Then Vietnam, twice: in 1968 commanding the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, and in 1971 the 23rd — the Americal — Division, in the same I Corps country where, in those same years, his cousin Al was a seaman on the Seventh Fleet and his cousin Marjorie, if the family has it right, was somewhere near the helicopters. None of the three knew of the others. Then the 82nd Airborne Division, 1972–74; the VII Corps in Germany; and in 1976 the fourth star, "the first Officer Candidate School graduate to hold that rank" — a distinction that meant, in the Army's own terms, that a man who had not gone to West Point and had entered the officer corps through the wartime ninety-day door had reached the top of it [4]. Commanding General, Forces Command, 1976–78; Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, 1978–79; and from 1979 to 1983 Commander-in-Chief, United States Army Europe and Seventh Army, and Commander of NATO's Central Army Group — the two hundred thousand American soldiers facing the Warsaw Pact across the inner-German border, with Berlin, where Al had stood guard twenty years before, the outpost at the far end [4].

On the morning of 15 September 1981, in Heidelberg, the Red Army Faction fired an RPG-7 anti-tank rocket at his armoured Mercedes as it slowed at an intersection. The rocket struck the rear of the car; the general and his wife Roween were cut by glass and otherwise unhurt; a "Kommando Gudrun Ensslin" claimed the attack, and a decade later West German prosecutors would indict the East German secret police chief Erich Mielke for helping plan it [4]. He retired in 1983, chaired a defence consultancy, and wrote a column for ARMY magazine for decades — clear, short, unimpressed prose — and died in Alexandria, Virginia, on 30 April 2020, at ninety-seven, in the first spring of the pandemic. He is buried at Arlington [4].

What he did for the record

That is the public man. The private one, "since about 1960," was a genealogist, and Cruise quotes him on nearly every question where a careful reader was needed. It was General Kroesen who explained the Dutch naming system to the book — that the wife kept her maiden name "as a hyphenated addition to her married name," which is why Neeltje Jans is Neeltje Jans and why Elizabeth Cregier stays Elizabeth Cregier in the Dutch records [5]. It was his daughter-in-law, Adriana Goedbloed Kroesen — Dutch herself — who supplied the explanation for the Staats name that chapter 4 is built on: that "if a branch of a family had no male heirs to carry on the family name, and the only living descendant was female, then that remaining individual could pass the name of her family on to her sons" — the observation Cruise took to a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam for confirmation [6]. It was the general who noted, with a soldier's patience, that "an IGI record indicates a son baptized on the same day as Mary, but there has been no further information to substantiate that claim"; who traced a Nancy Kroesen Stevens to the Henrico County militia in Virginia and found nothing contradictory in it because he "had proof of a Charles Crusen also living there prior to 1780"; who preserved Frank Swain's guess about Derrick³'s first wife with the note that Swain "took the name Anne from a deed signed in 1764, that he had understood was for [Derrick]" [7]. These are the sentences of a man who checks.

And it was the general who carried the search to the Netherlands. "During his tenure in Germany, he 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" [5]. A four-star commander with a staff, a car, and every Dutch archive open to him, and the answer was the same answer this book got from a laptop: the record begins with Garret on the wharf at Breuckelen, and behind him is nothing anyone has found. There is something fitting in that. The family's most powerful member in eleven generations went looking for the beginning and came back with the same blank as everyone else, and reported it honestly, and kept looking at the parts that could be found.

Two genealogists

Al Krewson and Frederick Kroesen never met and, so far as the archive shows, never heard of each other. Al's letters do not mention a general; the general's work, in Cruise, does not reach the 1800s where Al's line would appear. They were born twenty years apart, both went to war, both came home and spent their evenings on the same family, and their findings sit in the same private record now because a nephew of one remembered the name of the other. The general kept the spelling — Kroesen, the form Cruise standardised on for every generation after Garret's — and the Bucks County graves and the Dutch dead end. Al kept the Iowa cousins, the Tulsa farm, and the rifts. Between them, and with the six keepers of the last chapter, the whole of what this book has been able to say was preserved by people doing it for nothing. Cruise's sentence about the general applies to all of them: he "brought much to the genealogical history of the family." He also, in the plainest way, kept its name.

The ground it happened on

Period-general, as always. Phillipsburg in 1923 was a railroad and iron town on the New Jersey bank of the Delaware opposite Easton, where the Lehigh comes in — the river the Kroesens had lived along since 1710, seen from forty miles farther up. Jebsheim in January 1945 was an Alsatian village of a few hundred houses on the flat, dyked plain between Colmar and the Rhine, fought over for three days in deep snow by American, French and German infantry and remembered in the 63rd Division's histories as its hardest fight [4]. Heidelberg in 1981 was the headquarters of USAREUR in the old Campbell Barracks, a university town on the Neckar where a general's armoured car at a traffic light was, that autumn, the most visible target in West Germany. Arlington, where he lies, is a hundred and fifty miles from the Richboro plot where his ancestor lies under "Revolutionary Veteran," and the two stones, read together, are the whole of one line's American history — 1729 to 2020 — on granite.

1. Cruise, Vol. I, "Tributes," p. vi, quoted verbatim.
2. Cruise, Vol. I, p. ix, "several of our lineages back to Garret Dircksen Croesen": the columns for Warren D. Cruise and General Frederick J. Kroesen, with Cruise's identification numbers (7 Garret³, 34 Jan⁴, 224 Derrick⁵). Michael's descent through Derrick³ (Cruise no. 13): the family record and chapters 8–10.
3. Cruise, Vol. I, pp. 238–239 (34 Jan⁴ Kroesen, "Revolutionary War Veteran"): baptism 3 May 1730 at Bensalem; marriage 1755 to Jannetje Nevius, daughter of David Nevius; nine children incl. 224 Derrick⁵, baptized 29 January 1766; will 21 November 1806, codicils 1806 and 1809, proved 29 June 1812 (Bucks County Will Book 8, p. 275, file 3858); the Anne Raike Files note ("Book Two," p. 76) on the first lieutenancy of 10 June 1776; the ten Richboro inscriptions (Raike Files, "Book Three," p. 36). See chapter 10.
4. Frederick James Kroesen Jr.: born 11 February 1923, Phillipsburg, NJ; Rutgers (B.S. agriculture, 1944); George Washington University (B.A. 1962, M.A. 1966); OCS, Fort Benning, 1944; 254th Infantry, 63rd Division (Colmar Pocket; Jebsheim, 26–27 January 1945); 187th Airborne RCT, Korea; 196th Light Infantry Brigade (1968), 23rd Infantry Division, deputy commander XXIV Corps, First Regional Assistance Command (Vietnam); 82nd Airborne (1972–74); deputy CG V Corps; CG VII Corps (1975–76); general, 1976, "the first Officer Candidate School graduate to hold that rank"; CG Forces Command (1976–78); Vice Chief of Staff (1978–79); CINC USAREUR / Seventh Army / CENTAG (1979–83); the RAF RPG-7 attack in Heidelberg, 15 September 1981, "Kommando Gudrun Ensslin," and the 1991 Mielke indictment; retirement 1983; chairman, Military Professional Resources Inc.; senior fellow, AUSA Institute of Land Warfare; death 30 April 2020, Alexandria, VA, aged 97; burial, Arlington National Cemetery; decorations incl. the Defense and Army Distinguished Service Medals, two Silver Stars, three Legions of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars with "V" — his published obituaries and the Wikipedia biography (which also records the ancestry statement "Garret Dircksen Kroesen … around 1661" and "Johannes Kroesen … second lieutenant in Bucks County Pennsylvania Militia"). His wife's name, Roween Wilder McCray, from Cruise p. ix. The book's account of Jebsheim, Heidelberg and Campbell Barracks is period-general.
5. Cruise, Vol. I, pp. 6–7: "General Kroesen noted: The Dutch system was influenced by the Spanish occupation …"; "Retired General Kroesen was the Commander of U.S. Army Forces in Europe and simultaneously, Commander of the NATO Central Army Group. During his tenure in Germany, he tried but was unable to learn of any direct linkage …"; p. 12: "the descendants in General Kroesen's family line are one of the few who have retained the original Kroesen spelling."
6. Cruise, Vol. I, p. 137: "Adriana Goedbloed Kroesen, daughter-in-law of General Kroesen, may have the answer to this …"; Bogardus's letter to Professor Willem Th. M. Frijhoff of the Free University, Amsterdam. See chapter 4.
7. Cruise, Vol. I, p. 268 (the IGI note), p. 280 (Nancy Kroesen and Dudley Stevens, Henrico County militia; "Information from General Frederick J. Kroesen (First Families of New Jersey, Volume 1, page 401)"), p. 284 (the Wyckoff note), p. 300 ("General Kroesen noted: Mr. Swain thought he [13 Derrick³] was married to an Anna Bennet Hulst or Hufte …").