Part I · TWO HOMELANDS, TWO FLAGS · Chapter 4

The Name Came From Her

Manhattan · 9 September 1640

In the record Jan Pietersen Van Husum (c.1605–c.1675) · Elsje (c.1605–c.1649) · Neeltje Jans (1640–c.1690) · Pieter Jans Staats (b. c.1638) · Grietje Jans Van Groningen · Sara Rapalje (b. 1625)

On 9 September 1640, in the Reformed Dutch Church of New Amsterdam, a man who called himself Jan Pieterszen van Huysen had a daughter baptized. The register gives the child's name, Neeltjen, and the names of three witnesses: Barne Bal, Tryntje Koos, and Sara Rapalje [1]. It does not give the mother's name. Almost nothing in the colony's records ever would.

The third witness is worth pausing on. Sara Rapalje was fifteen years old that September, and she was something the colony would later make a great deal of: the first child of European parents born in New Netherland, in 1625, in the settlement's first years [2]. She stood at the font for a girl who was, twenty-one years later, going to marry a cooper from Winschoten. The family this book follows is, on its mother's side, older in America than almost anyone's.

Husum

The man at the font was not Dutch. Jan Pietersen — Pietersz, Pieterse, Pitersen, the clerks spelled it as they heard it — came from Husum, a harbour town on the North Sea coast of Schleswig, a hundred and thirty miles north-east of Winschoten and, the family's genealogist notes, in a different world: Winschoten had been Spanish until nearly 1600, and Husum looked north, to Denmark and Sweden, and was a Danish duchy when Jan was born there around 1605 to 1607 [3]. It was a real port. Amsterdam's merchants had been shipping through Husum's harbour since 1461, landing goods there to be hauled overland to Flensburg for the Baltic trade; it had its own sea-court from 1582 and five or six thousand people, the second town of the duchies after Flensburg [4]. Its trades were grain and malt and brewing.

And it was going under. The town's own account of the years of Jan's youth, sent to the family's genealogist by the Husum municipal government in the 1980s, is a list of things going wrong: export restrictions on grain and malt from the 1590s, a rival harbour built up the coast at Tönning in 1613, a rival town founded at Friedrichstadt in 1621, and "the constant muddying of the harbour" [4]. In 1627 Wallenstein's imperial army occupied the duchies and stayed two years. In 1634 the great flood — the Burchardi flood, which drowned thousands along that coast in a single October night — took the marshland behind the town, and "reduced the grain business even further" [4]. A young man from a shrinking port with a silting harbour, in a country being marched over by other people's armies, had the ordinary reasons of his century for going to Amsterdam, and from Amsterdam the West India Company's ships went west.

Somewhere in those years, probably in Amsterdam, he married a woman named Elsje. Where she was from, who her parents were, and what her family name was, no record says [5]. Between 1636 and 1638 the two of them were in New Amsterdam, and Jan was working: in September 1638 he took on an indentured servant, George Lucombs, and in March 1640 another, Thomas Wesson, "for three years and seven months for forty guilders Hollands annually" — a man with two servants three years after landing was not poor [6]. Their first child, Pieter, was born in the colony some time before Neeltje; no baptism has been found, but he would later state his birthplace as America [6].

Jan Pietersen's events

The family's genealogist built Jan's life, as he built Garret's, out of a numbered series of documents — twenty-one "events" from 1640 to 1675 — and the man they show is a small trader in a very small town, doing a bit of everything, and unable to sign any of it. In June 1640 he leased livestock from the Company:

Three weeks later he was in front of the colony's secretary again, on stranger business. A neighbour of his on the bay, a tobacco planter named Thomas Bescher, had said something to him on 8 June that he could not get out of his head, and he had reported it to the Fiscal as possible "foul play." The deposition survives, and it is the only place we hear Jan Pietersen speak:

What became of Bescher is not recorded, except that his widow remarried within two years. What the document gave the family was Jan's age — thirty-five in 1640 — and his mark, the X he would make on everything for the rest of his life [8].

He planted tobacco. By April 1642 he owned land at Gowanus, on the Brooklyn shore, because a patent to a neighbour that month describes its bounds as running "from the wagon-road between the aforesaid land and Jan Pietersen's land, lying alongside the river" — one of the first farms in what would become Brooklyn, on ground first bought from the Indians in 1636 [9]. He dealt in timber; in August 1642 he swore he had delivered four logs he owed a widow to another Jan Pietersen, nicknamed Janmaet — "Jack Tar," a sailor's name — which is the kind of record that exists because there were two Jan Pietersens in a town of a few hundred people and someone had to say which was which [10]. He owned, with a man named Thomas Hall, a small yacht called the Hope, and on 1 December 1646 the two of them sold her, "then lying before Fort Amsterdam, with her standing and running rigging," for two pieces of duffel cloth at four guilders the ell and the balance in wampum [11]. Two weeks after that he was back before the secretary to swear that one of those pieces of duffel had been cut short — the length scratched on the lead seal said thirty-nine and a quarter ells, the measuring found thirty-six and five-eighths — and this time he gave his age as forty [12]. In July 1647 he sold his house and lot on Manhattan, "northward from the point of the little cape where the land of Jochem Kierstede adjoins," for 375 guilders in three instalments; three X marks at the foot of the deed, his, the buyer's and a witness's [13]. Livestock, tobacco, timber, a boat, a house: a man of forty with a wife and four children, doing well enough, in a settlement of a few hundred souls on the tip of an island.

Elsje

In all of this she appears once. On 28 January 1646 the couple baptized a daughter, Annetje, in the Manhattan church, and the register that day did what it almost never did and wrote the mother's name beside the father's: "Jan Pieterszen Van Husem, Elsje" [14]. That is the whole of her documentary life. She was not named at Neeltje's baptism in 1640, or at Jan's in 1643, or at Ruth's in November 1648 — where the witnesses included a Willem Bredenbend, the elder Garret Croesen would one day summon to court, and a Femmetje Jans, who if she is the Femmetje of the tree affair was standing at the font for the aunt of the man she would call a thief; and where Jan, for once, did not bother to add "van Husum" to his name [15]. She was named once, at one font, and then some time between that November and 1652 she died, in Manhattan, and was buried there, and no record says when or of what [5]. Neeltje was about ten. Pieter was about twelve. Ruth was a baby.

On 15 May 1652 the register of marriages has "Jan Pieterszen Van Husum, widower, and Grietje Jans van Groeningen" — a woman from Groningen, Garret's own province, and the stepmother who would stand at the font when Neeltje's first son was baptized ten years later [16]. Jan was about forty-six. Within a year he and Grietje had a daughter and named her Elsje [17]. So did his son Pieter, later. So did his daughter Annetje. Three separate households in one family each naming a girl for a woman none of the records could be bothered to name is the nearest thing the seventeenth century leaves to a portrait.

Why the sons were called Staats

And then there is the name. Every one of Jan and Elsje's children carried the patronymic Jans — Pieter Jans, Neeltje Jans, Jan Jans, Annetje Jans, Ruth Jans: the children of Jan. That was the ordinary Dutch way, and it meant a family name did not exist yet; it would be whatever the next generation settled on. What the two sons settled on, and used in official records "several times," was Staats. Pieter Jans Staats. Jan Jans Staats. By the third generation the Jans had dropped away and the family were simply Staats, and remained so on Staten Island for two centuries [18].

Jan Pietersen was not a Staats. Nobody called him one. The family's genealogist puzzled over this for years — "the big mystery, of course, is why did Elsje's two sons, Pieter and Jan, use the Staats name?" — until a daughter-in-law of General Kroesen's, Adriana Goedbloed Kroesen, who was Dutch, told him something Dutch genealogists knew and American ones mostly did not: that in the seventeenth century a family with no sons to carry its name could pass it through a daughter to her children [19]. The genealogist put the question, through the editor of the family history, to Professor Willem Frijhoff of the Free University of Amsterdam, and Frijhoff wrote back in July 1997:

So the likeliest reading — and it is a reading, not a record, and the genealogist says so before saying that he "firmly believe[s]" it — is that Elsje was a Staats, the daughter or granddaughter of a man called Eustathius, from a family with no sons to carry the name, and that she gave it to her boys so that it would go on [19]. It did. The Staats who took a patent beside Garret's on Staten Island in 1677, and the "Unkle" Peter Jans who could swear to what was in Garret's burned will, and the Staats family that farmed the island's north shore into the nineteenth century, all carried a name that came into America through a woman whose own name the clerks wrote down once. "Remaining strictly by what is authenticated," the genealogist concluded, "we can only refer to Elsje as 'Elsje'" [19]. This book does the same. But the name came from her.

Gowanus, and the twenty-five

Some time in the ten years after selling the Manhattan house — the genealogist could never pin it closer — Jan and his second wife moved across the river to the land at Gowanus. In February 1657 he is on the first tax list of the hamlet, assessed eight guilders toward the salary of the circuit minister Polhemus, one of seven names: Willem Bredenbent, "who hath voluntarily promised to contribute" twelve; Jan Pietersen, eight; Barent Bal, eight; Teunis Nyssen, twelve; Adam Brouwer, six; Johannes Marcus, four; Paulus van de Beeck, ten [20]. Sixty guilders in all, half payable at once "in wampum or country produce, such as corn, wheat, peas, maize," for a minister who was getting old and could barely reach them on the roads [20]. That is Gowanus in 1657: seven taxpayers.

Three years later, on 12 September 1660, the same people organised a church of their own, and the first page of its first record book lists the members within the jurisdiction of Breuckelen:

Read that list against the two chapters before this one. Jan Pieterszen and Grietie Jans: Neeltje's father and stepmother. Teunis Nijssen, who would stand witness when Garret joined this church eight months later, and Femmetie Jans, his wife, who would call Garret a tree-thief in front of the full meeting. Adam Brouwer, the miller, and his wife — the woman Garret would be fined ten pounds for striking. Willem Bredenbent, the elder Garret would summon to court, and Willem van Couwenhoven, the magistrate who would stand witness for Neeltje in 1664, and Albert Cornelissen — presumably the Albert Cornelissen Wantenaer with whom Garret was having "private quarrels" in 1662. Twenty-five people founded a church, and then spent twenty years in front of consistories and constables and governors, hitting and suing one another. The family's own genealogist saw it and said it mildly: "Adam Brouwer and Jan Pietersen seemed to travel together" [20]. They did. So did everybody. The village was too small for enemies to be strangers.

A month after the church was founded, it took in Jan's son Pieter and Pieter's wife, Annetje Jans van Dyke, "witnesses for both: Jan Pieterszen, Grietie Jans" [22]. A year after that it married Neeltje to the cooper, with Jan standing as "father of the bride." In December 1662 Jan and Grietje, both in their fifties, baptized a last daughter there, Sara [23]. And in May 1664 Jan put his mark on the petition Adam Brouwer sent to the Director-General "in the name of the inhabitants of Gowanes," asking leave to dig out the silted kill behind Red Hook so that boats "laden with a hundred skepels of grain, full of wood and other articles" could reach the Gowanus and the mill without going round the shoal [24]. Timber and grain and a channel to the mill: the whole economy of the place in one petition, with the marks of a dozen men who could not write beneath it. Three months later the English came, and the Director-General to whom it was addressed was no longer in a position to grant anything.

After that he fades. He may have married a third time — a note in the records has a Jan Pietersen marrying Elsje Pieters, a widow, in November 1663, and the minister's list of the late 1670s does have a "Jan Pietersz and Elsje Pieters his wife" at Gowanus, with the note "moved to Staten Island" — but no church record confirms the marriage, and the genealogist leaves it as "Perhaps" [25]. In August 1675 the tax roll has "Jan Pieterse, the Elder": one poll, four oxen, seven younger cattle, and "16 morgans of land and valley," assessed at £117 10s — a bigger farm than his son-in-law's [26]. Then nothing. He was about seventy, and the genealogist's reading — that he died soon after that assessment, because no document mentions him again — is the reasonable one, though the same list that records his son-in-law's death to the day gives no date for his. He had been in America nearly forty years, twice as long as Garret would manage. He had signed forty years of documents with an X.

Neeltje

Which leaves the girl at the font, and what the record has of her is what it has of most women in this book: a baptism, a marriage, the baptisms of her children, her admission to the church, her second marriage, and silence. Born in the colony in the September of 1640; motherless at ten; a stepmother from Groningen at twelve; across the river to Gowanus in her teens; married at twenty-one to a cooper two years older who had been in the country a few years and in the church a few months; five children in sixteen years; the tree-thief affair in her first spring as a wife, conducted outside her door so that she would not hear it; a husband dead at forty; a farm sold to the neighbours and a second husband from the other side of the fence within seven months; one more son at forty-one; a last appearance, probably, at a niece's baptism in 1687; dead by 1695, when Volkert Bries married again [27].

The family's genealogist, reaching the end of her page, wrote a sentence that is more honest than most: "After 1681, little else is known of Neeltje's life" [27]. This chapter has been about her parents because her parents are where the documents are. But it is her chapter, in the end, for the reason it is her mother's: the whole of the family's Staten Island land — the patents of 1677 and 1680, the 710 acres, the ground the next four generations of this book stand on — came through the Pietersen side, through her brother's patent beside her husband's, her sister's husband's patent beside that, and her nephew's after. Garret's name is on the book. The land was her family's. And the name her brothers carried into it was her mother's.

The ground it happened on

As before, none of this is a document about these people; it is what the period's own records say about the places and things they handled. New Amsterdam in 1640 was a fort, a church inside it, a windmill, and a few hundred people in a scatter of houses and tobacco plots on the tip of Manhattan — a company outpost more than a town, a decade before the city charter that made Martin Cregier a burgomaster [2]. Tobacco was the cash crop the Company had been pushing on its settlers since the 1630s, planted on cleared lots along the shore, which is why Jan Pietersen and Thomas Bescher were both "tobacco planters" on "the bay" [6, 9]. The currency of the documents above is the currency of the place: guilders were the unit of account, but what changed hands was wampum — strings of shell beads, the trade currency of the coast — and duffel, the coarse woollen cloth sold by the ell that the Dutch traded to the Indians for furs and to each other for boats; a yacht bought with two pieces of duffel and the balance in wampum was an ordinary transaction [11]. A jacht was a small, fast sloop, the workhorse of the harbour and the river, the kind of vessel a timber merchant with a farm across the water would want a share in. And the Gowanus he moved to by 1657 was a tidal creek and its meadows — the "land and valley" of the tax rolls is upland and salt-meadow, the meadow being the hay that kept the oxen through the winter — with a mill at its head, a shoal called Red Hook at its mouth, and, on the far side of the creek from the church, the twenty-eight acres where his daughter would spend her married life [20, 24].

1. Neeltje's baptism, 9 September 1640, Reformed Dutch Church of New Amsterdam, witnesses Barne Bal, Tryntje Koos and Sara Rapalje: Baptisms from 1639 to 1730 in the Reformed Dutch Church, New York (Collections of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Vol. II), p. 11, as transcribed in Warren D. Cruise, The Croesen Families of America, Vol. I (Gateway Press, Baltimore, 1998), p. 119. As throughout this book, the colonial records are read as Cruise transcribed them.
2. Sara Rapalje (b. 1625) as the first European child born in New Netherland, and the state of New Amsterdam in 1640: Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (Doubleday, 2004). Cruise mentions the Rapalje family's early history at p. 119 and earlier.
3. Jan Pietersen's birth at Husum c. 1605–07 and the contrast with Winschoten: Cruise, pp. 108–111, 116. He was not Dutch; the genealogist is explicit about it, and this book follows him.
4. Husum's history — the Amsterdam trade from 1461, the sea-court of 1582, the town's decline after 1596, Tönning and Friedrichstadt, the imperial occupation of 1627–29, the flood of 1634: the account supplied to Cruise by the municipal government of Husum, reproduced in Cruise, pp. 111–115. The name "Burchardi flood" for the October 1634 storm surge is the standard one in the histories of the Schleswig coast and is not in Cruise.
5. Elsje — "maiden name unknown," probably Amsterdam, died c. 1648–52 in Manhattan, named once in the records: Cruise, pp. 136–139, 166.
6. Arrival 1636–38; the indentured servants of 1638 and 1640; Pieter born in America; tobacco planting: Cruise, pp. 116–117, citing De Forest, "The Identification of Jan Pieterszen Van Huysen," The American Genealogist 12 (October 1935), pp. 70–76.
7. The livestock lease of 20 June 1640: Van Laer (trans.), New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Vol. I, p. 282, in Cruise, pp. 117–118.
8. The Bescher deposition of 10 July 1640, "aged 35 years," and the X mark: Van Laer, Vol. I, p. 288, in Cruise, pp. 118–119.
9. Jan's land at Gowanus by April 1642 (the bounds of Cornelis Lambertsen Cool's patent GG 46) and the 1636 purchase from the Indians: Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn (1867), Vol. I, pp. 55–56, and Gehring (ed.), Land Papers, in Cruise, pp. 119–121.
10. The four logs and "Janmaet," 17 August 1642: Van Laer, Vol. II, pp. 64–65, and the editors' footnotes, in Cruise, pp. 122–123.
11. The sale of the yacht Hope, 1 December 1646, for duffel and wampum: De Forest (1935), p. 72, in Cruise, p. 125. De Forest describes Jan's mark on this document as a swastika — an old cosmic and religious sign long before its twentieth-century use, as Cruise notes; the other documents show a plain X.
12. The short-measured duffel, 14 December 1646, "aged 40 years": Van Laer, Vol. II, p. 382, in Cruise, pp. 125–126.
13. The sale of the Manhattan house and lot to Egbert van Borsum, 29 July 1647, 375 guilders: Van Laer, Vol. II, pp. 446–447, in Cruise, pp. 126–128.
14. Annetje's baptism, 28 January 1646, with Elsje named: NYG&B Baptisms, Vol. II, p. 20, in Cruise, pp. 123–124.
15. The baptisms of Jan (28 June 1643) and Ruth (22 November 1648), the latter with Willem Bredenbend and Thomas Hall among the witnesses: NYG&B Baptisms, Vol. II, pp. 15, 25, in Cruise, pp. 123–124.
16. The marriage to Grietje Jans van Groningen, 15 May 1652: NYG&B Marriages from 1639 to 1801, Vol. IX, p. 17, in Cruise, p. 128.
17. The baptism of the second Elsje, 1653, and De Forest's observation that Jan, Pieter and Annetje each named a daughter Elsje: Cruise, pp. 128–129.
18. The Jans patronymic and the sons' use of Staats: Cruise, pp. 136, 138, 150–151.
19. Adriana Goedbloed Kroesen's explanation, Frijhoff's letter of 23 July 1997, and the genealogist's conclusion: Cruise, pp. 137–138. The Eustathius derivation is Frijhoff's suggestion and is presented here, as there, as probable and unproven.
20. The Gowanus tax list of 7 February 1657 and the salary of Domine Polhemus; "Adam Brouwer and Jan Pietersen seemed to travel together": Fernow (ed.), The Records of New Amsterdam, Vol. I, p. 168, and Stiles, Vol. I, pp. 134–135, in Cruise, pp. 129–131.
21. The founding members of the Breuckelen church, 12 September 1660: Old First Dutch Reformed Church of Brooklyn, First Book of Records, 1660–1752 (van der Linde, ed.), p. 13, in Cruise, p. 131.
22. Pieter Jansen and Annetje Jans van Dyke received into the church, 17 October 1660: First Book of Records, p. 15, in Cruise, p. 132.
23. Sara's baptism, 3 December 1662: First Book of Records, p. 112, in Cruise, pp. 132–133.
24. The Red Hook petition of 29 May 1664 and its marks: Stiles, Vol. I, p. 68, in Cruise, pp. 133–134.
25. The possible third marriage (15 November 1663) and the communicant list's "moved to Staten Island": Cruise, p. 135, citing Stiles, Vol. I, appendix pp. 428, 430.
26. The 1675 assessment of "Jan Pieterse, the Elder": Stiles, Vol. I, appendix p. 430, in Cruise, p. 135, with the genealogist's inference about his death.
27. Neeltje's life after 1680, the 1687 baptism, and the bracket 1687–1695 for her death: Cruise, pp. 154–157. The family's Staten Island acreage and its Pietersen source: Cruise, pp. 66–67, 144.