Part I · TWO HOMELANDS, TWO FLAGS · Chapter 6

The Voorlezer's Hand

Staten Island · 28 September 1698

In the record Hendrick² Kroesen (c.1665–1761) · Cornelia Corsen (b. 1681) · Derrick² Kroesen (1662–1731) · Elizabeth Cregier (1662–1740) · Maritje³ Kroesen (b. 1698) · Pieter Jans Staats · John Vincent

The oldest surviving record book of the Reformed Dutch Church on Staten Island begins on 5 May 1696, in a hand that a nineteenth-century minister called "peculiarly beautiful," and for the first hundred and sixty-nine years nobody knew whose hand it was [1]. The keeper of a Dutch church's records did not sign them. He wrote down other people's children, their parents and their witnesses, in the third person, page after page, and left himself out. Then, in the winter of 1698, he wrote this:

My daughter. One possessive pronoun, in a book that otherwise had none, and the clerk of the Staten Island church for its first twenty years stepped out of the third person and became a man with a name. The Reverend James Brownlee saw it in 1865, preparing a discourse for the church's two-hundredth anniversary, and put it in a footnote: "The records are first made in Dutch by Hendrick Kroesen, as may be learned from some touching entries of his children's names" [1]. Eighty years after that, when the little house the church had built for its Voorlezer had been saved from demolition and nobody could say who had lived in it, a Staten Island historian named Loring McMillen went back to Brownlee's footnote and the register and worked it through, and the Voorlezer, he wrote, "emerged after nearly 250 years of oblivion into the community which had lost all trace of him" [2].

He was Garret the cooper's second son. The witness at the font, Dirck Kroesen, was the first. It was December 1698. Some months earlier — the exact date is not recorded — the house of the county clerk had burned down with their father's will inside it, and within the year the two men standing together at Maritje's baptism would be on opposite sides of a petition to the Governor of New York.

The brother who could write

Hendrick was about fifteen when his father died in March 1680, and the family's genealogist reckons that "most of those first fifteen years were spent attending school at the Reformed Dutch Church in Breuckelen" — the school kept by that church's own Voorlezer — where "he became fluent in both the English and Dutch languages, which would serve him well in later years" [3]. His older brother had not gone. Derrick, the family's book says flatly, "never received any formal education, and consequently, was never able to write his name" [4]. It is one of the plainest facts in the record and one of the least explained: two sons, three years apart, on a twenty-eight-acre farm, and the elder worked it while the younger was sent to learn his letters. Whatever the reason — a father who needed his first boy in the cooperage, a second who showed aptitude, the church's school opening at the right moment — it set the shape of both lives. The elder son could claim under English law; the younger could read what the law said.

By his own account, given under oath in 1699, Hendrick had been living on the island, on the lot his father meant for him, for "about twelve years" — since 1687, when he was about twenty-two, and his mother, on the family's reckoning, was dying or dead [5]. The genealogist's guess for the next decade is the modest one: he "may have spent the next ten years, from 1687 to 1697, working the patent and possibly teaching some," in a community that had "neither church nor minister" and schooled its children, when it schooled them, in private houses. He called himself a Planter. And around 1695 the Dutch families of the island, who had told the two Labadist travellers "wherever we went" that they wanted a minister, did the thing Dutch congregations did when they could not get one: they built a house for a Voorlezer, on ground leased for fifty years from a man named James Hanse Dye, at the head of the Fresh Kill [6].

What a Voorlezer was

McMillen's 1946 article, which the family's genealogist reprinted whole because he could not better it, sets out the office. The Voorlezer was "an employee of a Reformed Dutch congregation whose principal office was to assist the dominie in the Church services by ringing the bell, leading the singing, admonishing noisy ones, keeping the records of the church including the baptismal records (thus the English title of clerk), and in the absence of the dominie conducting church services by reading from the scriptures or from a published book of sermons" — hence the other English title, "fore-reader" [2]. He could not baptize, marry, preach his own sermon or serve communion. He kept a school "in which was taught elementary reading, writing and arithmetic, together with religious study leading to a simple catechism." In most places he was also court clerk, court messenger and public scrivener, and in that last capacity, McMillen notes, an old Dutch manual of 1607 required him to be able "to compose love letters" [2].

On an island with one Dutch congregation and no minister of its own — the Domine Bartholf who baptized Maritje came over from New Jersey when he could — the Voorlezer was the church, most Sundays. And the building that went with the job was not a church as anyone now imagines one: "with true Dutch realism and frugality it was intended that the voorlezer would also dwell and teach school" in it, and such buildings "were dwellings or houses and always so called" [2]. In 1697, around the age of thirty-two, Hendrick married Cornelia Corsen — sixteen, the daughter of Captain Cornelius Corsen, the man Leisler had made a captain and a justice, and of Maritje van der Grift — and the newlyweds moved into the Voorlezer's house [7]. Their first child was born there on a September morning the next year, and her father, keeping the church's book, wrote her down.

The congregation left the house in 1701, and it is worth knowing why. The lease from James Hanse Dye carried a clause "that no person shall live in the said church, which if the said congregation of the Dutch shall presume to put any person therein, then my gift is void" [6]. A Voorlezer with a wife and a baby living in the building was, on a strict reading, exactly that, and the genealogist's inference that the breach is what moved the congregation is the likeliest one. They sold the house on 13 March 1701 and built again at Port Richmond, on the north shore, near the family's patents, and the record says Hendrick's nephew Garret³ — Derrick's eldest — "helped his Uncle Hendrick build the Reformed Dutch Church at Port Richmond" [8]. Whether Hendrick kept the title after the move is not known; he kept the book until about 1718 [9].

The house he left survived by accident. It passed through private hands for two hundred and thirty-eight years, its origin forgotten, until a title search and the carpentry itself — materials and joinery of before 1700 — identified it, and in 1936 Staten Island scheduled it for demolition. Three years of local effort, led by a Mrs. T. Livingstone Kennedy, saved it, and in 1939 it was given to the Staten Island Historical Society. It stands at 63 Arthur Kill Road, in Richmondtown, and is recognised as "the earliest known elementary school building standing in the United States" [6]. The book Hendrick kept in it nearly did not survive at all: "the priceless document was almost destroyed," the family's genealogist writes, until "Mrs. Alfred DeGroot happened upon the tattered artifact and deposited the book with the Reformed Dutch Church" [6]. A schoolroom a cooper's son taught in, and the register he wrote in a hand a minister thought beautiful, both saved by women who noticed.

Derrick and Elizabeth on the island

The elder brother's life in these years is recorded, as his father's was, in other people's registers. His children's baptisms trace the family's move. Garret³, born about 1685, has no record at all. Francis was baptized at Breuckelen on 11 September 1689 — "Frans; parents: Dirck Croes, Elizabeth Croes; witnesses: Pieter Jansen, Katrijna Bogardes" — Derrick's uncle Pieter Staats and one of Elizabeth's Bogardus half-sisters [10]. Neeltje³ was baptized there on 13 March 1692, with Volkert Bries, the stepfather, as witness [10]. They were living on Staten Island by then; they crossed to Breuckelen to do it, because there was nowhere on the island to do it and because Breuckelen was still the family's church [10].

Then, from 1696, the entries are in Hendrick's book. Nicholas, 5 May 1696 — the very day the register begins — with "Cornelis Vielen, Caatye Bogardus" as witnesses. Derck, 22 October 1701, with "Niclaes Backer, Blandyena Bogardus." Hendrick³, 30 July 1707, with "Chrystiaan Korssen, Sara Bogardus" [11]. The uncle's hand, writing the nephews down; the first entry in the island's oldest church book may be the Voorlezer recording his own brother's son. And in every one of them, a Bogardus: Caatje, Blandina, Sara — the daughters of Walburg De Sille and Willem Bogardus, Elizabeth's half-sisters from the Manhattan house she grew up in, crossing the bay to stand at the font for her children. "It is apparent," the genealogist writes, "that Elizabeth had influence with her step-family" [11]. The Burgomaster's granddaughter had not been cut off by marrying a farmer who signed with a mark. Her family came to her.

Derrick is on the roll of "First Settlers" of the island for 1691, the year after Leisler's raid on the Catholic collector's beef [12]. A census of the island's men between sixteen and sixty, taken in a year the census-taker forgot to write down — 1706, or 1709, depending on whose age you trust — has "Derick Krose, 46; Gerard Croose, 24; Francis Crose, 17; Hendryk Crose, 40," and a few lines down "Peter Staats, 40; Abram Staes, 44" [13]. Two brothers, two sons, two cousins, on one page. Between 1685 and 1707 Elizabeth bore eight children, and all eight lived to marry, which for the time and place was a great deal of luck and a great deal of work [14].

The fire, and the petition

The county's records in the 1690s were kept in the house of a Mr. O'Neil, and in 1698 the house burned. Among the things in it was the will of Garret Dircksen Croesen, "together with the probate and record thereof," and no copy existed anywhere else [5]. The family's book had always known the will burned; it was the Staten Island descendants, two centuries later, who remembered the detail of whose house — "Gerrit made a will and the will was burned up in Mr. O'Neil's house in 1698" — in a conversation taken down in 1902 [15].

Under the English law that had governed the island since Derrick was two, a man who died without a will was succeeded in his land by his eldest son, and the law did not distinguish between a will that had never been made and one that had been made, proved, recorded, and then reduced to ash in the county clerk's parlour. Derrick was the eldest son. "Derrick must have pushed the issue," the genealogist writes, "forcing Hendrick to take some action" [5]. What Hendrick did — the brother who could write — was petition the Governor:

It asked that he be left "in quiet possession," and it came with an affidavit from the two uncles — Peter Jans Staats, Neeltje's brother, and John Vincent, her sister's husband — "that they had witnessed, seen and read the said will which was destroyed by fire, and that Hendrick together with his brother Dirck had been each devised a lot of land" [5]. Two men who could not have been more inside the family swearing to what a burned paper had said, against the eldest son. The line in the petition that carries the most weight is the quietest: having notice of the same. Derrick did not make the claim until he learned the will was gone. A man who believed he was his father's sole heir would not have waited eighteen years to say so. He had known what the will said, and he had lived with it, and when the paper burned he saw the law change under him and reached for it.

"The outcome of the petition is not recorded," the genealogist writes; a survey of the two lots was ordered in 1700, "apparently, an agreement was reached," and in 1709 the whole patent was sold, in a transaction that was never recorded, except for a strip of thirteen and a half acres on the western side that the will had left to their sister Elsje [5]. Twenty-nine years from the death to the sale. The Staten Island branch of the family, when they told the story in 1902, told it in one sentence: "So he tried to grab the whole estate" [15]. And of what became of the man who tried, they had four words: "Dirk disappeared, and Hendrick here" [15].

What each brother did with the money

The genealogist's belief — and he says it is a belief — is that the sale of the patent, after thirty-two years of ownership and a generation of settlement along the north shore, funded both brothers' next moves, and "a fair case can also be made that the dispute between the brothers, lasting until 1709, may have benefited the price" [5]. What is recorded is what they bought.

Hendrick, in 1709, bought fifty-two and a half acres next door to the old patent from a George Hooglandt — a parcel that included the thirteen and a half acres his sister Elsje had inherited and her husband had sold off in 1696 [16]. He bought his sister's strip back and built his house on it, the "Dwelling House," an old stone house that stood until a Vanderbilt tore it down in the nineteenth century, and he laid out the family burial plot on the same ground; a descendant found five of the stones there in 1902 and photographed them [16]. He deeded a strip to his cousin John Staats, whose son-in-law, the island's first resident Dutch minister, built a house on it that is still standing — the Cruser–Pelton house, which in the Revolution would be a British headquarters with Hendrick's widowed daughter-in-law living in it [17]. He kept the church's book until about 1718, was still called the Voorlezer in the records of the house he had left, and died in 1761, aged about ninety-five, leaving his son Cornelius three tracts of land "and also my Silver Tankard" [18]. His descendants held the ground until 1835. McMillen, writing of the whole class of men Hendrick belonged to, allowed himself one summary: "At no time did the Voorlezer feature on the wrong side of the public or court records, a tribute to his honesty and industry and a tribute which cannot be paid to many of the Dutch dominies, his ecclesiastic superiors" [2].

Derrick, in 1712, bought 580 acres in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for six hundred pounds [19]. But he did not go there first. His daughter did.

Neeltje goes first

Neeltje³, the girl baptized at Breuckelen in 1692 with her step-grandfather as witness, married young — seventeen — a man named Casal Van Hasten, who with a partner had bought 580 acres in Bucks County in 1708 and had come into the whole of it when the partner died [20]. By 21 May 1710 she was there, baptizing her first son, Jacob, in the new Reformed Dutch church at Bensalem-Neshaminy; a month later she was admitted to its membership by certificate. She was the first of the family in Pennsylvania. The family's book says it plainly: "There is little doubt that Neeltje was the first Kroesen to reside in Bucks County" [20]. Her parents followed within the year — their own admission to the Bensalem church is dated 23 June 1711 — and a note in the Raike files says they lived with Neeltje and Casal when they arrived, which "would make sense" [20]. On 12 August 1711 she baptized a second son, Derrick, for her father. And then, the book says, "she died at a very early age and never really knew her two sons" [20]. The baby died too. Casal sold the 580 acres to his wife's parents in 1712 and left.

That is why the family is in Pennsylvania. Not the lawsuit, not the patent money, not a plan. A daughter went ahead to her husband's land, and died there with her second child, and her parents bought the farm she died on and stayed on it for the rest of their lives. "It was during this time," the genealogist writes in his conclusion, "that Neeltje's second son was born, and both mother and son died sometime after the birth. Subsequently, in 1712, Casal decided to leave the area and sold the 580-acre farm to Derrick and Elizabeth. They continued to live on this tract for the remainder of their lives" [21].

So the first part of this book ends where the family's genealogist ended his: Derrick and Elizabeth, "that grand and brave old couple … being twice transplanted," on a farm in Bucks County, in their fifties, with a dead daughter and a dead grandson somewhere on it, and the English flag over everything [22]. Behind them was the island, and on it the brother who could write, in a house on his sister's thirteen acres, keeping the book. The two of them never lived in the same colony again. Hendrick's people would remember only that Dirk disappeared.

The ground it happened on

As always: what follows is what the period's own describers said about the places, not a document about the family. The Voorlezer's House still stands, and can be visited: a two-storey clapboard building with a steep roof, a big room downstairs that served as church and schoolroom and a smaller one behind it, the family's quarters above — plain, as McMillen says, and "always so called" a house [2]. The bell he rang hung from it. The school taught Dutch children to read Dutch; the island's first English-language records and its Dutch church book ran in parallel for a generation, and a man who had both languages, as Hendrick did, was the hinge between them, which is why the Voorlezer was so often the court's clerk too [2]. The two family patents on the Kill Van Kull were each about a quarter of a mile wide and a mile deep — a strip of shore and salt meadow, then upland, then the "woods" the surveyors' chains ran into — and the sale of 1709 broke them into the lots that maps would carry for the next century: Lot 1 and Lot 4 and the widow's strip [16]. Port Richmond, where the congregation rebuilt, was the landing on the north shore where the ferry to New Jersey ran; the family's church was, as everything on the island was, at the water. Bucks County, where the next part of this book begins, was some fifty miles south-west by no road at all, across the Raritan, the Millstone and the Delaware, in a colony that was English, Quaker, and only thirty years old.

1. The baptismal entry of Maritje Kroesen, 28 September / December 1698, in the Voorlezer's hand; Brownlee's 1865 identification and his remark on the handwriting: Transcriptions of the Early Town Records of New York: The Earliest Volume of Staten Island Records, 1678–1813, p. xxxv, and Loring McMillen, "The Voorlezer," The Staten Island Historian 8, no. 3 (July–September 1946), pp. 17–19, 22 — both as reprinted in Warren D. Cruise, The Croesen Families of America, Vol. I (Gateway Press, Baltimore, 1998), pp. 340, 372–373. The "Domine Batolius" of the entry is presumably Guiliam Bartholf, the itinerant minister who served the Dutch congregations of northern New Jersey and Staten Island in these years. As throughout, the records are read as Cruise transcribed them.
2. McMillen's article on the office of Voorlezer, the house, its uses, its identification, and the character of the men who held the office: Cruise, pp. 367–373, reprinting McMillen (1946) with the Staten Island Historical Society's permission.
3. Hendrick's schooling at the Breuckelen church and his two languages: Cruise, p. 338.
4. Derrick "never received any formal education … never able to write his name": Cruise, p. 170.
5. The burned will, Hendrick's 1699 petition (quoted), the uncles' affidavit, the survey warrant of 6 June 1700, the unrecorded sale of 1709 and Elsje's 13½ acres, and the genealogist's belief about the proceeds: Cruise, pp. 74, 341–343, citing New York State Archives, Albany, Book 3, p. 34.
6. The Voorlezer's house — built c. 1695, the Dye lease and its "no person shall live in the said church" clause, the sale of 13 March 1701, the 1936 demolition order, Mrs. T. Livingstone Kennedy, the gift to the Historical Society in 1939, "the earliest known elementary school building standing in the United States," and the near-loss of the record book: Cruise, pp. 339–340, citing "The Story of the Voorlezer's House" (Staten Island Historical Society, 1974) and McMillen (1946). The address is given as 63 Arthur Kill Road in McMillen; a later Cruise page gives 45.
7. Hendrick's marriage c. 1697 to Cornelia Corsen (b. 24 July 1681, bapt. Breuckelen 13 August 1681), daughter of Capt. Cornelius Corsen and Maritje van der Grift; "Planter"; the move into the Voorlezer's house: Cruise, pp. 336, 338.
8. The congregation's move to Port Richmond and Garret³'s part in building the church: Cruise, pp. 177, 340.
9. Hendrick's record-keeping "until around 1718": Cruise, p. 343.
10. The Breuckelen baptisms of Francis (11 September 1689) and Neeltje³ (13 March 1692), with witnesses: Old First Dutch Reformed Church of Brooklyn, First Book of Records, pp. 128, 130, in Cruise, p. 172; the continued use of the Breuckelen church to 1693, Cruise, p. 171.
11. The Staten Island baptisms of Nicholas (5 May 1696), Derck (22 October 1701) and Hendrick³ (30 July 1707), with the Bogardus witnesses, and William B. Bogardus's memo identifying them: NYG&B Staten Island Church Records, Vol. V, pp. 10–11, in Cruise, pp. 172–173.
12. The "First Settlers" roll of 1691: Monnette, First Settlers of Ye Plantations of Piscataway and Woodbridge, pp. 120–121, in Cruise, pp. 173–174.
13. The undated census ("1706") and its ages: Stillwell, Historical and Genealogical Miscellany, Vol. I, pp. 151, 153, in Cruise, pp. 174–175, with the genealogist's discussion of the date.
14. Derrick and Elizabeth's eight children and their marriages: Cruise, pp. 168–169, 176–177, 318.
15. The 1902 account of the Staten Island branch — "the will was burned up in Mr. O'Neil's house in 1698," "so he tried to grab the whole estate," "Dirk disappeared, and Hendrick here," the burial plot and its five stones: a conversation with a Mr. Rowland recorded by "MA," reprinted in Cruise, pp. 364–366.
16. Hendrick's 1709 purchase of 52½ acres from George Hooglandt, including Elsje's strip (sold by William Claaz, 17 May 1696), the "Dwelling House," and the burial plot: Cruise, pp. 345–347, citing Richmond County Liber B, pp. 9, 452.
17. The strips deeded to John Staats (1709), the Rev. Cornelius Van Santvoord's house, its later history as the Cruser–Pelton "Mansion House" and Loyalist headquarters, and "Widow Cruser": Cruise, pp. 341, 346, citing Richmond County Liber D, pp. 285, 509.
18. Hendrick's will (made 11 August 1760, proved 4 July 1761), the three tracts and the silver tankard: Cruise, pp. 336, 347.
19. Derrick's purchase of the 580-acre Van Hasten tract in 1712 for £600: Cruise, pp. 74, 177–181.
20. Neeltje³ and Casal Van Hasten — the 1708 purchase with Lawrence Johnson, Jacob's baptism (21 May 1710), her admission (23 June 1710), Derrick's baptism (12 August 1711), the Raike note, and her early death: Pennsylvania Vital Records, Vol. I, pp. 111, 115, 117–118, 249, in Cruise, pp. 175–177; Derrick and Elizabeth's admission to the Bensalem-Neshaminy church, 23 June 1711, Cruise, p. 175.
21. The genealogist's conclusion on the move to Bucks County: Cruise, p. 319.
22. "That grand and brave old couple … being twice transplanted": Frank King Swain's 1933 note, in Cruise, p. 80.