Part II · THE X ON THE WILL · Chapter 8

The X on the Will

Northampton Township, Bucks County · 4 January 1758

In the record Garret³ Kroesen (1685–1767) · Arientje Nevius (1690–1776) · Henry³ Kroesen (1707–1789) · Francis³ Kroesen (1689–1756) · Nicholas³ Kroesen (1696–1786) · Jan³ Kroesen (1698–1775) · Catharine³ Kroesen (1698–1785)

On the fourth of January 1758, a man of seventy-two in Northampton Township, Bucks County, sent for someone who could write and dictated his will. He began it as his father had begun his, "being in health and in perfect and sound mind," and the clerk set down the words that a Pennsylvania will always opened with. Then the clerk wrote the testator's name as he heard it:

Krewson. Not Croesen, as his grandfather had been entered at Breuckelen; not Kroesen, as his uncle had written it in his beautiful hand on Staten Island; not Cruson, as the Bucks County clerk had spelled his father in 1729. Krewson — the spelling this book carries on its cover, the spelling on every later gravestone and deed and enlistment paper in the family's line, written for the first time in a legal document by a Pennsylvania scrivener listening to an old Dutch farmer say his own name. And at the foot of it:

He could not write the name. The third witness who could was his youngest brother, Henry, who had commanded a company of Pennsylvania militia in the war against the French. The family's name arrived at its present form in a document its owner could not read, signed with the same X his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had made, and vouched for by the first Kroesen soldier.

The ferry-keeper's granddaughter

Garret was the eldest of Derrick and Elizabeth's eight, born on Staten Island about 1685, with no baptism found [2]. On 10 October 1710 — the year his sister Neeltje went to Pennsylvania — he married Arientje Nevius, and the family's records place the wedding, oddly, at the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, forty miles from either family's home. The oddity has an explanation the genealogist found in the end: the Philadelphia church's first minister, Jedidiah Andrews, rode a circuit from 1698 to 1747 "as far north as Staten Island, east and south into New Jersey and Delaware," and the marriages he performed on the road were entered in his own book at home. Several Kroesens over three decades "married in Philadelphia" without going there [3].

Arientje's family was older in the colony than his. Her grandfather Joannes Nevius, born at Zoelen on the Rhine in 1627, the son of a minister, educated at Leyden, had come to New Amsterdam in 1650 and run the Brooklyn ferry — the crossing at whose landing, in 1679, Adam Brouwer would stand and say that Garret's grandfather should not have come off alive. Nevius was a Schepen of the city in 1654 and 1655 and its town clerk in 1658; his wife's mother had lived in Batavia, on Java, at the other end of the Company's world, before marrying a Brooklyn merchant [4]. After Joannes died in 1672 his widow petitioned the city to renew the ferry lease, and got it [4]. Their son Cornelius, born in 1661, was the Cornelius Nevius whom Leisler had made an ensign of the Staten Island militia in 1689, and he died in 1711, within a year of his daughter's marriage; his will was witnessed by his new son-in-law, "7 Garret³ Kroesen" [5]. The family's researcher Marie Metzgar noticed that the couple named their first son Cornelius, out of the usual Dutch order, "which shows that Arientje's father, Cornelius Nevius, died about the time of her marriage or before" [2]. The name went to the dead grandfather first.

That first son was baptized at Port Richmond on 23 October 1711 — in the church, the record says, that Garret "helped his Uncle Hendrick build" [6]. He stayed on the island some years after his parents had gone, the eldest son working beside the uncle who had fought his father over the patent, and then, between 1715 and 1718, followed the family to Bucks County [2]. In the deeds of gift of 1727 he received 260 acres in Northampton; on them he built a stone house, and in its east gable he set the stone that reads, in one transcription, "Derrick Kroesen, May 12, 1731" — his father's name and, on the family's reading, his father's death — and in another "Built by D.K. 1730" [7]. In the will his father made in 1729, his portion was "all my gold and silver buttons and one cow" [8]. He and his brother John were the executors. He was forty-six.

Thirty years on 260 acres

The record of the next three decades is the record of a farm and a family, kept in the baptismal books of the Dutch churches at Bensalem and then Feasterville and Richboro, and in the wills of the people around him. Seven children: Cornelius, Derrick, a son whose name is lost, Elizabeth, Agatha, John, Arientje [2]. And then, as always in this family, the deaths that shaped the will. Cornelius⁴, the firstborn, went to Burlington County, New Jersey, and married a Catharine Bennet; in January 1744 she bore a daughter, Adrientje, at the North and Southampton church, and died two days after the baptism; Cornelius himself was dead by April 1749, and the orphaned granddaughter came home to Bucks County [9]. Derrick⁴, named for the grandfather with the date stone, cleared a meadow "at the west end of my place," married a woman the will calls Lommiche, had four children, and died before 1758 [1]. So when Garret sat down to dictate, two of his three sons were in the ground, and the will is mostly about their children.

Read it against his father's. The wagon, plough, harrow and horse harness go, as before, to the son who will farm — John now, as Henry had been. The silver buttons that came to Garret in 1729 with the cow go on, in 1758, to three boys named Gerret, one of them a Huff. Twenty pounds among a dead son's four children; eighty pounds to a dead son's orphaned daughter, who had lost her mother two days after her own baptism; a cow and calf for the same girl "if in case she should marry." And two things his father's will did not have. The meadow a dead son cleared with his own hands, left to that son's widow for as long as she keeps her own place — which is to say, for as long as she does not remarry and leave. And one silver cup, to his wife, "to be property her own, to give and bequeath unto whom she pleaseth." In a will whose every other clause is conditional on his widow staying a widow, that cup is the one thing that is hers absolutely. A man who could not write his name knew exactly what a possession was, and gave his wife of forty-eight years one of her own.

He died on 18 March 1767, at eighty-two, and was buried in the cemetery of the North and Southampton Reformed Dutch Church, where his stone — "d. 1767, aged 82, born 1685" — is, the genealogist notes, "one of the oldest ever recorded in Bucks County" [10]. Arientje kept the house and the cup nine more years and died on 18 January 1776, six months before the colony she had been born in declared itself a state, and was buried beside him [2].

How the name got written

The clerk who wrote "Krewson" in 1758 was not correcting anything; he was doing what every clerk in the family's record had done, which was to write what he heard. The Dutch had a name, Kroes or Kroesen, that the family's book traces to a medieval nickname for "a person with curly hair," in an age when families reused the same three given names and needed something to tell one Dirck from another [11]. Written in Dutch by Dutch clerks it was Croesen, Crousen, Kroesen. Written in English by English clerks it became whatever the ear made of it: Cruse, Cruise, Crusen, Cruson, Kruson, Krewson, Krovesseen. A New Jersey genealogist counted fourteen spellings in two standard references, and the family's own book prints a dozen on its title page [12]. Frank Swain, who read more of the family's deeds than anyone, put the truth of it in his 1933 note: these people made their way in "a Government conducted in a different language" [13]. The name on this book is a Pennsylvania scrivener's transcription of a Bucks County Dutchman's accent, fixed by the accident of which document his descendants happened to read.

And in the same generation, in the same county, the same surname was being written four other ways by four brothers. That is the next thing the record shows: how far Derrick's children scattered, and what each of them was called when he did.

The scatter

Francis³, baptized at Breuckelen in 1689 with a Bogardus aunt as witness, married Elizabeth Van der Grift in 1716 — another of Andrews's road weddings — and went south, to St. George's Hundred in New Castle County, Delaware, on the river the Dutch had called the South River, where his grandmother had spent her childhood [14]. His will, made "being very sick in body though of perfect mind and memory" on 31 May 1756, opens "I, Francis Krovesseen of Northampton Township and County of Bucks, farmer" — he was in Bucks County when he made it — and leaves his wife "all that plantation lying in St. George's Hundred in the County of New Castle on the Delaware, with the houses, outhouses, barns, stables, orchards, meadows," her choice of a horse, two cows, "her saddle and bridle, her bed and furniture"; and to his son Leonard, "my silver shoe buckles more than his equal share" [14]. Then something none of his brothers could do: he signed it. "FRANCIS KROESEN," in his own hand, and spelled the Dutch way. Of Derrick's six sons, the second is the only one whose signature survives; where he learned it — on Staten Island, from the uncle who taught school — the record does not say, but the spelling he chose is his uncle's. He died that June. The will took some finding: a family researcher thought it lost in Philadelphia, and Swain searched everywhere before it turned up "at #275, Book K, in the Philadelphia City Hall way of filing" [14].

Nicholas³, baptized in the first days of Hendrick's register in May 1696, married Mary Rowland at the Abington Presbyterian church in 1724, farmed in Bucks County for thirty years, and between 1750 and 1760 went further south than any of them, to Harford County, Maryland, on the Susquehanna, where he bought 230 acres in 1760 [15]. His will is written in the name of "Nicholas Kruson of Hartford Co. Md" and names three sons, Richard, John and Garret, and neither of his daughters. The family's book prints it as made on 7 May 1785 and proved in December 1786, and then prints the will's own first line, which says "this Seventh Day of May 1765" — a twenty-year discrepancy in one document, which the genealogist records rather than resolves and this book does the same [15].

Jan³, called John, born in 1698 and never baptized that anyone found, married twice — Brechje Bergen, then Catrina Cornell — and went north-east into New Jersey; he died on 9 December 1775 and is buried at South Middlebush, in Somerset County, and his will names as executors a son and two sons-in-law "all of Somerset County" [16]. Catharine³, the daughter who got 250 acres in the gifts of 1727, married Benjamin Jones of Northampton and bore him eleven children, and after his death married Henry Lott — a Revolutionary War veteran, and presumably the Henry Lott who had witnessed her brother Garret's will [17].

Henry³, the youngest, the one who got the ploughs, stayed. He was baptized at Port Richmond in 1707 with a Bogardus aunt as witness — the eighth child, the one that makes Swain's count of seven an undercount — and he married Elsje Bergen, a sister of the Cornelia Bergen his brother Derrick³ married, so that two Kroesen brothers had two Bergen sisters for wives, and a third brother, Jan, had a Brechje Bergen [18]. He lived in the east end of his father's house with half the cellar. And in the 1750s, when the war with France that had been fought for a generation on the Ohio and the Lakes came finally into Pennsylvania, he "served in the French and Indian War as a captain in Company #2" [18]. The family's book is careful about what that means. The war's real violence — "burned farms, captured settlers" — fell on the province's frontier a hundred miles west and north, and "Bucks County's own settled townships were largely spared the shooting war" [19]. What Bucks County contributed was the grievance behind it: on 19 September 1737, from the Quaker meeting-house at Wrightstown, a few miles from the Kroesen farms, the Penn family's agents had set three runners off on the "Walking Purchase," a day-and-a-half walk that took in over a million acres the Lenape had never agreed to sell, and left them, seventeen years later, ready to side with the French [19]. Henry's company was raised in a county that had helped cause the war it was defending against. Whether it ever fired a shot, the record does not say.

He was married a second time, at Hunterdon in New Jersey on 31 October 1774, to an Ann Williamson; his first wife had died in 1771 [18]. He made his will in May 1788, in a Bucks County that was now in "the State of Pennsylvania," and died on 25 April 1789. He is buried in the Feasterville cemetery — the walled graveyard Swain found on his brother's land — in row 7, stone 3. Elsje Bergen is row 7, stone 4 [18].

What the scatter shows

Six sons of Derrick and Elizabeth reached manhood in Bucks County. One went to Delaware and one to Maryland and one to New Jersey, and their descendants are Cruses and Crusers and Krusons in three states; three stayed within a few miles of the 580 acres and became the Krewsons of Bucks County. It is the pattern the family's book calls "moving westward" and that this book has been calling eight miles at a time — except that here, for once, the movement went in every direction, and what held the centre was not a patriarch but a churchyard. Garret and Arientje at North and Southampton. Henry and Elsje in row 7 at Feasterville. Derrick³ and his Bergen wife in the same ground, which is the next chapter. A generation after the family had left the island where its grandfather was a Voorlezer and its church was one house, it had a graveyard with rows in it. That is what a hundred years on one square mile of Pennsylvania buys: not wealth — Uncle Al was right about that — but a place to be buried beside your brother.

The ground it happened on

As always, what follows is the period's own description of the things named above, not a document about the family. Northampton Township lies north of Southampton along the Neshaminy, twenty-odd miles from Philadelphia; Richboro, where the family's second Dutch church was built in 1751, is its village, and the North and Southampton Reformed Dutch Church, into which the Feasterville and Richboro congregations were joined, still keeps the cemetery where Garret and Arientje lie [20]. A vendue, the word in Francis's will, is a public auction, the Dutch vendu passed into Delaware Valley English; "current lawful money of our currency" in Garret's will is Pennsylvania paper, by 1758 the province's ordinary money. "Company #2" was a company of the Bucks County provincial militia raised under the Pennsylvania militia acts of the 1750s, when the Quaker-controlled Assembly, which had refused for seventy years to raise troops, was finally forced to by the Lenape and Shawnee raids of 1755–56 on the Northampton County frontier — the other Northampton, north of the Lehigh, which the Walking Purchase had created and which bore the war the Kroesens' Northampton did not [19]. Silver buttons and silver shoe buckles, in a farmer's will, are the whole of a man's portable wealth and the visible sign of it: what he wore to church. A silver cup was the equivalent for a woman, and Arientje's, "to give and bequeath unto whom she pleaseth," is the only object in three generations of these wills that a woman disposed of on her own.

1. The will of Garret Kroesen, made 4 January 1758, proved 11 June 1767 — Bucks County Will Book 3, p. 167, file 1214, copied by Frank K. Swain on 23 February 1932; transcribed in Warren D. Cruise, The Croesen Families of America, Vol. I (Gateway Press, Baltimore, 1998), pp. 229–231, where it is headed "7 Garret³ Kroesen (Krewson) Will" and the testator's name in the opening line and the attestation is given as Krewson. As throughout, the documents are read as Cruise transcribed them; spelling is modernised in quotation except for names.
2. Garret³'s birth, marriage, children, the Metzgar note on the naming of Cornelius, the move to Bucks County between 1715 and 1718, and Arientje's death on 18 January 1776: Cruise, pp. 228–229.
3. The Rev. Jedidiah Andrews and the Philadelphia "marriages": Cruise, p. 232.
4. Joannes Nevius, the ferry, the Schepen and clerk offices, his wife's family and the Batavia connection, the ferry lease renewed to his widow: Van Doren Honeyman, Joannes Nevius and His Descendants, A.D. 1627 to 1900, pp. 134–170, in Cruise, pp. 231–232.
5. Cornelius Nevius (bapt. 19 June 1661, d. 1711), his will witnessed by Garret³: Cruise, p. 232. His commission as ensign under Leisler is in chapter 5.
6. Cornelius⁴'s baptism at Port Richmond, 23 October 1711; Garret's help in building the church: NYG&B Staten Island Church Records, Vol. IV, p. 15, in Cruise, pp. 177, 233.
7. The 260 acres of 1727, the stone house and the date stone: Cruise, pp. 188, 190; treated in the previous chapter.
8. "All my gold and silver buttons and one cow": the will of Derrick Cruson, 1729, in Cruise, p. 191.
9. Cornelius⁴ (1711–1749), Catharine Bennet's death two days after Adrientje's baptism (January 1744): Pennsylvania Vital Records, Vol. I, p. 245, in Cruise, p. 233.
10. Garret's death (18 March 1767), burial at North and Southampton, and the tombstone "d. 1767, aged 82, born 1685," one of the oldest recorded in Bucks County: Cruise, pp. 174–175, 228.
11. "Kroes" as a nickname for curly hair, the Dutch naming system, and the anglicization of names: Cruise, pp. 6–7.
12. The fourteen spellings counted by Lewis Wayne Nelson (Kruse, Croose, Croesen, Kroeson, Kroesen, Kroose, Crose, Crusea, Crosson, Crusen, Cruse, Cruise, Croese, Cruser): Van Harlingen Historical Society Newsletter 1, no. 4 (June 1978), in Cruise, p. 77; the title-page list, Cruise, p. 1.
13. "A Government conducted in a different language": Frank King Swain's 1933 note, in Cruise, p. 80.
14. Francis³ — baptism, marriage (23 March 1716), the move to St. George's Hundred, his will of 31 May 1756 (quoted) with his signature "FRANCIS KROESEN," and the search for it: Cruise, pp. 242–245, citing Philadelphia Will Book K, no. 275, p. 43, and Linn and Egle, Records of Pennsylvania Marriages Prior to 1810, Vol. II, p. 16.
15. Nicholas³ — baptism (6 May 1696), the Abington marriage (23 November 1724), the move to Harford County, the 230 acres of 1760, and the will with its two dates: Cruise, pp. 264–267.
16. Jan³ — his two marriages, his death on 9 December 1775, burial at South Middlebush, and his will: Cruise, pp. 274–277.
17. Catharine³ — her marriages to Benjamin Jones and Henry Lott, and her eleven children: Cruise, pp. 178, 288–289.
18. Henry³ — baptism (30 July 1707), his marriages to Elsje Bergen and (31 October 1774) Ann Williamson, his captaincy in "Company #2" in the French and Indian War, his will of 7 May 1788, death 25 April 1789, and the Feasterville stones (row 7, stones 3 and 4): Cruise, pp. 312–313, citing Anne Raike's files and Nelson, Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, p. 230. The three Bergen wives: Cruise, pp. 278–279.
19. The French and Indian War's distance from Bucks County and the Walking Purchase of 19 September 1737: the family record's own summary, drawing on the standard histories; see also Cruise's account of the Bucks County settlement. The militia acts of 1755–57 and the Assembly's resistance are general Pennsylvania history.
20. Richboro (1751), the North and Southampton Reformed Dutch Church, and its cemetery: Cruise, p. 176.