I’ve written about an ancestor on my maternal tree, my 10th great-grandfather Robert Coles, who was publicly shamed for drinking alcohol. He was made to wear a scarlet letter “D” in the 1630s in Boston. On my paternal tree, I’ve found another ancestor who suffered a similar public humiliation in…
Category: <span>New Netherlands</span>
I’ve written extensively about my husband’s roots in the West Indies, but I have almost no historic connection to that part of the world. There is one notorious character on my family tree however who lived for a time in the Dutch colony of Suriname, located on the northern coast…
Going back to the 1600s on my maternal grandfather’s tree, I’ve traced back to Laurens Jansen De Camp (about 1645-1719), a Huguenot who came to New Amsterdam in the 1660s. In the New World, he married Aeltje Mandeville, a Dutch woman born about 1657 in Holland. Aeltje’s father was Yellis…
Ice hockey is believed to have common roots with the sport of golf: they may both descend from an old Dutch game called “kolf” or “colf”. The summer version of kolf was played outdoors on the grass or streets, with players competing to hit a distant target (a stick or…
My Brewster tree goes back to the earliest New Netherlands settlers of the Hudson River Valley. One branch comes down from Pieter Janse Loockermans, an immigrant from Turnhout, a city in the Flemish section of Belgium. Pieter came to New Netherlands in about 1640 and settled in Beverwyck in…
On my Brewster/Betterton family tree, there is a large branch of Dutch and English ancestors who lived in the area of Albany, NY and the Hudson River valley. One such ancestor was Peter (Pieter) Mees Hogeboom. He was a Dutch merchant and landowner who lived during the 18th century in…