Stories about my Mother 15
My family is from such a wide variety of completely disparate places and the journey through them all has so many twists and turns that I find myself continually having to adjust what I think I know. Not only do I have patchy and often contradictory information about some of my ancestors, but in putting together what I have I am also finding that I am continually misleading myself by not questioning my own cultural biases.
The day before yesterday, I went to the beautiful little Dutch town of Buren. It’s about a 45-minute drive east of Amsterdam. In my records, the trail of the Van Buren side of my mother’s family dries up just before Cornelis Van Buren arrives in New York in the 1630s. Since the name, in Dutch, means nothing more than “from Buren,” I went to Buren to see what I could find.
Buren was built in the Middle Ages and is protected by a wall. Even now there are less than 30,000 people in the town and the surrounding countryside. It used to have an impressive castle but sadly that was demolished in the 1800s. In 1492, while a certain somebody was sailing west, the area was made a county which meant that it was then overseen by a count. In 1551, the founder of the current Dutch Royal dynasty, William I of Orange married Anna of Egmont, who was the Countess of Buren. Because of that, the town and surrounding area still fall under the control of the House of Orange-Nassau.
To this day, when a member of the Royal family wants to stay anonymous, they use the name van Buren.
In an old building near the town’s center is a museum dedicated to both the history of the area as well as the history of the House of Orange. The lady in charge was a Royal groupie. She was very excited about the possibility that I might be related to the family but, sadly not very excited about much of anything else. I did, however, learn something from her that I hadn’t realized.
Ordinary people typically had one name plus a derivation of their father’s name. The records I have on Cornelis refer to him as Cornelis Maessen van Buren. I had just assumed that Maessen was a middle name and hadn’t paid any attention to it. It is, in fact, his father’s name which would have been Maes. His name, therefore, translates to Cornelis, son of Maes, from Buren. By ignoring the parts I didn’t understand, I’d ended up missing the point completely.
His wife Catalyntje Martense’s name translates to Catalyntje, daughter of Marten. While the Counts and their families would use van Buren, the townspeople wouldn’t. Cornelis went to what is now New York in the early 1600s as Cornelis Maessen or Maesz. In 1664, when New Amsterdam was ceded to the British, many Dutch settlers there added their birthplaces to their names to identify themselves to the English strangers. Rather than their name signifying any relationship to the Count, they took the name later as a geographical marker.
The spelling of Cornelis’s patronymic could be almost anything: Maessen, Maesen, Maesz, Maersz or Maertsz. The Martin Van Buren National Historic Site in Kinderhook, New York uses Maessen so for clarity’s sake, so will I.
Armed with that new information, and ignoring the van Buren in the search, I’ve managed to open a huge whole new section of my tree. The first thing that I managed to find was that Cornelis’s father’s name was Bartolomeus Maes Maas van Buren. Up until yesterday, all I knew was that one of his names was Maes. Then I discovered that somebody in Holland had done a lot of work on the ancestry of Bartolomeus’s father who was named Bartolome, and voila – there they all were. While Cornelis may have been a farmer, those that came long before him were not.
Cornelis and Anna of Egmont share a distant ancestor named Heer Otto II van Buren who was born in 1240 and died in 1312. Heer is a kind of title, meaning noble. He, in turn, is descended from Aldegisel II, King of Friesland who ruled over what is now Holland. Its capital was Utrecht which is about twenty miles west of Buren. He was Cornelis’s 9th great-grandfather and Anna’s 8th. That connection is so distant that it would be shocking if either of them were aware of it at the time.
It turns out that Cornelis, and his family before him, were all born in Buurmalsen, a small village within Buren County that sits about three miles southwest of the actual Buren. I was SO close. I am clearly going to have to go back. The Dutch Reformed church in Buurmalsen dates to the 1100s so Cornelis would have probably attended it. At some point, President Martin Van Buren visited the village and reportedly met some of our distant ancestors.
Given all that, here, then, is my updated version of the story of Cornelis Maessen van Buren.
Henry Hudson sailed up the river that is now named for him in 1609. He had been hired by the Dutch East India Company to find a passageway to the riches of Cathay in the East. Stories said the route lay above the Arctic Circle. When he came upon New York harbor where the mighty Hudson empties into the sea, he was sure he’d found it. He spent ten days navigating upstream in his ship, the Half Moon. They got up as far as present-day Albany, New York before they had to admit defeat and turn back.
The Dutch claimed the area he’d found as sovereign territory and about five years later built a trading post called Fort Nassau beside the river. What they were trading were beaver pelts which were extremely desirable to the people of Europe. The thick beaver fur was not only soft but also virtually waterproof. With Europe in the middle of what historians call the Little Ice Age, everyone wanted them. Hudson, upon his return, reported that the Native Americans had a flourishing trade in beaver pelts and that there was a great opportunity for the Dutch to get a piece of the action. They jumped at it. Unfortunately, they didn’t choose the site for their fort very well. It turned out to be prone to flooding.
A new company called the Dutch West India Company was formed in 1621 and given a monopoly on Dutch trading in the New World. In 1624, the GWC, as the company was called, sent over a group of thirty Walloons to build a new settlement about two miles to the north of the old location out of the flood plain, that they called Fort Orange. The Walloons were French-speaking protestants from what is now Belgium. As Fort Orange was being built, the Walloon settlers were sent south to a new settlement that had been established on the southern tip of Manhattan Island that they called New Amsterdam.
The Dutch created a system through which the GWC would assign a large tract of land to one of its members. That person, who was called a patroon, was then required to either bring over fifty colonists or establish a settlement of fifty families within four years. The settlers, in turn, paid rent to the patroon, and the patroon then paid a percentage of his income back to the GWC.
Under this system, the GWC started sending more and more settlers over to solidify their position there. Other European countries were doing the same thing. Just the year before the GWC was formed, the British sponsored a group of settlers who were aiming to settle in the same area. The ship they sailed on was called the Mayflower and was filled with religious separatists who had left England for Holland a decade before and were now trying to get out of the way of an approaching war between the Dutch and the Spanish. The Mayflower, of course, never made it up the Hudson but, instead, ended up on Cape Cod. They quickly relocated to what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, where they decided to stay.
Cornelis Maessen was born in the tiny village of Buurmalsen in 1612. His family were farmers and had been on the land for generations. When he was nineteen, he signed an agreement with Killaen van Rensselaer, who was the owner of the largest and most successful patroonship in the New Netherlands colony, to work for him for three years. The first year, he was to be paid £60, the second year £70, and the third year, £80. He was given £12 in advance.
In July of 1631, Cornelis sailed to the New World on the ship Eendracht. He worked hard for Killaen and saved his money. When his period of indenture was done, he returned home to Buurmalsen.
In 1635, Cornelis and Catalyntje Martense got married in Buren. They must have known each other before he left otherwise, why would he come all the way back? With some of his money, he started buying provisions so that they could go back together and start their own farm.
A letter that year from Killaen to his agent in Holland states, “These two farmers, who have been very helpful to me, viz., Cornelis Maessen and Symon Walrichs, you will give a fair choice of the men who are coming but in such a way that they do not select all the best men, for others must have something, too. You will provide them with as many animals as can be supplied from the increase of the others, and in case they should want to settle on Paepzickens land, which I think has not yet been bought, make every effort to purchase the same or at best to cause the farmers to be established there with the consent of the owners.”
In 1636, Cornelis, a pregnant Catalyntje, and a few men, including one named Cornelis Theuenissen Bos, that Cornelis had hired to work for him, set sail back for New Netherlands in the ship Rensselaerwyck. During the journey, their son Hendrick was born.
They settled on a piece of land that is an extremely short distance from where Michael grew up in Castleton-on-Hudson and farmed. By extremely short distance, I mean you could walk to it in an hour or two. As per his agreement with Killean, who was still the potroon, Cornelis was required to pay ten percent of what he grew. In 1644, his annual payment was a hundred bushels of wheat, oats, and rye plus a few bushels of peas. Meaning that he had harvested a thousand bushels of grain.
Two years later, while they continued to farm, they also bought a piece of property in Manhattan. "A house and plantation at the North River on the Island of Manhattan, next to Wouter van Twiller and Thomas Hall." Today that lies between Christopher Street and 14th Street and stretches west to the Hudson River. Weirdly, Michael also used to live on 9th Street which was either right on the plantation or a five-minute walk from it.
Cornelis worked hard and was successful. It was a life that cannot have been easy. In Holland, he worked on a farm that had producing crops for centuries. In New York, he and Catalyntje had to carve a farm out of the wilderness along the river. They seem to have done well. In 1648, however, tragedy struck. The Hudson River flooded and overran its banks. Both Cornelis and Catalyntje were drowned. Their now five children were left orphaned. The person who took them in was the man who had worked for their father, Cornelis Theuenissen Bos.
When the two died, Cornelis was only 36 and Catalyntje was only about 33. They are buried somewhere near Michael’s childhood home.
The Dutch would control the New Netherlands colony for less than twenty more years. The British took it over and aside from a brief period when the Dutch took it back again, it remained under British control for the next century. After that happened was when the Cornelisesen children would change their last names to van Buren. Somewhere down the line, somebody got fancy and started capitalizing the Van, but it was never meant to be fancy. It was simply to point to where they were from.
One of the five children, instead of calling himself van Buren, took on the name, Bloomingdale. When I saw that, I, of course, immediately started checking. It turns out that they are no relation. The Bloomingdales who started the department store in New York were German Jewish immigrants, not the descendants of Dutch settlers.
I feel a pull to some of the people in my tree, but not to all of them. There is something about Cornelis and Catalytje that I keep coming back to. The chance of Michael growing up near where they settled and then moving right next door to where they bought a property in Manhattan seems almost too unlikely to be a coincidence. There’s more than a four-hundred-year gap between us, but unlike some of my other ancestors, they feel more present.
When I go back to visit Buurmasen next, I’ll bring Michael. I’d like to stand with him in that ancient church. There’s a connection there, even if I don’t understand it yet.
Being a Castleton person, I loved, loved, loved this. Fascinating history, and those coincidences with Michael. Wow.