Family · the lines · VanBenschoten

The Name Itself

the Van Bunschoten line — eleven generations of the family's own surname

Every other river in this archive flows into the name; this is the river of the name — from a small town on the Dutch coast, over the ocean to the Esopus flats, up the Hudson to a Saratoga farm, and down to the present. It survived two near-extinctions: of one generation's seven sons, only two grandsons carried it on, and one of those two raised a single surviving boy. The line holds a Revolutionary lieutenant, a shoemaker, a carpenter, four brothers who scattered from one North Street house to Honolulu and back, and a principal who came home from a Belgian hiding place. It ends, for now, with a boy named Reed.

c. 1671 → now · Bunschoten, Utrecht → the Esopus flats → Saratoga Springs → the Finger Lakes

c.1671Gen I · Bergen → Kingston, on the Esopus · 41.93°N 74.02°W

Theunis Eliasen Van Bunschoten

the immigrant

A Dutchman named for the town of Bunschoten on the Zuiderzee, in the New World by 1671 at the latest; his first child was baptized at Bergen, New Jersey, in 1676, and then Kingston, where he acquired land on the Esopus flats. Ten children between 1676 and 1695. His own parentage in the Netherlands defeated even the family's great 1907 genealogist — the line's deepest documented point, honestly inherited.

beyond him, the Netherlands — and no record

c.1690Gen II · Esopus, Ulster County

Solomon Van Bunschoten

the Esopus generation

Son of the immigrant, he married Elsjen Schoonmaker — granddaughter of a Hamburg man — and held the family to the Esopus lowlands where the name would sit for a century. His children's baptisms run through the Kingston registers like a metronome. The record must also say plainly: after his death his widow's 1755 census entry lists four people held in slavery by name — Seas, Cof, Gen, and Saar — kept here as fact, because they are part of this history too.

c.1720Gen III · Esopus · two old streams meet

Teunis Van Bunschoten

m. Elsjen Du Mond

His wife Elsjen Du Mond carried two of the valley's oldest currents into the name at once: the Du Monds, from a Huguenot refugee of Paris who reached Wiltwyck in the 1660s, and the Albany Schuylers through her mother Catrina. Their youngest son would be named for her grandfather — Egnos. His own estate, probated around 1785, included two people held in slavery by name — Jin and Ben — names kept here as fact for the same reason.

1754Gen IV · Esopus → Saratoga · the patriot

Egnos Van Bunschoten

Second Lieutenant, the Revolution

Born at Esopus on the second day of 1754, he served as a Second Lieutenant in Colonel Graham's Dutchess County regiment — his own pension declaration survives in the 1907 book — the family's first patriot line on the father's side. Twice married, he followed his youngest son to Saratoga in 1836 and died there in 1841, aged 87, buried in the old Whitford ground.

1795Gen V · Dutchess → Saratoga → Owego

Joshua Van Bunschoten

twelve children · White Rosie

The tender-hearted farmer who could not bring himself to punish a child — "Are you ever going to do so again?" — and who walked uphill beside his own wagon to spare his horses. He and Rachel Germond raised twelve children, eight born in Dutchess County and four by the springs at Saratoga, and he kept the old spelling, Van Bunschoten, all his life. Yet of his seven grown sons came only two grandsons to carry the name: a grocer's line at Asbury Park — and ours.

1821Gen VI · Saratoga Springs · 43.08°N 73.78°W

William Van Bunschoten

shoemaker · farmer

Joshua's fifth child, a shoemaker and farmer at Saratoga. Widowed once, he married Georgianna Reilly — his first wife's niece — and died on the first of September 1886; little Jessie, three years old, followed six weeks later. Georgianna, a dressmaker, raised the surviving boy alone — and a century later her recorded initials, "Georgie A.," begat a phantom husband named George in the public trees, a wall this archive tore down in June 2026. She died in May 1906, a fact recovered only this summer.

1881Gen VII · the house on North Street

William VanBenschoten

carpenter · father of five sons

The name's sole carrier in his line, a carpenter at Saratoga Springs, he married Jeannette Landers in October 1901. Five sons: William Sidney, Berton Landers, Donald — dead at ten months in 1915, and unmentioned in every later record until this year — George Douglas, and the family speaks its mothers' names here: Sidney for grandfather Landers, Landers outright for Berton. Jeannette died at 44 in 1926, and the household scattered — by 1930 ten-year-old Douglas was living in his eldest brother's house.

1905→98the brothers · four roads from one house

Four Brothers

Saratoga · Honolulu · a war

William Sidney (1905–1952) stayed — married at nineteen, a truck driver on North Street, twice in the New York Guard, dead at 46. Berton Landers (1907–1998) went — Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and in October 1939 an ocean liner to Honolulu, where he and his wife Kathleen lived through Pearl Harbor and the whole Pacific war; he came back through the Golden Gate in 1956 and lived to ninety. Baby Donald got ten months, and his name waited nineteen years for a nephew. William Sidney's son Bill — Donald William — became "the Van in Van-Mar Builders," helped bring downtown Saratoga back to life, ran the Lake Tuck-Away campground, and lies at Greenridge under a stone that says, on his own instruction, BUGS BITE. His children are this page's living second cousins.

1919Gen VIII · Saratoga → the war → Interlaken

G. Douglas VanBenschoten

lieutenant · principal · Citizen of the Year

George Douglas — the youngest, the motherless boy from his brother's house — served four and a half years in the Second World War across Iceland, England, France, Belgium and Germany, was hidden by a Belgian family during the Battle of the Bulge, and took his lieutenant's commission at Fontainebleau. Home, he married Betsey Clinnick at Saratoga Springs in 1946, took degrees at Ithaca and Cornell, and spent twenty-five years as principal of the South Seneca schools — Interlaken's Citizen of the Year. He died at 95, with full military honors, at Lake View.

1947Gen IX · Interlaken → Liverpool

Robert F. VanBenschoten

Tim's father

Born at Interlaken in 1947, he carried the name to the next generation — Tim's father, standing here between his own father's war and his son's record of the whole line. He died in 2019.

nowGen X · XI · the keepers of the name

Timothy — and Reed

the record, and its newest keeper

Who traced the name back through every spelling to the flats of the Esopus and the town on the Zuiderzee — and whose son Reed, named for the other great river of this family, is the eleventh generation to carry it. A name that twice came down to a single boy has a future again.

A name from a town on the Zuiderzee, spelled three ways, twice nearly gone — now carried by a boy named Reed.

XI generations · Bunschoten to the Finger Lakes · the namesake line

Drawn from the 1907 published genealogy (read in full), the state and federal censuses 1910–1950, the New York vital indexes, and the family's own obituaries; conflicts between book and index are kept in the record, not smoothed over.

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