Family · the deepest line
from a widow of Mechelen to the present
She survives in a single line of a clerk's hand. Everything below her — a colony's secretary, the Albany Schuylers, a Revolutionary lieutenant, a soldier hidden in Belgium — descends from that one mark on a page. This is the family's deepest documented bloodline, read the way it was written: as one unbroken current, four and a half centuries long.
c. 1555 → now · Mechelen → Amsterdam → the Hudson → Kingston → Saratoga → the Finger Lakes
A widow of Mechelen
She enters history in one clause. In 1608 her son registers his Amsterdam marriage "assisted by Catharina de Druyper, his mother" — a mother standing where a father should, so already a widow. A woman of the Spanish-ruled Low Countries at the height of the Dutch Revolt. The deepest root of the whole tree is a Flemish widow whose first name outlived her face.
Low Countries — the source
Bookkeeper, Dutch West India Company
Her son crossed the border north and made himself an Amsterdammer and a Calvinist — bookkeeper and shareholder of the West India Company. He kept the books of the very enterprise whose Hudson colony his own son would help govern. In 1608 he married Maria Tijron of Antwerp.
Secretary of Rensselaerswyck
The eighth and last of their children, baptised in Amsterdam's Nieuwe Kerk, sailed to America and rose to secretary of the vast patroonship around Fort Orange. He kept the colony's records; his own memorandum book survives to this day. He died young, near 1655, on the frontier he administered.
married Harmanus Rutgers
Anthony's daughter married into the Albany brewing-and-trading Rutgers family. The Dutch world of the upper Hudson — Beverwyck, soon to be Albany under the English — is home now.
married the Mayor of Albany
She married into the first family of the region — David Davidse Schuyler, Mayor of Albany — and, widowed, married the minister of the Kingston Dutch church, quietly bending the whole line southward. Her 1723 portrait still hangs in Albany.
of the Albany Schuyler dynasty
Baptised in the Albany Dutch church, of the Schuylers — a cousin, not a descendant, of the Revolution's General Philip Schuyler. In 1725 she married Eginas Du Mond at Kingston. By a coincidence the family never knew, her surname is the name carried, still, in a middle name three centuries on.
— and the name appears
Her daughter married Teunis Van Bunschoten in 1743 — and here, after seven generations carried almost entirely by daughters, the surname appears for the first time. She would name a son for her own father, Eginas; the name echoes on down the line.
Revolutionary lieutenant
The family's soldier of the Revolution — a lieutenant in the Dutchess militia, out on the lines the night of Trenton, present at Burgoyne's surrender, sent to round up the "Tory Robbers" of the river counties. He drew a pension of ninety-six dollars a year and lived to eighty-seven.
farmer · twelve children
He kept the older spelling, married Rachel Germond, raised twelve children, and drifted west with the opening country — Dutchess to Saratoga to a Tioga County farm — the family always a little further up the road.
shoemaker & farmer
A shoemaker by trade and a farmer most of his life near Saratoga; entry №3928 in the great 1907 family genealogy. For years the trees had even his name wrong — recorded as "George" — until it was set right, at last, this past June.
carpenter
A carpenter in Saratoga Springs, married to F. Jeannette Landers — a quiet generation set between the soldier's century and the next war's.
sheltered in Belgium, 1944
He went to the European war, and in the Battle of the Bulge he was hidden — sheltered, kept alive — by a Belgian family. Stand back and the symmetry is almost unbearable: the line begins with two widows of Mechelen and Antwerp, and four centuries later it is saved on that same Low-Country ground. Home he came: a school principal, a Mason, his town's Citizen of the Year; buried with military honours at ninety-five.
Low Countries — the debt repaid
— your father
Born in the Finger Lakes village of Interlaken, he married Vickey-Jo Doig — and became your father.
— and then you
Keeper of all these names, who pulled this line up out of register pages in Amsterdam and Albany and Saratoga — and passed it forward again, to your son, Reed.
Carried by daughters for six generations — de Druyper, Tijron, Bratt, de Hooges, Rutgers, Schuyler, Du Mond — before it was ever a name you could spell.
XIII generations · ≈ four and a half centuries · one unbroken line
Every name here rests on a primary record or a sound inference in the family archive. The history around them is context, never invention.
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