Up a Tree

I discussed briefly last time how the Dutch came to America through the "discoveries" of Henry Hudson, exploring on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, or VOC,  the abbreviated form of the company's name in Dutch. The VOC established a presence  that would be called New Netherland in what is now New York, centering its operations on the island of New Amersterdam, what we call Manhattan. The Dutch engaged the indigenous tribes in trading, with beaver pelts being the main focus.  It became obvious to the powers-that-be of the time in the Netherlands that  the properties the Dutch had claimed in the New World and the western parts of Africa needed separate administration, so the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands granted a charter for the formation of the Dutch West India Company, or the GWC, an initialism of the Dutch name.  The company had five chambers, sort of like regional headquarters, of which Amsterdam and Middleburg were the most eminent. Un...

  As a reminder, I intend these posts as a way of learning and relearning about history using the vehicle of our family tree. All these relatives lived in specific eras, and in ways large and small, they influence that history. Many times I can't find the exact ways they did this, but as the simplified version of chaos theory would have it, every action affects our world, often in unpredictable ways. I've not told the stories of those whose names only show up on marriage registers or birth records or pictures of tombstones because I'm relying on the Internet to find their connections to history instead of doing the really hard work of traveling to the areas our ancestors lived in and digging through the records at libraries and churches and government offices. Fortunately, others have done some of that work and put it on the WWW for me to find.  Sometimes the connections are a bit tenuous -- say a letter written to a congressman seeking help that leads me to discover how a ...