Up a Tree

The Dutch West India Company (or GWC, from the Dutch name) provided a mechanism for the Netherlands to establish colonies in the New World and to profit from investment there, with certain exceptions. Although the opportunity was available to anyone who had the financial wherewithal, the reality was that pretty much only members of the company  If you remember, investors could establish "patroonships," and a number of the GWC's member decided to try their hands, but only one really succeeded. Kiliaen van Rennsselaer, a diamond merchant and investing member of the GWC, took advantage of the offer and bought a significant interest in land along the modern-day Hudson River.  Remember that his deal would include his bargaining with the indigenous tribes for purchase of the land. I haven't found a record yet of how much he paid, but apparently his agent negotiated the terms with the Mohicans, you know, the tribe in the famed James Fennimore Cooper book.  The land involved ...

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 ...

You are probably familiar with the little Dutch girl -- she's a stereotype who's been appropriated for advertising purposes . She wears wooden shoes, has blonde hair and rosy cheeks and wears the "Dutch cap," also called the "Dutch bonnett," a cotton or lace cap with triangular flaps turned up on the sides. That's her to the right.  A stereotype to be sure, but it reflects parts of Dutch culture and heritage. I suspect if you travel to the Netherlands, though, you would only see this representation as part of the tourist trade. I could be wrong -- some companies there might actually use the concept as part of their identity and marketing. I didn't check. Now, if you were paying attention, you noticed that 1) the country I referenced in relation to Dutch people was the Netherlands, not Holland, and 2) the term "Dutch" has no apparent linguistic tie to either country name. What's up with that? The answer is a bit complicated, involving et...

I have cited a couple of family-produced histories in this series of vignettes that link our family members with notable events and people in the past. For the past few posts, I have referenced The Hussong Manuscripts ( Hussong, Edward Marston. 1976 (1993 Printing). Compiled by Mary Marie Glascock Brewer. Genealogical Forum of Portland Oregon, Milwaukie, Oregon.)  In those posts, I was able to find the links needed to tell the stories, sometimes because the Manuscripts directly cited a source and sometimes because my chasing down of the events confirmed the events described in the Manuscripts. But occasionally I run across stories I can't confirm with my limited skills as an Internet researcher. And sometimes the information doesn't line up well with what the research finds. For example, the Manuscripts  assert that Rene Jacques Husson, the first Husson in Sharon's family line, to come to America and the one whose story led us to explore the history of French Huguenot immi...

Sharon's great-to-the-x grandfather makes an appearance in a listing of some ancestral items possessed by family members. The compiler of The Husson Manuscripts mentions that his mother had an old poplar chest containing Jean Henri's clothing brush that he bought to brush his wedding clothes and "some buckskin tassels that Jean Henri wore on his coat when he went west with Washington and Braddock to drive the French Catholics out of Penn." The incident referred to is probably The Braddock Expedition (aka Braddock's campaign aka Braddock's Defeat) of 1755. You have probably correctly surmised that this was another piece of American history I missed during my schooling and the subject of this post. The Braddock Expedition seems to mark the beginning of the French and Indian Wars in the colonies, though war was not formally declared until after the end of the expedition. General Edward Braddock led British forces on a campaign to disrupt activities by French colo...

The title of this post sounds as though it could be the title for a television series, or a movie about superheroes. Perhaps you thought it refers to the band of outlaws led by Billy the Kid in the movie Young Guns. Or maybe you thought it referred to those anonymous people charged with keeping the reins on businesses, utilities, or investment opportunities. Some of you may recognize the term from an actual television series, which I confess I have not seen, called Outlander. I understand that a group called "Regulators" in North Carolina are part of the plot in season 5. I suspect they make an appearance in the books on which the series is based. If you are an Outlander fan, then you have a bit of an outside track on today's post.  I stumbled on the group while reading The Hussong Manuscripts, which I have referenced in the two previous posts. As a quick recap, the Hussong family lies along the branch leading to Sharon's father. They came to America from France beca...