Embedded Files
Dear Cousins,
Although Westward From New Amsterdam ultimately follows my branch, over 300 early pages are relevant to all Schoonovers. There’s several reasons:
There’s reams on Claes and Guert—including a lengthy article on them from The Holland Society of New York’s quarterly, de Halve Maen. It has Kit Davids’ endless pages of court battles, his fights with Peg Leg Peter Stuyvesant, his heroism in the 1663 Indian massacre and war in Kingston, and there’s leads to whole chapters in two books devoted to this fascinating ancestor. Debra’s scandal, launching the huge Bastard Line (of which I’m proudly a member) is documented, including court proceedings. Period maps (and modern photos) showing locations of developer Claus’ properties in Lower Manhattan are included. Incredibly, two properties are reproduced in a bronze rendition of the famous 1660 Costello map in Lower Manhattan!
Secondly, to bring to life our 12-13 generations, behind each is painted its historic context with maps, photos and graphs, so we better understand the forces affecting our ancestors’ lives. Once you graft your line onto the tree, you can cut and paste this historic material for your own work.
Thirdly, the book takes you back to the Netherlands and the family namesake at Schoonhoven. I passed through in 1970, and there’s a surprising amount of family information—including early lines.
It also contains my 2001 photo odyssey following our Van Schoonhoven/Schoonover route from Lower Manhattan up the Hudson River to Albany and Kingston, and down the Minisink into Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and then points west during the Great Migration; and a second photo expedition in 2016 to Kingston to explore Kit and Debra David’s roots. Did you know there’s a Davis Tavern in Marbletown, NY, with an historical marker? It’s named after one of Kit’s kids who lived in the well kept stone structure. Another chapter lists famous Schoonovers, some of which will surprise.
The work is exhaustive mining our early common ancestry. There is simply not a better source. This is why I make it available.
Here’s my line. You can graft on wherever applicable.
Hendrick Van Schoonhoven & Aeltgen Adriaens, Holland.
Klaas/Claes Hendrickse Van Schoonhoven & Cornelia “Neelti” Fredericks, Holland-Albany-Kingston, NY.
Hendrick Claes Van Schoonhoven aka Hank the Cuckold & Debra Davids & Peg Leg Derrick Van Vliet, Kingston-Marbletown, NY.
Nicholas (1) Van Schoonhoven a.k.a. Nick The Bastard & Weyntjen De Lange, Kingston-Marbletown, NY.
Jonas Van Schoonhoven & Engeltje Van De Water, Kingston-Fishkill-Warwick.
Richard Schoonover I & Gemima Bailey, Warwick-Troupsburg, NY.
Richard Schoonover II & Eunice Potter-Troupsburg, NY
William Leonard Schoonover I a.k.a. Blacksmith Bill & Almira Grinold NY-MN-MO who moved to Minnesota and were caught up in the great Sioux Uprising of 1862.
William Leonard Schoonover II a.k.a. The Shadow & Martha “Matti” J. Baker MO-Wash, wild westerner who took part in the Spanish-American war in the Philippines.
William Leonard Schoonover III a.k.a. Showbiz Bill & Ida/Nora, MO-WISC-MN-MO/ Saskatchewan Canada, who ran a tent show up and down the Midwest out of Missouri.
William Lenis Schoonover & Hilda Robinson, farmer and teacher, Ridgedale, Sask.
Vernon Lennis Schoonover & Linda Lena Nowak, Sask./Alberta.
Jason Brooke Rivers Morgan Schoonover, Sask/BC/Thailand.
For enquiries, please email me at jason@jasonschoonover.com. My website is at www.jasonschoonover.com.
A sample—part of the Prologue—follows.
Warmest regards—Cousin Jason
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PROLOGUE
Hendrick Van Schoonhoven is the suspected Grand Patriarch (in name if not always genetically) of virtually all carrying the Schoonover name in North America. Today Schoonover—the Americanized version of Van Schoonhoven which evolved around 1700 on most censuses (but not until the mid 1800s for this line)—is one of the 50,000 most common names in the U.S. with over 7,000 Schoonover heads of household. A distribution of Schoonovers state-by-state from 1880, 1920 and 1990 can be found by searching out the Surname Distribution Map and hammering in the name. We’re well distributed everywhere – except the Deep South.
Hendrick may have been a lawyer, thus getting the family off to a bad start. He is suspected of siring two adventurers—Claes/Klaas Hendrickse Van Schoonhoven (the namesake of my “line”; quotation marks will be explained later) and Guert Hendrickse Van Schoonhoven. Claes and Guert were likely brothers, but perhaps cousins; there is no proof linking them other than names, ages and proximity. Claes is known to have had a brother, Wouter, who apparently was born in Amsterdam where he remained dipping cheese into his brown beer and providing financial backing for his master carpenter brother’s property development dreams; as well as a probable sister, Barentje Hendrickse. Guert had a brother, Jan Hendrickse.
What kind of a life did they live? The one Claes and Guert left? Surprisingly, it’s one very familiar to us—particularly from the canvasses of Jan Vermeer. He was 43 and Rembrandt 44—both in their primes—in 1651, which is approximately the year the first of the two sons to emigrate, Claes, boarded a ship for New Amsterdam.
The Schoonovers—like everyone who came to this frontier—were an adventurous breed and were among the very first to risk the two month voyage to America in a tiny ship, not much more than a boat. The long struggle against the Spanish back home in the Dutch War of Independence had hardly concluded (1568-1648) when Claes and Neeltjie married in Amsterdam and clomped in their wooden shoes onto Governor’s Wharf in New Amsterdam, which is believed to be that date of 1651, the first evidence we have of him there. Hendrick was born in 1652, the year Holland and England went to war.
At that time, New Amsterdam was a raw frontier town of a few hundred people huddled on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. The entire European population of North America barely surpassed 50,000.
The first arrows had already been shot in the Great Real Estate War with the reds and whites fighting for control of North America, a war that wouldn’t end until Wounded Knee 240 years later and which put our first six generations on constant alert. Claes and Neeltje entered an environment where fear from Indian depredation was a constant fact of life and death. Collecting firewood, a daily undertaking, was hazardous even on Manhattan in the beginning where “savages” waited with raised tomahawks—despite us Dutch having paid very well for the island. They were called savages by the early settlers because they were, well, savage. But then they often had reason to be: this was a hostile real estate takeover almost from the beginning (“almost” because the Dutch always purchased their land from the Indians).
Just before their arrival, during Governor Kieft’s War of 1643-45, about 1,000 lower Hudson River and Long Island Indians died at Dutch hands. Clearly the land battle had begun. Beginning about the time Claes arrived, the Beaver Wars began, pitting the Iroquois - by far the most powerful alliance - against the Hurons and everyone else for control of the fur trade.
Early Schoonovers had several—quite literal—hair raising experiences. Four times—that I can document—early generations were massacred or narrowly escaped being wiped out in Indian massacres. Our earliest (possible, but now proven not likely by Jay Schoonover, the Maria Martensen believed connection) ancestor Phillippe Maton Wiltse, born 1590 and who came from France or Luxembourg in 1623 was most probably massacred in 1632 at the new Dutch settlement of Swaanendael, at the bottom of the Delaware River leading to Philadelphia. Eleven year old second generation Hendrick Claes and his mother managed to survive the 1663 attack when Indians put Kingston (then Esopus) to the torch - but his new born baby half-brother and step-father were slaughtered. Details of this well-planned Indian raid can be found in The Early History of Kingston & Ulster County, NY by Marc B. Fried (Ulster County Historical Society, Marbletown, Kingston, NY). In another - a Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862 and the biggest Indian uprising in American history - my ancestors Blacksmith Bill and Almira were forced to flee for their lives. Richard’s colorful brother Christopher had a father-in-law killed in the Wyoming Massacre (Pennsylvania).
Parents of Maria Martensen, the latter who married the notorious Kit Davids and dropped the also notorious Debra who launched the Van Vliet Bastard Line of the Schoonovers to which I belong, are listed in one genealogy as having come over in the Dutch ship the Nieu Nederland (New Netherlands) in 1623. It was of 260 tons burden and landed 30 families at the village of New Amsterdam on Manhattan.
Singles or families that came over 1631-1660 founding my line:
Dutch –Van Schoonhoven, Van Vliet, Rose, Martensen
English – Grinold, David, Smith
The first hint in these records that the patroon had invested in a vessel of his own comes in April 1637 when he expresses hope to a friend in New Netherland “that by this time our people, ship and goods have arrived,‘“* and in September of the same year in another letter he speaks of “my small ship.“ This was the Rensselaerswijck that we know to have been a small ship, not only from her owner’s letters, but from two other circumstances: she could navigate the shoals and sandbars of the Hudson of that day as far north as Fort Orange; and she was later sold for only f2,600. Yet in spite of this she carried 38 passengers to America, in addition to her cargo, skipper, supercargo and crew. There still exists the log of this voyage of six months. It shows that she left the Texe1 on October 8, 1636, and after spending time in several English ports and at La Rochelle, the Stilly Islands, Madeira and the Azores, made her way across the Atlantic to drop anchor before Fort Orange on the Hudson on April 7, 1637. During the passage three children were born, each birth occurring in the midst of a storm. One of the children, a boy, was christened Storm and later took as a family name van der Zee, meaning from the sea. The protracted voyage of the Rensselaerswijck was not profitable for the Van Rensselaers and there were unpleasant problems with a partner and with the skipper and supercargo. As a result Van Rensselaer sold the ship on April 20, 1638, for f2,600. She was wrecked in the Caribbean six years later.
1631-1660 four Dutch and four English parties sailed to New Amsterdam and the Massachusetts Colony. Now New York and Boston. Being a highly attractive and horny bunch, they tumbled in the hay and I am the marvelous result. They sailed in ships of roughly 250 tons, 100-feet and the crossing took over two months under miserable conditions in the stormy north Atlantic. My crossing in Nov-Dec 2019 in the 91,740 ton, 965-foot Norwegian Star Gibraltar Strait to Miami took eight cruising days in luxury. It roughly followed the routes of my friends, Capt. Norm Baker, first Mate on Thor Heyerdahl’s reed boats Ra and Ra-II, who took 57 days; and Colin Angus, first to circumnavigate the world on manpower who rowed across in 121 days. Columbus took 36 days. I thought of my brave ancestors and the mixed emotions they must have had, including anxiety about the unknown, and obviously great challenges they faced. Any adventures I’ve had pale in comparison, but I like to think my enlarged curiosity to travel the world found roots in them.
Claes, the colorful Kit Davids and the infamous Peg Leg (important names you’ll meet along the way) were among the very first adventurers to strike out into the wilderness. Before doing so Claes, a master carpenter and developer, made several real estate transactions in New Amsterdam, the sites of many of which can be located today. One is a famous landmark: when you walk through the entrance and foyer of Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street, you are treading over the very land which Claes purchased in 1652. Unfortunately the very next year Peter Stuyvesant ran the fortification wall, which eventually became Wall Street, through a corner of Claes’ property, destroying his development plans and seriously pissing him off.
Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street with the exchange on immediate left. Whether the actual wall went through on the right, left or center, it cut right through Claus’ property.
Trish Schoonover-Rees in July 2008 emailed: “Found a transcribed document in "Volume I. Minutes of the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens 1653-1655", "The Records of New Amsterdam-From 1653-1674, Published under the Authority of The City of New York by The Knickerbocker Press MDCCCXCVII, dated 30 Sept'1655, in which "The Burgomasters of this city of Amsterdam in New Netherland" were trying to raise 4,000 guilders to pay for "the outer works" after an assault by the Indians. The document states that "We request your Honors to authorize us in our quality, to raise the expenses of the aforesaid work already executed and still to be performed, from and out of the commonalty, and that each one shall contribute, according to his circumstances and condition." What was most interesting in the list of "contributors" was the line item concerning one Claes Hendrick. "Claes Hendrick in the Negro's Ship, exempt."
Claes certainly should be exempt from paying more since the wall was going right through his property (as I say, where the doors to Trinity Church are today as near as I can determine), he could have taken passage in a ship containing slaves. He certainly wasn’t involved in the trade.
Because of this and other frustrating real estate transactions on Manhattan, Claes and Neeltje left the bright oil lamps of Herrewegh, later Broad Way, behind and sailed up the Hudson becoming one of the first Dutch to settle along that frontier river. They settled in Fort Orange (a.k.a. Albany a.k.a. Beaverwyck - Beverwijk, with the Dutch spelling, is a town in the province of Noord Holland) in 1654, and were there that year, as per The Book of New World Immigrants p. 128-130. He offered some chisels for sale August 20. He worked as a carpenter and a "considerable dealer in real estate,” according to Genealogies of the First Settlers of Albany on p. 133.
In 1657, he left Neeltje in charge of affairs and traveled south to Esopus / Kingston / Wildwcyk - founded in 1652. There he purchased land where the present day Ashokan Reservoir, which waters 50% of Manhattan, stands today, just three miles south of the 1969 Woodstock Festival site.
- End sample -
Westward from New Amsterdam is too massive to publish in book form, so it’s available via Dropbox. You do not need Dropbox to receive it. By purchasing, you join my large and ever growing email update list.
To order, please mail me a bank draft or a post office money order (not a personal cheque as cross border charges are astronomical) for $25.00. Or PayPal $27.30 (to cover their charge) to jason (at) jasonschoonover.com. Please use this email for enquiries as well.
My mailing address is:
Jason Schoonover
720 University Drive
Saskatoon, Sask.
S7N 0J4
Canada
My website is at jasonschoonover.com
Fraternally—Cousin Jason
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