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On summer evenings on the front porch in Lakeside, Michigan, fireflies glimmering around the edges of the yard, my Dad – “Sandy” Sulcer – would pass on some family legends that stayed with me. One was about a famous ancestor in old New Amsterdam named Annetje Jans, a young Dutch widow who married a minister and owned much of present day lower Manhattan (sometimes it is spelled “Anneke”. My Dad pronounced the name “Annity”). This tale was already several generations old; by the time we heard it, it bore the weight of unquestionable fact.
It was a great story, and sparked my early interest in family history. Was it true? As my Dad was a Madison Avenue genius of sorts, we were pretty used to hearing wonderfully embellished ideas and stories. Still, the Annetje Jans story seems to have too much specificity to it to be made up out of whole cloth, and he seemed to genuinely believe it himself.
There are at least three mysteries here and I think we have solved all of them. First, was Annetje Jans a real person as she was described, or just my father’s invention? Then, as I began digging into it I became intrigued with another aspect – the extraordinary durability of this story, and our family connection to it. The last puzzle: do the Sulcers actually have Dutch roots and what are they?
The first one is easy – Annetje Jans was real, and you can read about her in numerous sources. You can easily find a portrait attributed to her on the Internet – very unlikely to be genuine – but such fame as hers demands an image.
In fact, she did very little in her life to earn such posthumous attention, though her life was anything but dull.
Jans was not actually Dutch, as she was born on the small island of Flekkeroy which belonged to Norway at the time. She and her first husband Roeloff Jansen joined the thriving New Amsterdam colony in Lower Manhattan Island in 1630, still in its early days. They were granted a farm of about 60 acres, along the river just north of The Wall (where Wall Street runs today), in the area now west of Broadway.
When Jansen died, she married Everardus Bogardus, the new minister of the Reformed Church for the colony. Her land became known as the “Dominie’s Bouwerie” (Minister’s Farm).
A remote descendant of Annetje Jans has imagined the her life and times. Let’s imagine with her:
The Dominie, a large portly dignified man, with a determined grave expression on his Dutch face, relieved by a kindly eye and a benignant smile, is clad in a long black serge coat with large black buttons running to the bottom; a broad black-felt hat covers his brow and black worsted stockings encase his sturdy legs. On his arm is his wife, Anneke Jans, in waist-jacket of dark cloth with little pendant tails behind. Her dress skirt of ample fullness is of purple cloth, which covers apparently as many petticoats as Mrs. Bogardus could conveniently wear. Her neat colored stocking with clocks on the side are encased in high-heeled shoes, be tokening that she is a person of consequence; in her hands is her silver-clasped bible, brought with her from the Old Country; from her girdle on one side, depends by a silver chain, the psalm book and on the other side hangs a purse embroidered by her own skillful hands. Thrown over one arm is her yellow and red rain hood to protect against a possible shower…
Maria Sabina Gray
Her husband, the Reverend Bogardus, was actually a very controversial figure, one of the many outspoken critics of Governor Kieft. The Governor had instigated brutal and unnecessary attacks against native tribes, and in 1647 the authorities sent the famous peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant to replace him. Kieft was recalled to Amsterdam along with his opponents, including Bogardus, where all the grievances would be aired. They sailed together on the return voyage of the very ship that had brought Stuyvesant, the Princess Amelia. It ran aground on the coast of Wales due to a navigational error, and Bogardus drowned, along with his rival Kieft and most of the passengers and crew.
Widowed for the second time, with children of two fathers, Annetje spent her remaining years up-river in Fort Orange (present day Albany, New York), with very little money. The farm in Manhattan – known as the “Minister’s Garden” or “Dominie’s Bowerie” – became part of her estate, as her children’s main inheritance, with a special provision for the children of Jansen:
Her first four children shall divide between them out of their father’s property the sum of one thousand guilders, to be paid to them out of the proceeds of a certain farm, situate on Manhattan Island, bounded on the North River…
They sold it to Governor Lovelace after her death, as the will stipulated, and it subsequently was leased to Trinity Church – at the time representing the state-run Anglican Church. It was finally fully deeded over to the church by Queen Anne in 1705. All this was well before the Revolutionary War.
Here is where we begin to get to the second mystery: how did Annetje Jans become so famous, disproportionate to all the other women who lived in New Amsterdam for over half a century?
Imagine that you find you might wake up one day to believe you are entitled to a significant swath of lower Manhattan real estate. In 1749, 86 years after her death, this is exactly what happened. A man named Brower discovered that his ancestor Cornelius Bogardus, one of the sons of Annetje Jans, never signed the deed of transfer when the farm was sold to Lovelace. Since he was one of six heirs of Annetje Jans, he believed that Bogardus’ descendants still had a claim to one sixth of the property, and he himself one fifth of that.
He took up residence on a small patch of the Trinity land in protest – you might say he was the first to “occupy Wall Street” – and unsuccessfully sued the church when evicted. He tried it again 8 years later.
The legend was just getting started: the number of descendants grew, as did the dollar value of the land in question. The years passed and in 1784 a different descendant tried again – and actually lived there for two years until he was forced out. His son did it yet again in 1830, this time raising money for court costs by sending enticing letters to hundreds of possible descendants of Annetje Jans, collecting a large war chest.
By now, the Church was involved in a major real estate development of Hudson Square – the area that would later become known as the “printing district” and then home to the Holland Tunnel entrance – that seemed to have enormous wealth potential. This time, part of his argument was based on a New York State law passed during the Revolution, that implied that loyalist property was subject to forfeiture. If loyalists should have lost their land, then how could the English crown itself have a prior claim over land that rightfully belonged to loyal (formerly Dutch) Americans?
In 1847 the claim was decisively thrown out by the courts, largely based on the precedent this could set:
a plainer case has never been presented to me. … [T]he law on these claims is well settled; and it must be sustained in favor of religious corporations as well as private individuals. Indeed, it would be monstrous, if, after a possession such as has been proved in this case … [that] title to lands were to be litigated successfully, upon a claim which has been suspended for five generations. Few titles in this country would be secure under such an administration of the law; and its adoption would lead to scenes of fraud, corruption, foul injustice and legal rapine, far worse in their consequences upon the peace, good order and happiness of society, than external war or domestic insurrection.
Vice-Chancellor Sandford
Despite this definitive ruling, over the next century, even as late as the 1920s, imaginations continued to run wild. New fantastical claims emerged of a family tie with William of Orange: now if you were descended from Annetje Jans, perhaps you were heir to a royal birthright as well as New York real estate. Fortunes left by her royal grandfather could be sitting in European banks waiting for her descendants to claim it. Various family associations had sprung up to raise funds for continued fruitless legal challenges to the Trinity Church lands, possibly representing thousands of individuals.
One of the more silly, but fun legends that sprung up about Jans is that she predicted the coming of the skyscrapers of New York – a story colorfully told in Peter Spiel’s children’s book, in which she appears as “Crazy Annie” who dreams of “people and stone” filling the sky over the Dutch fort.
So at the end of the day…were the Sulcers related to Jans? Probably not, though Henry’s grandmother was from the Van Horne family in Pennsylvania, clearly a Dutch name. How did the idea of a connection start? Well, in the 1920’s the Reverend Francis M. Marvin published a book about the Van Horne family, based on dubious scholarship, claiming a connection to Annetje Jans through Jan’s half-sister Anna Maria. He also founded the “Van Horne Heirs Society”, one of many family associations in the mid-west keeping the dream alive – in other words, that when you least expect it, you could turn out to be filthy rich. It’s not unlikely that Henry, an ad-man who probably loved a great story, may have been contacted about a possible link to Annetje Jans. It is not a long jump to family legend status from there.
We have arrived at the last mystery: what is the real family history story? While it may be sad to lose the claim to Wall Street riches, I think the more likely tale of Dutch ancestors is just as interesting, if less colorful.
There are numerous Van Horne branches that settled in Pennsylvania, and most are in fact descended from one of three separate progenitors who indeed date back to the days of Peter Stuyvesant. Admittedly I don’t know for sure which of the three is the right one.
There is one theory that seems to fit the (admittedly meager) facts, and it starts with a Dutchman named Matthys Cornelisen, from the port town named Hoorn on the Zuider Zee. He arrived in 1663, the year before Peter Stuyvesant was forced to hand over Nieuw Amsterdam to the Duke of York, and by coincidence the year of Annetje Jans’ death. He first lived across the river in the village of Breuckelen (now Brooklyn), then in nearby New Utrecht (now Bensonhurst) and started his family there as an older man. His sons Cornelius and Abraham followed the Dutch custom of using their father’s birthplace as a surname: Van Hoorn (meaning “from the city of Hoorn”). They both moved to central New Jersey along the turnpike now known as Rt. 22. Abraham built and ran a well-known tavern known as the “White House” which still gives its name to that community.
Cornelius had three wives in turn, all English, giving him 10 children in total. His first wife, Catherine Cox, died shortly after giving birth to Thomas Van Horne in 1722. Thomas eventually married Jane Ten Eyck (a Dutch name meaning “living around the oak tree”). In 1772, their son Matthias married Catherine Cline and they moved across the mountains to pioneer a farm in Meadville, Pennsylvania. They had three children, the youngest of which was named Catherine after her mother and grandmother. We haven’t found any information about her, but it’s possible she is the missing link between the Van Horne family and the Sulcers.
If she is our Catharine, she may have travelled from Meadville to Pittsburg, then down the Ohio River to the Cincinnati area to marry Henry’s grandfather (also named Henry) in 1825. They had six children, the youngest of whom was A.A. Sulcer.
Even if the Sulcers are not descended from Dutch royalty, and sadly don’t have a valid claim to the land underneath Wall Street, we still can enjoy our family connection to a fascinating place and time. By the way, for a great read, I heartily recommend Russell Shorto’s “The Island at the Center of the World” about the Dutch colony. I love to think about Manhattan before New York – a tiny city at the tip of a forested island, with Native American villages and pathways, swampy farms, and Dutch patroons. It was the crossroads of the world back then, and still is today, for better or for worse. Our family was there then, and we are there again.
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Sources
- “Anneke Jans Bogardus Story”, available at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ghosthunter/Anneke/page2.htm on 30 April 2013
- “Dominie Everadus Bogardus” available at http://www.billsbrownstone.com/NewAmsterdammers/Bogardus.asp on 28 June 2014
- Portrait from New York State Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Senate House State Historic Site
- “Princess Amelia (Ship)”, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Amelia_(ship) on 30 April 2013
- Groenveld, Simon, “New Light on a Drowned Princess”, de Halve Maen, Journal of the Holland Society of New York, Summer, 2001, available at http://www.hollandsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/deHalveMaen_2001-02-Summer_LXXIV_02Red.pdf on 14 July, 2020
- “Text of the Will of Anneke Jans Bogardus” available at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ghosthunter/Anneke/page3.htm on 28 June 2014
- Zabriskie, George Olin, Anneke Jans in Fact and Fiction, The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, Vol 104, No. 2, April 1973, available at http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/d/e/e/Phillip-D-Deere/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-0117.html on 31 March 2013
- Gray, Maria Sabina (Bogardus), A Genealogical History of the Ancestors and Descendants of General Robert Bogardus, Printed for Private Circulation Only, Boston, Massachussets, 1927, available at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89062847827&view=1up&seq=13 on 19 April 2020
- “Annetje Jans Bogardus”, Find-A-Grave, available at https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/5787586/anneke-bogardus on 19 April 2020
- Nevius, James, “When Trinity Ruled Lower Manhattan”, Curbed New York, 22 August 2018, available at https://ny.curbed.com/2018/8/22/17764064/trinity-church-real-estate-history-hudson-square on 18 April 2020
- Bridgeman, Charles Thorley, Morehouse, Clifford, P., A History of the Parish of Trinity Church in the City of New York, 1 Jan 1901, Putnam, available at https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=8LEjAQAAIAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP1 on 19 April 2020
- “Anneke Jans Bogardus Story”, Op. Cit. Spier, Peter, The Legend of New Amsterdam, Doubleday, New York, 1979
- The name “Catherine Van Horn” is found in the Sulcer family bible as A.A.’s mother, and her birth place of Pennsylvania comes from the census (believe this was 1870 for Ridge Farm)
- Zabriskie, Op. Cit. “Frost Gilchrist and Related Families”, available at http://frostandgilchrist.com/getperson.php?personID=I19684&tree=frostinaz01 on Apr 15 2013
- Stillwell, M.D., John E, Historical and Genealogical Miscellany: Early Settlers of New Jersey and their Descendants, Volume III, New York, 1914
- “Whitehouse, New Jersey”, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehouse,_New_Jersey on 19 April 2013
- Hallenbeck, Elsie Overbaugh, Our Van Horne Kindred, New York, 1959, available at http://books.google.com/books/about/Our_Van_Horne_kindred.html?id=EJpYAAAAMAAJ on 29 April 2013
- Shorto, Russell, The Island at the Center of the World, The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America, Doubleday, New York, 2004
