I have always been fascinated with New York City. Not the tourist perspective, but the perspective of people who live there... and go to the restaurants... and go to the theatre and the museums... and don't rely on their own vehicles for transportation. The way that city functions just amazes me.
I'm even more fascinated with the history of New York City... building the subway system, the Tenement Museum, Ellis Island (which I didn't get to visit but still would like to)... I love seeing old photos of NYC and knowing where the original boundaries of Manhattan were.
The deeper I dig into my family genealogy, the more branches I find that go through New York. There's a measure of sorrow and sadness for me when I come across my Southern ancestors that participated in the abomination of slavery. I was of the perspective that my Northern ancestors were lily white and pure as the driven snow as far as guilt of crimes against humanity. That may not be accurate. It seems that there were many, many accounts of crimes against the native Americans, driving them out, taking their land from them. And one, particularly haunting account that my 11th great-grandfather took part in.
The article below is incredibly interesting to me and for those of you who are interested in History or love New York, you will appreciate this view back to the past. Also, in Beacon, NY there is a historic site that has preserved the family home site. I would love to go there. If you're near there and have been, I'd love to hear your insights. http://www.mountgulian.org/verplanck.html
This article is copied from ancestry.com - I believe it is copied from some other source but I have been unable to find it and therefore can't credit it. I've added links for additional information where possible. There is SO much information out there, I tried to condense this article but I didn't want to leave anything out. If you're reading just to see the New York landmark/locations, I've tried to make them into links.
The Verplancks may lay just claim to belong to the veritable Knickerbocker stock. The first of the name in this country, of whom any record has been kept, was Abraham Isaacson Verplanck, which being translated means simply Abraham Verplanck, son of Isaac. There is a family tradition that his name was Abraham Jacobson Verplanck, but it is unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, in fact it is amply proved to have been as first stated, by the records of the Old Dutch Church in New York, as preserved in Valentine's Manual, where the names and dates of baptism of several children of Abraham Isaacson Verplanck are given, and these the same as those of the traditionary Abraham Jacobson Verplanck.
Abraham Isaacson Verplanck came from Holland, according to the same family tradition, about the year 1640, and married " the widowMaria Ross, whose maiden name was Vigne ;" she being a daughter ofGuleyn and Ariantje [Cuviljc] Vigne. Whether this marriage took place before his arrival in this country, or whether it was a second one consummated afterwards, I am unable to say. The presumption is very fair that they were married here, and there is no evidence that he was a widower as well as she a widow, for which also there is no other proof than the aforesaid tradition. But certain it is that the second child of Abraham Verplanck was born January 1st, 1637, and named Guleyn, the same as her father, but whether he was born here or in Holland I do not know. From his christian name I should suppose him to have been her child, which if so and born in this country, which I also think most likely, would place the arrival of Abraham Verplanck here at an earlier date than that given, which undoubtedly was the case.
He dropped the patronymic and was known as "Abraham" or "Abram" Verplanck, to whom in the years 1643 and 1644, land grants were made. He was a witness to a conveyance from the Indians to Governor Stuyvesant, January 23, 1656; and September 5th, 1664, was one of the signers to a " Remonstrance from the people of New Netherlands to the Director General and Council of the Dutch West India Company.''
After the surrender of New York to the English, he was among the citizens who, (n October, 1664, swore allegiance to the King ; but when on March 31st, 1665, a meeting of the burghers and inhabitants of the city of New Amsterdam was called by the Burgomasters and Schcpens to meet at the City Hall and agree upon how many of the English soldiers each would lodge in their respective houses, opposite to his name appears the decisive answer "cannot take any." It was finally ordered that those who could not accommodate any of the soldiers should be assessed a certain sum in lieu of the accommodations, and his name is on the assessment list as " residing on the Smet Valye." Smit Valye or Smidt's Valey, abbreviated Smct or Smce's Vly, was a marsh extending from the rising ground, a little north of the city walls, along the East river, or shore of the present Pearl Street, to the rising ground near Fulton Street. This valley or salt marsh was bounded westward by the high ground along the rear of the lots on the north-western side of Pearl Street, and is spoken of by this name as early as the time of Van Twiller. Abraham Verplanck lived on what would be the west side of the present Pearl Street, between Franklin Square and Wall Street. The same list contains the name of "Abigal Verplanck, residing on the Hooge Straat," or present Broadway. She was likely the "Abigil Verplanck and child " who arrived in "April, 1664," in the ship Concord, and might have been a sister-in-law or sister of Abraham Verplanck, or indeed even his mother, from whom his eldest child and daughter was named.
In February, 1674, after the recapture of New York from the English, the Burgomasters and Schepens of the city notified the governor, that having become greatly indebted, and being daily vexed by some of their creditors to make payment, they solicited that some expedient might be invented by which these debts could be liquidated. After taking it into serious consideration, the governor decided that no remedy could be applied more prompt, than that the money should be obtained by taxation of the wealthiest inhabitants " as often in similar occurrences had been put in practice in our Fatherland ;" therefore he deemed it necessary to command " that by calculation a tax be levied on the property of this State without exception, from all the inhabitants of this City of New Orange, those only excepted whose estates are calculated not to exceed the sum of one thousand gilders seawant value," and named six impartial men to levy and collect the same. From the list so made out Of the " most wealthy inhabitants," I find:
Abraham Verplanck. Estate valued at Gilders Holland value, 300
Guiliane Verplanck. " «•«••••• $i000
It may appear strange at first sight that Guiliane or more properly Gcleyn, should have at that early day an estate of so much greater value than his father, but this statement is reconcilable from the fact, if from no other reason, that six years before he had married into the Wessels family, one of the wealthiest in old New York, through which connection he doubtless obtained a large estate. The difference between "gilders seawant value" and "gilders Holland value," was very considerable; the exact proportion however I am unable to give, but abraided string of seawant, a fathom long, was worth a few years before only three-fourths of a guilder, and it was rapidly depreciating in value. This seawant or scawan was the name of the Indian money commonly called wampum. It cons1sted, as is well known, of beads formed of the shells of the quahaug and periwinkle; shell fish formerly abounding on our coast, and was of two colors, the black being held of double the value of the white.
Mrs. Verplanck died in the year 1671, and her husband survived her many years, dying at an advanced age, but exactly at what date I have been unable to discover: it is however believed to have been about 1680. He had nine children in the following order, viz.:
1. Abigail, married A. Van Lac 1s.
2. Geleyn, of whom hereafter is known as Gulian
3. Catalyna, married David Pieterson Schuyler, October 13,1657.
4. Isaac, baptized June 26,1641, died doubtless in infancy.
5. Sussanna, baptized May 25,1642, married Martin Van Wacrt, December 4,1660.
6. Jaconnyntje, baptized July 6,1644.
7. Ariantje, baptized December 2,164C.(this is my ancestor)
8. Hellegond, baptized November 1,1648.
9. Isaac, baptized February 26,1651, married Miss Coeymans of Cocymans Patent, whose descendants live in the neighborhood of Albany.
A book published in Amsterdam, in 1651 (" Beschrymnghe Van Virginia" etc.), contains the earliest pictorial representation of the little dorp or village which has since become the commercial metropolis of America. This print represents a fort at the southern extremity of the island of New York, close to the water's edge, with a few houses sparsely scattered to the east and west of it, the roofs of some of which, from the inequality of the ground, are alone visible, and towering above all, that indispensable and uniformly prominent object in a Dutch village, a windmill. Before the drawing for this print was made, or, to express it more definitely, in 1630, four years after the purchase of the island from the Indians, when the entire population, men, women, and children, did not exceed three hundred souls, Abraham Isaacson Ver Planck, or, as he was sometimes called, Planck, was married to Maria, daughter to Jan Vigne, one of the proprietors of the land surrounding " The Collect," or Great Fresh-water Pond, which existed up to the early part of the present century, on the space now bounded by Broadway, Grand, Chatham, and Reade Streets. As he was the first immigrant and common ancestor, it may not be inappropriate upon an occasion like this to put together from our early Dutch records what has been preserved respecting him. In the year of his marriage, a director of the Amsterdam Company, named Pauw, obtained a patent for a large tract of land, opposite the little settlement, upon the western bank of the Hudson, which included what is now Jersey City and Hoboken. This tract, to which he gave the Latin name of Pavonia, was granted to him as a Patroon under the imposing title of the Lord of Achtienhoven, that he might found there a feudal estate or manor of the kind which Van Rensselaer about the same period established in the land about Albany. Having vainly endeavored for several years to accomplish this object, -he gave up the grant, and Abraham Verplanck was the first to avail himself of the opportunity thus offered to obtain, by purchase, a considerable portion of this fertile tract at or in the vicinity of Jersey City, where he soon established a flourishing farm, and, by selling off other portions of it unconditionally to actual settlers for farms and tobacco-plantations, he managed to bring about what the would-be feudal proprietor could not, an •active and thriving agricultural settlement. In 1641 he was selected by the inhabitants as one of the council of " Twelve Men," the first attempt at any thing like representative government in the colony, which had its origin in the following circumstance:
Indian Massacre
In 1626 a peaceable Indian from Westchester, accompanied by his son, a young boy, started for the Dutch fort to barter some beaver-skins, and was met upon his way, in the vicinity of "the Collect," by three of the inhabitants, who robbed him of his peltries, and, to conceal what they had done, murdered him. The boy, however, escaped, to remember the deed and to avenge it in the manner of his race. When he had arrived at the age of manhood, fifteen years afterward, he went to New Amsterdam, and, entering the house of an humble mechanic, struck him dead with the blow of an axe. This open and daring act, perpetrated under the very walls of the fort, filled the whole settlement with consternation and alarm. The governor demanded the murderer, but his tribe, approving of what he had done, refused to give him up, upon which the heads of families in Manhattan and its vicinity were summoned to the fort, and, upon the governor apprising them of his design to make a general war upon the Indians, they selected twelve of their number as a representative body to confer with him. The " Twelve Men " decided against the war, evasively advising the governor to wait for a fitting opportunity; and, having in this way been called into existence as representatives, they proceeded to recommend a remodelling of the government, so as to secure to the inhabitants the rights and privileges they had enjoyed in Holland, which resulted in an ordinance of Governor Kief dissolving that body and forbidding any future assemblage of the people, as " dangerous and tending to the great injury of the country and of his authority." Very soon afterward Abraham Verplanck was arrested " for slandering the authorities and maliciously tearing down an ordinance posted on the gate of the fort," possibly the one dissolving the popular body, for which he was fined three hundred guilders. The imposition of this fine, a very heavy one at the time, appears to have wrought a thorough change in his sentiments j for in the following year, with two others who had served with him in the Council of the Twelve Men, he went to Kief, and, falsely professing to represent the wishes of the inhabitants, proposed that an attack should be made upon the unsuspecting savages, he and his two associates offering to guide the soldiers and to assist them in making it. The proposition was eagerly accepted, and led to the perpetration of the darkest deed that stains the annals of New Netherland. One hundred and twenty Indians at Pavonia and Corlear's Hook were massacred in cold blood in their wigwams at midnight. Forty were murdered in their beds. Infants, torn from their mothers' breasts, were chopped into pieces with axes, and the fragments thrown into the fire. Neither age nor sex was spared; and the cries of the unhappy wretches, borne across the waters of the Hudson, were heard on the ramparts of the fort at New Amsterdam, by the navigator De Vries, who has recorded the incident.
That Abraham Verplanck was not merely one of the instigators, but one of the chief actors in the execution of this bloody deed, may be inferred from the fact that, when the matter came before the States-General for investigation, the committee to whom it was referred recommended that two persons should be brought to Holland for examination, and Abraham Verplanck was one of them. It may very well have been, in view of this circumstance, that Mr. Verplanck never felt any desire to write the history of New Netherland, but left the task to be discharged long after he had become prominent as a literary man, by Dr. O. Callagham and Mr. Brodhead. Indeed, with the exception of a slight allusion in an oration delivered half a century ago, I am not aware that he ever wrote any thing about the people of New Netherland or their history.
The investigation in Holland seems to have been abandoned, or at least was productive of no injurious consequences to Abraham Verplanck, for he grew in favor under the subsequent government of Stuyvesant. In 1649 he was the owner of a plot of ground adjoining the fort, upon which he had a house and garden, which I suppose to have been the site of the present Bowling-Green, as it was taken that year to be used as an open place for the holding of the weekly fairs, ox markets, another piece of land being given to him in exchange for it, and because there was only one open space or public square within the city walls for more than half a century afterward.
In 1655 his name appears upon the list of those upon whom a compulsory tax was imposed for the defences of the city, and it may be mentioned as a characteristic, that it does not appear upon the list of those who had previously made voluntary loans for the building of the wall from which Wall Street takes its name. Ten years afterward he appears as a witness to a treaty which Stuyvesanteffected with the Indians for the acquisition of lands upon the South River, in Delaware, of which he became one of the grantees. He appears by the records to have been no respecter of the ordinances, where the disregard of them was attended by any advantage in trading, and to have been very litigious, involved in lawsuits with his mother-inlaw and his wife's relations respecting the lands surrounding " the Collect," and with others. In 1664 he was one of the signers of the remonstrance urging the inexorable Stuyvesant to capitulate to the English; and we can imagine the temper with which the indignant governor read the passage advising him not " to call down the vengeance of Heaven for all the innocent blood which may be shed by reason of your honor's obstinacy." Upon the capitulation of the city,Abraham Verplanck was one of the two hundred and seventy-two who swore allegiance to the English, and with that act his name disappears from our records.
Gulian - my 11x great-uncle
His son, the first Gulian, was the founder of the subsequent wealth and prosperity of the family. He became a merchant, having his store uponPearl Street, which then faced the water, between Broad and Whitehall Streets. He was a sharp-sighted man of business, attentive to his own interest, but regarded as worthy of so much trust and confidence, that he was one of the three persons charged with the care and settlement of Governor Lovelace's estate. When the Dutch repossessed themselves of the city in 1673, he was one of five selected by the government, out of fifteen recommended by a vote of the inhabitants, for the oflice of schepen, a position ranking next to that of burgomaster; but, while filling the position, he was tried for holding intercourse with the English, a grave offence on the part of a magistrate in the eyes of his associates; which he defended upon the ground that he did so to secure his estate in New England ; which not being considered satisfactory, a heavy fine was imposed upon him of five hundred beaverskins. Upon the restoration of the city to the English in 1674, an enumeration was made of two hundred and seven of the most wealthy of the inhabitants, in which his personal estate is put down at five thousand florins, being the twenty-eighth in order on the list.
A few years afterward he united with others in a purchase from the Indians of a large tract of land upon the Hudson, which was followed shortly thereafter by the location of Fishkill, of which he was one of the founders— the first settlement made in Dutchess County. It was by this act chiefly that he laid the foundation of the future wealth and social influence of the family; his descendants having managed, amid the mutations, revolutions, and changes, that have occurred in our history, to retain, to a very great extent, what he had the forethought to acquire. A family homestead, built about the commencement of the last century, was Mr. Verplanck's country residence, which, together with the lands around it, has passed, by his death, to his only surviving son, William S. Verplanck, Esq., the father of a numerous family.
During the colonial period, the Verplancks, by intermarriage with the leading English and Dutch families, the Bayards and the Ludlows, the Van Cortlands and the Beekmans, increased in wealth and social importance. By their marriage with the Van Cortlands they acquired the large tract of land jutting out into Hudson Biver which is known as Verplanck's Point. In 1730 they intermarried with the Crommelins, an influential Dutch family, long afterward, and until a few years ago, represented in Amsterdam by the wealthy banking-house of that name.
Abraham Issacsen VerPlanck was the father of
Ariantje VerPlanck who was the mother of
Wynant Melgertse Vanderpoel who was the father of
Abraham Vanderpool, who was the father of
Wynant Vanderpoel, who was the father of
Mary Vanderpool, who was the mother of
Cecilia Moad, who was the mother of
Mary Polly Doherty, who was the mother of
Cordy Bullock, who was the father of
George Washington Bullock, who was the father of
Sarah Jane Bullock Ward, who was the mother of my grandmother,
Leta Ward Gant Harris, whose son
Jim Gant is my daddy.
