The Sharp Family
Abraham Pietersen Van Deursen
1599-1678
One of the first European settlers of the island of Manhattan.
Famous Relative Week One.
Week of February 18, 2014
Maps of “Manatus,” or early Manhattan, dating from 1639 show two windmills near the Battery, and a third on Governors Island. They are thought to have been built by Francois Veersaert, a “molemaecker,” or master builder of windmills, in exchange for food. But Peter Minuit, sometime after the Dutch West India Company appointed him director of the Dutch colony New Netherland in 1626, blocked the payments, contending that one of the mills was not working properly. Back in Amsterdam in 1632, a man identified in records as “Abraham Pieterse Molenaar” — “Abraham, the miller and son of Peter” — upheld Veersaert’s claim in part by testifying that he was on “Eylant Manatus” in February 1627 and that the disputed mill worked. He returned to the New World by 1636, this time with Tryntje Melchoirs — a woman from Groningen he had married in 1629 in the Reformed Church of Haarlem, where he had been baptized 30 years before — and the couple’s two small children. Records at The Hague show that Abraham operated a trading post in Narragansett Bay that year that played a role in the protracted debate over conflicting Dutch and English claims on Rhode Island and surrounding areas. By 1638, he was back in New Amsterdam, again
The fifth of eight children born to Peter Jans and Paulyna Vincken, he was in his late 20s and single when he boarded a ship bound for the New World. A job as a windmill operator was waiting for him on the other side, assuming he got there in one piece; acquaintances who had made the same voyage in 1625 had contracted the plague. Court records from Amsterdam show that Abraham reached his destination and was gainfully employed in the windmill business no later than February 1627, making him one of the first few hundred European settlers of the island of Manhattan. (Dutch records listed which ships made voyages, but not the names of passengers, which is why his precise arrival date is elusive.)
working as a miller. He signed leases that gave him the right to farm land on the Bowery (Dutch for “farm”) but sold his interest a few years later. In 1646, he sued Gysbert Opdyke, the commissary of the West India Company, for slander, claiming he had been called a “grain thief.” The court ordered Abraham “to conduct himself as a miller that no one will in the slightest degree have any ground for complaint against,” and not to “brag, inveigh or make use of any sharp words in any place whatsoever on account of this suit.” By then, Abraham was living on De Breede Wegh — today, Broadway — and operating a tavern. In 1648 his liquor license was temporarily suspended when one of his patrons died after being impaled by the sword of a night watchman making his rounds. Depositions were taken, but no one was charged. In 1641, Abraham served on the Council of 12, which advised William Kieft, then director-general of New Netherland, on how to respond to a deadly Indian attack in Turtle Bay. The council issued a recommendation that on its face supported Kieft’s clear desire to retaliate, but in fact was a plea for restraint: “The murderer should be punished as the director proposes, but subject to God and opportunity.” A displeased Kieft disbanded the council and attacked. Abraham’s presence is felt at one more pivotal moment in New York history. When Kieft’s successor, Peter Stuyvesant, handed Manhattan over to the British in 1664, historians have said, part of the transfer happened at “the old mill” — a mill, according to Martha J. Lamb’s “History of the City of New York,” that Abraham had owned six years earlier on Fresh Water Stream, near the East River.
Information about Abraham Pietersen Van Deursen was found at the following web page...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/nyregion/the-story-of-the-van-dusen-family-one-of-manhattans-oldest.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 | Providing this link and information to our family is with the hope that we never forget our past.