My focus is now on a series of lesser-known presidents. Martin Van Buren was the eighth president of the United States, serving for only one term from 1837-1841. He was the first president not of British or Irish descent – his family was Dutch. My mother’s roots were in Dutch New Amsterdam, so I expected to connect to this president through that part of my family tree. I was surprised when I saw this connection through WikiTree. It doesn’t involve New Amsterdam at all, instead going through my 17th-century ancestors on Martha’s Vineyard (the Pease family).
This connection is fairly straightforward; I am very familiar with the names going back to #7 on this chart, Prince Pease. I already had his sister Mary (#8) on my tree, and it didn’t take long to identify Mary’s husband as Marshal Jenkins and their daughter as Abigail Jenkins (#9). In just a few more clicks I was able to identify Abigail’s husband as Thomas Worth, making way for their son William Worth (#10). William Worth married Margaret Stafford and they had several children, including Josephine (#11), who married Howard James (#12). His sister Ellen James (#13) married Smith Van Buren (#14), the youngest son of President Martin Van Buren. This connection checks out.
As they say, I want to "stick a pin in" William Worth on this line. I've added a story about him at the end of this essay.
When I went over to Geni to explore my connection to President Van Buren, I found the expected link through my Dutch family in colonial New Amsterdam. This connection goes back through names I recognize – Abraham Workman, who married Elizabeth Wyckoff (Workman) in New Jersey in find the date. She is descended from the immigrant ancestors on this line, Pieter Claeszen Wyckoff and his wife, Margreitje Cornelise’Grietje’ van Ness, who were both born in the Netherlands (probably) and married in New Amsterdam sometime before 1646.
At first, I thought this line was pretty valid – but then I saw a problem. A close-up of a portion of this tree from Geni illustrates the issue.
Setting aside for a moment the general problem with understanding Dutch names, with the letter sequences that don’t make sense to English-speaking people like me, this sequence of names itself points out the problem. Until New Amsterdam became New York in 1660, the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam followed a patronymic naming system, in which a child’s “middle” name referred to the name of the father. Here’s what this looks like in my Ancestry tree for the first four generations of this family in New Amsterdam:
So what’s the problem with the tree on Geni? The father of Nicholas Pietersze Wyckoff should be named Pieter (as I have it on my tree), but Geni shows him as Nicholas Wyckoff, without a patronymic to help us out. That doesn’t make sense.
However, this turns out to be a minor error. As my tree shows, Nicholas Pietersze Wyckoff’s father is Pieter Claeszen Wycoff – but Pieter has a brother named Jacobus, so I think the Geni tree just has the wrong brother as the father of Nicholas.
With this resolved, I looked at the rest of the connection to Martin Van Buren. Let’s look at the Geni connection again:
So these links check out:
Claes Pietersze Wyckoff’s mother was Margrietje Cornelise “Grietje’ Van Ness
Grietje’s sister was Hendrickje Cornelise van Ness, who married Jan Jansen Oothout
I initially had a problem with this; I already had a “Hendrick” on my tree as Grietje’s brother, and I was confused about whether a family would have a son named Hendrick and a daughter named Hendrickje. After a little research, I concluded that it would be like having children named John and JoAnn, or Henry and Henrietta. So I added Hendrickje to my tree, and found that she married Jan Jansen Oouthout, as Geni had indicated.
By the way, did you notice that it would be easy to find the father of Hendrickje’s husband Jan? His patronymic middle name was Jansen, so that tells us that his father is also named Jan.
Hendrickje and Jan had a daughter named Jannetje. But Ancestry didn’t help me find the husband of Jannetje – so I turned back to WikiTree.
There I found a suggestion (supported by some records) that her husband was named Laurens Van Schaack; when I went back to Ancestry and plugged this name in as a possible husband for Jannetje, I was able to begin to build “down” to Martin Van Buren.
Laurens Van Schaack and Jannetje Oothout had a daughter named Jannetje Van Schaack.
Jannetje Van Schaack married Johannes Dircksen Hoes.
Jannetje and Johannes Hoes had a daughter named Maria Hoes
Marie Hoes married Abraham Van Buren
Marie and Abraham Van Buren had son named Martin Van Buren.
Once I sketched Martin Van Buren in, the WikiTree U.S. Presidents’ Project kicked in with verified links to reinforce the connection back to the Wyckoff family. My connection to the Wycoff family is rock solid, so I think this link is also good – although I wouldn’t take it to Final Jeopardy or use it as the basis for a lineage society application. The connection gets a passing mark, although it doesn’t get an “A” because of the wrong brother problem in the Wyckoff part of this tree.
Then I wondered – if WikiTree helped me verify the connection from Geni, why didn’t WikiTree give me this connection in the first place? I think it’s because WikiTree provides the shortest connection; the New Amsterdam connection is longer than the connection WikiTree gave me, so it didn’t tell me about it.
My takeaway from this exercise is that these platforms can reinforce one another – one platform might have a detail that helps build out the tree on another platform. I think that’s an important understanding.
As promised – here’s the William Worth story. William is my 2nd cousin 5x removed; my 6th great-grandparents John and Hepsibah Ripley Pease were his great-grandparents. His generational peers on my line were my 3rd great-grandparents Spencer and Martha Pease Arnold, both of whom were born in Maine in the 1790s. William was born in Columbia County, New York (just south of Albany) and first fought in the War of 1812. His military career continued – he taught at West Point from 1820-28 and later was appointed Commandant of Cadets at the school. He served in the Second Seminole War in Florida in the early 1840s and fought in the Mexican War under the command of Zachary Taylor. He also served under General Winfield Scott in this war; this relationship came to an uneasy end over a disagreement on battlefield tactics. Worth had originally named his son “Winfield Scott Worth” in honor of his commanding officer; after this disagreement, he changed his son’s first name to “William.”
After the Mexican War, he was appointed as the administrator of the Texas and New Mexico military districts. He died of cholera in San Antonio, Texas, in 1849. The city of Fort Worth, Texas, is named after him, and he is buried in Worth Square in New York City.
This is the Worth monument on Worth Square (on 5th Avenue and W. 25th Street, just across from Madison Square Park. Google shows me this is now a kind of outdoor café.
End Note: My spell-check and autocorrect may never recover from this post. A couple of years ago when I was working on this line, I consulted with a friend who was born in Amsterdam and speaks Dutch fluently; she confirmed that even the Dutch themselves don’t agree about how these names should be spelled.
Wow! If you're a non-Dutch reader, it must be hard to pass a typing speed test with those names. Your line is very interesting. Mine is not.