Ep 17 - "Vertrouwt" - Have Trust - that the family story will live on.

Join us as we look at a long line of Dutch ancestry in Sleepy Hollow, New York.   How long can a surname go and not "daughter out".    Who do you compile your ancestry for????  

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to Chasing Hazel's Tales, a family history podcast presented to you by two registered nurses, and we're also off-duty sister searchers, which we might call family historians. I'm Kim McLaughlin. And I'm Laura Ireland. And I wanted to do a quick update on the family search that we talked about last week. So we'll call this a little bit of a, I don't know of a correction or a clarification cuz family search.org is a great website. It's an archive of records that I just can't, I can't gush on enough about. But just to note, I think I, I'm not sure, but I may have made it seem like every record you had to go to Salt Lake City or to an approved affiliate. in order to get the record or see it firsthand, but that's not true. Some of them are right there online on the family search website. So Is there any rhyme or reason to what's available or what isn't? Well, we may not know the rhyme or the reason, but there is a rhyme or reason because the decision on how it's accessed is based on whoever holds the records. So let's just say it's a University of Maine record. The University of Maine has allowed the Latter Day Saints to come in and copy those records, but they wanna have control over how it's accessed. So they may say that you can only see these records if you are at an approved affiliate or at the library in Salt Lake City. So that it's, it's generally depends on the agreement between the church and the record holder. Okay. So if all, there may be others in which I just happen to notice today, there may be other catalogs where they say we don't care. You can put it right on your website so people can see it Right from their homes, you know? Right. On the internet. Mm-hmm. So that's, and that, and that is what happened today when I was looking up the old Dutch church in. Sleepy Hollow, New York. I was looking that up. And you can see all the records there that they have. There's a book of records. So, and another thing I wanted to mention was if you, it can be locality specific. So if you don't know much about your family, But you know that they came from, say, Aroostook county in Maine or the county. Mm-hmm. You could just go to the family search, site and then do a search and you go by catalog. And so in the catalog you put the county and then all kind, what they hold about that county is there, will, will come up and you can just kind of filter through it. So you may find things that you didn't know they had just by location. And they're not all indexed so. You know, sometimes they are, but the ones from Montefiascone are not index. So they would say, Hey, here's all the marriage records from 1875 to, you know, 1900. Well, that's, and good luck, Yeah. You, you know, good. Now it's gonna snow tomorrow, so maybe we have some time tomorrow. But what happens is you have to go to a site to see those records. So it, there's just a big mix of how those records are presented. and you know, if you, you know, find something interesting that you really wanna follow up on, you just keep a list and then you go, when you do go to the A Center, you can start looking it all up, right? So but you know, they do the best they can based on the, the agreement with whoever holds the records. So, you know, it sounds like it. For some who just don't really know how to get started, it might be a good way, a good website to use, because. Maybe you know a name, maybe you know a town, right? Maybe you know, a region or you know, something that might help get you started, right? And so there are even, you know, in, in our family, I've found a book, lots of books about this lineage or that lineage that maybe someone, someone who has created a family history book has given to the library and said, here you can make it available. So you might find something like that. It might not be a, an official town record, it might be someone else's someone else's. Another genealogists such as yourself. So I just wanted people to know that that is a really great option. And I was telling, you know, telling you before that the records from Montefiascone, we have to actually go and do the, what I call the slow roll. And you just have to kind of go, go through the site and just look at every record. And that's, that's where you find all the good stuff because no one's had time to index it. But anyway, I have, those things are all on my list. I'll get to it. And we'll see. We'll see how it works out. But there will be a big party when I go So much scrolling, so little time. That's right, So last week we were talking about how our maternal surname is Smith. So our mother's father. His name is Smith and he's come from a long line of Smiths that we can trace back to the Hudson Valley in New York, I think around the time of the Revolutionary War. Mm-hmm. does that sound about right? Yep. And while doing other research, at the time, the name Beier came up. and there were some links. And you know what happens when Kim sees a link I, I labeled it the genealogical equivalent of Seeing something Shiny. That's right. Oh look, A link. Oh. And so one link leads to another and another. And the next thing you know, she's found the name of Dirk Storm, which what a cool name to have. That's sounds. I don't know. Strong. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. So she ended up giving it a little Google search and, there was a book written about the storm Family lineage. It was written by a Raymond William Storm in 1949, and at the time, you could only get this book through that Hathi Trust, free of charge. So the Happy Trust was a bit of a puzzle. So Kim had to do a little looking. Yeah. What is a Hathi trust? So I'm not, I'm not in the academic circles other than nursing. Right. The Hacky Trust. Digital Library is a large scale collaborative, and I'm, I'm reading from a website, a large scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries, including content digitized via Google Books and the internet archive digitized digitization initiatives, as well as some content digitized locally by libraries. The owner of the Hathy. is a university consortium. so when I saw this book that I must have, I did a deep dive into Hathy Trust and it seemed it would be free. So I could just do it right, get my request, but I, no, I noticed some of them were like Ivy League universities and I don't live near one, so I didn't know how to go about getting this getting this. So I put out a Facebook request cuz that's what everybody does, right? and I, I thought nothing of it, but I swear to God it wasn't even a, an hour or more later. And someone. Immediately knew what the Hathy Trust was. And it happened to be Laura's daughter, Whitney who knew, who knew you're holding out me, Whitney. And she just happens to be in that kind of academic circle. She, she's a little closer to Boston, so she knows a lot of people that do that kind of thing. So I asked her, and boom, I had the digital copy in my inbox within like two hours of old Dirk's. It seems that one of her friends from school was a PhD student at Notre Dame and knew exactly what to do for this crazy Aunt I think I'd like to see what, what email she sent. Yeah. please help this crazy woman she needs. She's just gonna bug everybody until the Happy Trust comes through. So. anyway, it was just meant to be. They, she found it. I had the digital copy and it was free, but it came from an academic, an academic library that did contribute to the Hathy Trust. So now I know what it is and I'm a big proponent. I'm glad it's there. Exactly. I think it was just meant to be that you were gonna find that Storm Family History book. Right. And. So we are related to the storms through the maternal grandfather Manley Smith. Dirk is our eighth great-grandfather through that line down from, so it starts with the storms and then goes through Belyeas, and then the Smiths and many families intertwined within that mix. So our families in. So back in the Revolutionary War time, our family, that line of the family was in New York in the Terrytown, sleepy Hollow area, and they were loyalists to the British Crown. I've forgotten the King's name at the time. George. I think they might have been George iii. Yeah, think you're right. Crazy. probably. Yeah. No, we, we'll just leave that one alone. We'll, yeah, we just leave that one So yeah, so our family ancestors were loyalists to the British Crown and there were quite a few. And after the surrender to the British, our family left the United States and they were given land in New Brunswick. And I did read. it was usually the most vocal of the, or it was mostly the, the most vocal of the supporters of the King and the Crown? Yeah. That were the ones who left. Oh. So there were many, many supporters who stayed. There was something close to like, I think it was 900,000, eight or 900,000 loyalists in the colonies at the time, and it was less than a hundred thousand. There are different estimates, but Anywhere from 20 to, I think 80,000 of people who left and some went back to England, the most wealthy, went back to England. It said and many went to New Brunswick or what would become New Brunswick as our family did. If you think about it, even if you wanted to stay, I mean it's, life was gonna be tough and might be a little hostile. A little hostile. People cranky. Yeah. But they also were gi, they were given free land in new Brun. in a, in a colony of the crown, right? Yeah. So why not? You know, that just seemed kind of tempting to me. But you'd have to, again, another theme uproot from your family and leave, right? Yeah. But to me it's like, okay, so they were given land and it was pretty nice land, you know, not to say that things were already built for'em, right? They, they were expected to go and create you. a territory, right? Yeah. In British North America is what? That's right. It was called at the time, right? Yeah. So you, when we were growing up, we only knew about New Brunswick kind of being the, you know, where the Smiths came from. Right. We didn't know anything beyond that. And because Smith had been such a brick wall in New York, that's when the storm name really became a lot more interesting and it started to give us a lot more information as you did a little bit more research. Right. So, yeah, so we were, most of the family that I knew. About Smiths. Anyway, we're in New Brunswick and I never really even gave it much of a thought. But we were given a family tree that did work out, you know, from the Smiths and it was a nice family tree. I don't know who who created it, but my mother had it. Oh, my grandmother had it. And I have it. And it went all the way back to Steven Smith, which is the one I'm still stuck at today. So Oh, the Steven Smith saga. Yeah, the Steven Smith saga. One of these, well, you know, we need to go. You know Westchester County or Manhattan and see what we can dig up. Let, let's do it. Yep. Okay. Ready? So, you know, we needed to figure out about Dirk Storm. So I, I, now I'm, I'm armed with Old Dirk's book and we just start digging and start finding stuff. I have here first, one of the first things I came up with and the reason that I kind of came across Dirk's name was because I was reading information that was submitted by a Marlou. Belyea is her name. And it's quite a comprehensive genealogy of the Belyea family and in. Account. They do mention that Belyea is a derivative of Boulier, which is French, and they come from the come from France. But the reason they changed it to Belyea was to make it sound more Dutch. I don't know if that's true, but that's what one person had written. So the Belyea were French, but they were located in Westchester County. That's funny because I, I had it pegged for a French name anyway. Did you? Yeah. Just, you know, just because of the, I guess the makeup of the name. I don't, right. It does. It does, and it just, it does. Yeah. Rolls off the tongue like a French name. That's right. So when as I was looking at the Belyea account of the storms, I also found a book called The Colonial Families of the United States, and they wrote about Dirk, and I'll read this to you. Dirk came from the Mayory of Bosch. Province of Braybant in the Netherlands with his wife and three children, and they sailed from Amsterdam on two September, 1662. In 1670, he succeeded Carol De Bva as secretary at Brooklyn, and afterwards served for some years as town clerk at Flatbush Long Island. He moved to Orange County, was more lesser of the tapin. From its organization. In 1694 to 1704 and prior to 1697, he changed his home to the manor of Phillipsburg Westchester County. The first record, the first record book of the old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow from its organization in 1697 to 1716 was kept by him. So people always mentioned what fabulous records the Dutch Church had. Because they were very, I wanna say? Detailed and organized. Yes. They were detailed and organized in a very, and legible, and kept in a very orderly fashion. And why didn't we inherit those traits? Well, I'm working on it. I'm a work in progress do not look at my nerd cave That they were very instrumental, or Dirk was very instrumental in recording all the births and records and marriages and all those things of all the people that came to the new world. And so I, I, I'm really quite pleased by that. So, because otherwise if it wasn't for him, we may not even know of the records of all these people in the late 16 hundreds that were there in New York. So it's really quite interest. Very good. Also, one thing I did wanna mention on this sheet about Dirk was that Dirk's daughter Maria, married Casper Springsteen Just gonna put that out there because Bruce Springsteen does attribute his. Family to the Dutch line in Sleepy Hollow? I don't know. I I haven't got, I don't have it back that far yet. But let's just, let's just say, you know, we could be the boss's cousin. Right? Okay. All right. So we have in front of us old Dirck's Book. it's about 425 pages long. If anybody is really interested in reading that. And I have something I just wanna mention. So we have at the beginning of the book, and I wanna read this because it just, Laura, Laura said earlier it sounds like they were writing this book for me or and basically the the Forward says, have trust, and it says that in Dutch, in the sentiment of Old Dirk's own motto, I have trust that my children, Geraldine and George will keep this record safe. For those who may one day wish to know what part of ancestors played in laying the foundations of this country, deep and strong, may they and their children and their cousins and their children, all and all the descendants of the pioneer find it a lasting bulwark against the inroads of what Sidney Laier calls the slow ox time, which browses through the clover fields of poets and great men and names of course of in the course of things sweeping away old landmarks like worthless rubbish. So basically, if you write a book. the history won't go to dust. Hopefully so that was his, his goal in writing this book. That was, you know, not everybody felt that way at the time. So, nice that yep. Nice. That they had that foresight to do that, because look who's interested now? All right. And so, A paragraph to read from Old Dirk's family in Holland, and it says it is in 1390 that the record of Old Dirk's family starts with Dedrick Storm. Not sure if I'm pronouncing that right, but who was the first of his kind? I'm sorry. That sounds like Game of Thrones. Yeah. first. First of his name. First of his name. Yeah. The first, the first of his basically is the first of his name. Really? I think that's what they meant. Yeah. So the first of his kind to leave a clear record in the archives of the low countries. In 1430, he established title to his lands at Wyck in the land of Altina. Where the descendants of the broadband of Vikings, the broadband of Vikings, had chiefly settled. De bore says that this is the cradle of the storms, where the earliest European records are extant. I mean, kept, I don't know. But yeah, the cradle of the storms where the earliest European rec records are. That's awesome. Yeah. And another thing that I wanted to mention in this same page was it writes Louis Debore, who was Dutch genealogists. Imagine that he's my friend, He fled this country during the First World War. To him must be given the credit for this research on which this portion of old Dirk's book is based in Dutch. The name means farmer or farmer. Like so many other families, Mr. DeVore's antecedents were doubtless rooted deep in the soil of Holland. He possessed a degree earned in a Dutch university, and although his English was scarcely idiomatic, his records thus far checked by others through American archives have been found to be accurate without exception. So they have taken this account of Dirk's family and, and. through all kinds of genealogists and every time it checks out. Correct. So I like the book. Hmm. Quite a thing. All right. And so I was just gonna go also in this book. They have the lineage, 425 pages. Let me find it. Oh, there it is. So from the earliest recorded date, old Dirk's Kind, they have listed that starts with Dederick Storm, which Laura just mentioned. He was born in about 1390, and it goes down 18 generations. To Dirk Allen Storm, born at Pelham Manor, New York in 1938. So in amongst all those, how many Dirks we have? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5. But that's a, that's a lot of generations to not have, to not lose the name. Nobody got daughtered out. No, exactly. Which is, that's a, that's a very good point. Many, many families can get daughtered out. So funny. And amongst all of those are many other Dutch names. The marriages were, I'm just gonna say a few names, if anybody catches on Vander Duson Smar let's see. Van Corten, Bosch. Monfort. Van Dyke. Van Wart. Vincent I don't know what that, yeah. Katherine Vincent. Woo. and then we get onto more American names. Hey, one of'em married. Someone from Portland, Maine. All right. There's another thing. Shiny. Shiny object. Mm-hmm. All right. Okay, so Modern Day Sleepy Hollow has something for everyone. And there are farmers markets, live music, street fairs, historic homes, hiking trails, kayaking and boating on the Hudson River to name a few. And Halloween season, I'm guessing is, is quite a time there because it is the home of the, the novel is it called Sleepy Hollow is the novel, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, written by Washington Irving. So there's even more stuff for the family to do at that time. Hay Rides, blazing Pumpkins, costumed, 5K run. I think they should all run the 5K with blazing Pumpkins on their heads. I think that would be pretty funny. You know, a Halloween parade and of course the Headless Horseman I was watching, I I was watching a documentary on the Sleepy Hollow Saga on mm-hmm. YouTube yesterday. And there was a gentleman who has been doing the headless horseman at Halloween for many, many years. And so they would have those blazing pumpkins, but they had to stop making'em blazing because number one, you have to, as you're riding the horse, and holding onto the horse, you have to hold the pumpkin out at an, you know, extend your arm. Mm-hmm. and you can only do that for so long before your arm is, is before it's a problem. And of course it's a blazing pumpkin so you can't like cradle it Right. And it could scare the horse too. That would be, that's right. So they stopped good. They stopped with the blazing pumpkin somehow, unless you're, unless you're on the street. But it was kind of funny how he said I can't, I couldn't do it for very long. So they had to stop doing that. Yeah. That's funny. So there's lots to be learned on YouTube, you. And, you know, we'll have to document something if, hopefully we'll make it out to Sleepy Hollow before too long. Right? I'm, you know, now. Now that we're traveling freely, I want to go. Yes. So it'll be, thank goodness it I promised last summer I was going, but it didn't go. So this summer, this summer we'll be summer. We're doing it. Yep. So we're, I wanna round back to the family search site. Like I said, I, I found records for the old Dutch burying ground that you can do their slow roll. And I'm gonna do that to see what else I can find because, you know, you always find something so I'm gonna keep looking. That's true. And so next week we're gonna continue on with a discovering the connection to the Van Tassel family. The Van Tassel name shows up in the legend of Sleepy Hollow and in our Family Tree. So tune in next week where we can deep dive into more Dutch genealogy from the Hudson Valley. Right. And if you get an opportunity, go to your favorite podcast platform and rate or review or do whatever it is you can do for our, our podcast. Send it forward, tell your friends, and we're gonna, we're gonna share what we find out next week. So until then, we'll see you later. See you later. Bye-bye.