AADAS 2011 conference - register now
AADAS 2011
18th biennial meeting
Past and Present:
The Importance of History for Dutch-Americans
June 9-10
Lakeland College
Sheboygan, WI
Register now open for the 18th biennial AADAS conference, which will take place in Sheboygan, Wisconsin in June. The advanced registration deadline is May 27, 2011.
The conference theme is "Past and Present: The Importance of History for Dutch-Americans". This conference explores historical themes about the uniqueness of the Dutch in America. In what ways are the Dutch similar to German or Scandinavian immigrants, and in what ways do they differ? This conference will take place in Wisconsin, a state home to large populations of Americans of Dutch and German ancestry. This appropriate setting will provide an opportunity to address Wisconsin's place in Dutch American history, and further explore the ongoing interest in Dutch identity across the United States today.
@Chalmers van Deursen
Fascinating story! Did you hear that the archives of the West India Company were placed on the Memory of the World heritage list by UNESCO this week? The archives of the WIC are kept at the Nationaal Archief in The Hague. Parts of these archives are currently being digitized. Perhaps you will be able to find out more about your family in these documents.I will post a message to this website once they become available online.
On a personal note: I am a descendant of the lords of Doorne (other old spelling of Deurne) too :-)
Yvette Hoitink
I am the only person in my family so many years after we first came to Manhattan in 1636 to speak Dutch, albeit imperfectly, since I taught myself. My ancestor, Abraham Pietersen van Deursen, married Trientje Melchiors at St. Bavoskerk in Haarlem in I think 1632 and then he came to what is now New York as an agent for the Dutch West India Company in 1636. He had a groats mill in the southeast part of Manhattan in what later was called the Bowery, after I think his bouwerij (farm). Maps as late as the 1700s still show a windmill in the same location. He also administered an island in Narragansett Bay for the West India Company, in order to keep a weather eye on them pesky Englishmen up in Massachusetts. Located between Conanicut Island and the western shore of Narragansett Bay, it is still called Dutchman's Island. Now, little could old Abraham Pietersen have known, but some of his descendants would be a marriage between his ten-times great grandchildren and the ten-times great grandchildren on them pesky Englishmen in Rhode Island--a marriage between my grandfather Edgar Allchin Van Deusen and my grandmother Margaret Barlow of both Block Island (RI) and Brooklyn, NY. Somehow over the generations my line dropped the R in van Deursen, followed American usage in capitalizing the V of the preposition, and so I am really Van Deusen, but for the purposes of this blog I am using the old spelling,
Chalmers van Deursen
(or if you go back to the 1200s in Brabant and the time we had the castle in Doorsen (modern-day Deurne), Chalmers van Doorsen