Being here
Old Dutch Church, Kingston, NY. 2021. photo credit: Cindy Waszak Geary
As written in the Ancestor Project description on my website, travel is central to my investigation of my ancestors' lives, particularly those who left Europe to settle this continent. Two years ago, I visited the Netherlands to find the birthplaces of Jacob Luursen and Stynte Douwes in Wageningen and Enkhuizen, respectively. They met and married in Amsterdam in 1638, and sometime during the 1640s, they crossed the Atlantic as relatively early colonists of New Netherlands. They came under the patronage of van Rensselaer who was granted the right to create a plantation to grow wheat that could be traded for sugar from the Caribbean and Brazil. After moving to the Dutch colony, Jacob and Stynte had two daughters and a son, Luur, from whom I am descended.
They eventually moved off the van Rensselaer plantation and close to Fort Orange, on the banks of what is now called the Hudson River where the city of Albany now stands. Jacob died at the relatively young age of 38; Stynte remarried and moved further down the river, close to what is now called Kingston. Luur and his son Cornelius married into families from the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland, settling in Kingston when it was called Esopus and then Wiltwyck. Luur eventually. moved his young family south and west to Port Jervis. Luur's grandson Abraham, from whom I am descended, moved further south, eventually to North Carolina, bringing his story closer to the family I knew personally. I planned this trip to visit each of these places of their onward journeys.
Why do I travel to be here, that is, physically present in ancestral habitations? I do it because it is a way I can experience something about their lives. It feels almost like a miracle to stand and walk and breathe in forests and riverbanks and fields and maybe see the same hillsides or hear the same birdsong or feel a breeze against their faces that they saw or heard or felt. I can go to spaces where shared histories took place and know they were there, living a life that would bridge into mine. Through these experiences, I often find a personal connection to the homes of my ancestors. For example, I realized that Kingston is not so far from Hopewell Junction, where my family lived for a short time when I was two years old. As I looked at photographs and read family letters from our time there, I was drawn into a bigger family story that weaves around the ancestor stories.
As I immerse myself in Dutch settler history, I also feel the grief of my ancestors' role in the project of imperialism and what was lost by Indigenous peoples all over the continent--and by the European settlers themselves--because of it. I have no way to know what transpired between my own family members and the people they encountered in this place. Still, the fact of their being here contributed to the well-documented resulting genocide. What I hope to find by being here--a connection to the place where they encountered one another and some sense of how one can heal in the present moment, painful karma of the past.
I'm three days into this trip to the Hudson River Valley. I've been to rivers, forests, libraries, museums, and graveyards. I have more places to visit. Being here opens up new paths for investigation, new ways of seeing the past as it creates the future, new meanings for their lives and mine.