Johannes DeWitt

MVDW 25
TGE 25. xii. Family 16.
March 26, 1701 - July 21, 1776
baptized in Kingston, New York; living in Marbletown when he marries
buried at Old Dutch [Reformed] Church, Kingston, New York

Mary Brodhead

August 6, 1699 [?] - died before 17 April 1774
birthplace
When her brother Charles writes his will in 1774, he describes Mary as deceased

Charles DeWitt

MVDW 137
TGE 120. ii. Family 45.
1727 - August 2, 1787
birthplace
Buried in Old Hurley Burial Ground, Hurley, New York
(see photo below)
His 7 July 1776 will is written “at my house in Marbletown.” (Full extracted text from Anjou is below.)

Blandina DuBois

Married December 20, 1754, in Kingston Old Dutch Church (New York)
Charles de Wit, “merchant,” and Blandina du Bois, both residing in Mormel (Marbletown). Married on the presentation of a license.
1731 - November 4, 1765
daughter of Gerritt DuBois and Margaret Elmendorf
birthplace
Buried in Old Hurley Burial Ground, Hurley, New York

John Charles DeWitt

MVDW 381
TGE 309. i.
October 22, 1755 - December 31, 1833
birthplace
baptized 2 November 1755 as Johannes in Old Dutch Church in Kingston, New York
parents: Charles de Wit, Blandina Dubois
witnesses: Johannes De Wit, Conrad Nieuwkerk, and his wife Anne de Wit
married 15 November 1778 Cornelia Cantine (1757-1814) at location
burial location
Evans, p. 3, says died “circ. 1832, at Windham, Greene Co., N.Y.”

Margaret (Marguerite?) DeWitt

MVDW 382
TGE 310. ii.
July 2, 1758 - September 26, 1827 (source?)
birthplace
baptized 9 July 1758 as Margrietje in Old Dutch Church in Kingston, New York
parents: Charles De Wit, Blandina Dubois
witnesses: Gerret Dubois, and his wife Margrietje Elmendorf

married 10 April 1783 Johannes Bruyn (1750?-1814) in Old Dutch Church:
Johannes Bruin, born and residing “under the jurisdiction of” Shawangunk, and Margritje DeWitt, born and residing “under the jurisdiction of” Hurley. First marriage for both.

Margaret and her sister Maria got married on the same day in 1783, possibly to cousins (both had parents who were Bruyns)

see Wikipedia page on their son Charles DeWitt Bruyn (12 December 1784 - 9 February 1849, died Shawangunk buried Bruynswick Rural Cemetery), with considerable additional family notes. He married his cousin Maria Hasbrouck (1793-1851), daughter of James Hasbrouck and Polly DeWitt Hasbrouck (MVDW 0383), and they had four children, listed in the Wikipedia entry.

burial location

Mary (Maria? “Polly”) DeWitt

MVDW 383
TGE 311. iii.
September 22, 1760 - July 18, 1798
(Evans, p. 3, says born 28 September)
birthplace
baptized 12 October 1760 as Maria in Old Dutch Church in Kingston, New York
parents: Charles de Wit, Blandina Dubois
witnesses: Andreas de Wit, and his wife Blandina Teneik

married 10 April 1783 Jacobus Hasbrouck (1753-1819) in Old Dutch Church:
Jacobus Haasbrough, born and residing in Kingston, and Maria DeWitt, born and residing “under the jurisdiction of” Hurley. First marriage for both.

Maria and her sister Margaret got married on the same day in 1783, possibly to cousins (both had parents who were Bruyns)

Jacobus “James” Hasbrouck is described in Wikipedia as “a prominent Kingston merchant.”
their daughter Maria married her cousin Charles DeWitt Bruyn; see entry above under Margaret (MVDW 0382)

See PoliticalGraveyard.com on the DeWitt-Bruyn-Hasbrouck-Kellogg family of New York politics

burial location

Gerritt (Garret?) DeWitt

MVDW 384
TGE 312. iv.
August 8, 1762 - February 5, 1846
birthplace
baptized 15 August 1762 as Gerret in Old Dutch Church in Kingston, New York
parents: Charles Dewit, Blandina Dubois
witnesses: Coenrad Dubois, Gerretje Dubois
married 15 November 1786 Catharine Ten Eyck (1765-1840) at Kingston, New York
Buried in Old Hurley Burying Ground, Hurley, New York

Ann DeWitt

MVDW 385
TGE 313. v.
November 11, 1764 - death date
birthplace
baptized 18 November 1764 as Ann in Old Dutch Church in Kingston, New York
parents: Charles de Witt, Blandina du Bois
witnesses: Coenraad Nieuwkerk, Ann de Witt
married 16 February 1786 Peter Tappen (1764-1846), in Old Dutch Church: Peter Tappen, Jr., born in Kingston, residing in New Paltz, and Ann DeWitt, born and residing under the jurisdiction of Hurley. First marriage for both.
burial location: Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York, per Find-A-Grave. See her page for more details, and more links

Notes

Charles was an enslaver. He initially helped manage Livingston Manor across the Hudson from Kingston, then became a merchant for many years, then inherited a mill and grounds from his uncle Charles Brodhead, and subsequently was involved in the creation of an independent New York and eventually an independent United States.

Charles DeWitt was praised as a U.S. Revolutionary War figure, with many achievements supporting the war that ended with Britain’s acknowledgement of the independence of the United States. (Many DeWitts were involved supporting the Revolution in various ways. DeWitts let the army use their farms in distant valleys to store arms and supplies, and DeWitts provided some of those arms and supplies too.) Charles DeWitt ran a mill that may have been working since the days of his great-grandfather Tjerck, and Martha Washington apparently preferred flour from the DeWitt mills, specifying it when a contractor sent a letter asking for more flour for the troops at Valley Forge. Charles also served in various legislatures on both state and continental levels.

A much richer rumination on Charles DeWitt, his place in his world, and some of his social and family connections, can be studied here.

Evans, p. 13, says: “Charles De Witt was one of the most prominent men of Ulster County in the political events which preceded and accompanied the war of the Revolution. From 1768 to 1775 he was a member of the Colonial Assembly, ‘and as a member of the last legislative body which sat under royal authority, was one of the nine resolute and patriotic men who voted to approve of the proceedings of the Continental Congress, then recently organized in Philadelphia.’ [This quotation and the one that follows are from the source Evans cites below.] He was a member of the Provincial Convention of April, 1775, and of the third and fourth Provincial Congresses, where he was associated with John Jay, William Duer, and others on the committee ‘for detecting and defeating conspiracies, etc.’ On December 21, 1775, he was commissioned colonel of a regiment of minute men. When the State Government was organized, Colonel De Witt was made a member of the committee to draft a Constitution; and from 1781 to 1785 he sat in the State Assembly. A sketch of Colonel De Witt, from which the above facts are mainly taken, may be found in the Ulster County Historical Collections.” (See Sources below.)

Olde Ulster, Vol. V, No. 7 (July 1909), has a long and only mostly turgid encomium for Charles DeWitt, pp. 193-206, including photos of Charles’s newly upgraded grave marker as well as that of Blandina Du Bois. (Letters of Charles DeWitt also appear in this volume, although many of them are letters addressed to the Colonel, rather than written by him.) The article (drawn from a “eulogy” of sorts given by Benjamin Myer Brink, editor of Olde Ulster, at the dedication of his new grave marker) describes how, after the Stamp Act of 1764 (and after his wife died at 34 in 1765), Charles was elected a representative of Ulster County in the Colonial Assembly in 1768, together with George Clinton. The eulogist waxes on about Charles’s “love of liberty,” and quotes an entire article from the original Constitution of New York that cites “the benevolent principles of rational liberty.”

Charles also was an owner of slaves, as were other DeWitts in the same area, and many of the businessmen with whom Charles interacted. We can guess that Charles’s well known mill used enslaved labor to run. When Charles rushes off to join the Revolutionary War days after the Declaration of Independence is signed in 1776, he dashes off a quick will (see full text below), noting that he may lose his life fighting for liberty, and leaving his eldest son John a “Negro Servant” of his choice. When Charles’s uncle Charles Brodhead died in 1774, Charles inherited 4 enslaved workers together with the mill. Multiple generations of DeWitts owned slaves right up to 1827, when New York State finally abolished the practice. This is not the space for a longer and well deserved discussion of the history of slavery in Ulster County and North America, and its lasting impact on individuals and instituions down to the present day, but much more can be said and learned and considered. Understanding the interconnection between enslaved people and the governing class gives us a richer, clearer picture of the past, and of the people who took part.

Two pages after the Olde Ulster mini-biography describes Charles’s contributions to freedom (“Never before, in the history of the race, were such words embodied in fundamental law”), the author also mentions Charles’s “negro slave, ‘Pete.’” The irony appears unintentional.

The context of the mention also offers a more complex understanding of the man who is almost invariably called “Colonel”: “One of the incidents in the career of Colonel DeWitt which aroused great interest at the time was his arrest for neglect of military service.” Charles had been in charge of a group of Minute Men at the start of the Revolutionary War. (Ranks were often handed out, at the time, based on a landowner’s wealth and status in the community, rather than based on any measure of capability or experience. A man of a certain stature was expected to raise a certain number of volunteers for the militia, make sure they were properly outfitted, and lead them.) As “the long contest developed into a question of endurance,” Brinks notes, the excitement that fed the start of the war waned: “It dampened enthusiasm to lie in leaky tents awaiting an enemy who never came.” Troops stopped showing up for muster. So the local commander decided to make an example of some prominent members of the community who had gone AWOL. “Among those arrested were Colonel DeWitt and his negro slave, ‘Pete.’”

(The arrest of a slave for not voluntarily showing up to fight for freedom raises a rich set of questions. N.B. also that the British had offered freedom to slaves if the war went their way.)

Did the man who proudly claimed the title Colonel say there had been a misunderstanding, and that he had meant to serve all along? No, actually, “Colonel DeWitt claimed his prerogative as a Member of the Assembly to be secure both from arrest and from military service.” (It is not clear whether this would also exempt “Pete.”) As it happens, Colonel Snyder, who was the guy trying to get soldiers back to the battle, was himself a Member of the Assembly, but he was claiming no such exemption. (Snyder was likely a distant cousin of Charles DeWitt; one source says his mother was a Hoffman.) Governor Clinton, who had served with DeWitt in the Assembly, supported Snyder, but the legislature agreed with DeWitt. He might be called Colonel, but that did not mean he had to serve in war. Or, as his eulogist writes, “his service was not to be a military one.” Everyone seemed to agree that the mill that had been left to Charles made really top-notch flour.

I have not checked any of the Olde Ulster account against primary sources, which often reveal further nuance. Olde Ulster does not give a date for the arrest, but Brink’s description makes it sound as if it happened later in the war, after the 17 October 1777 burning of Kingston (when the town was burned—at the time the state capital—but not Charles’s mill). The same episode is referred to in Collections of the Ulster Historical Society, Vol. 1, p. 165, without much further illumination, and again without giving a specific date for his arrest. The account does note that the “question of privilege” was discussed in the Provincial Convention, which may lean toward an earlier date for the incident. (The New York Provincial Congress was around from 1775-1777; it was the Fourth Provincial Congress, convened in White Plains on July 9, 1776, that started calling itself the Convention of Representatives of the State of New York. After it adopted the Constitution of the State of New York, on April 20, 1777, in Kingston, presumably the new Assembly and Senate were in charge.) Secondary sources may not always be exact in their descriptions or terminology. Brink’s celebration of Charles’s life, for example, describes how his commitment to religious tolerance came from “his ancestors among the dykes of the Netherlands, who fought for eighty long years for religious freedom and then bestowed it unreservedly upon all.” In point of fact, Charles’s first ancestor to come to North America was from a German province, not the Netherlands, and he was a staunch Lutheran, not a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, and the Dutch Governor, rather than magnanimously bestowing religious freedom upon him, fined him for leading Lutheran services. So Brink’s description of Charles’s illustrious service in the Provincial Congress, and the timing of his arrest for desertion, is probably worth double-checking against some original sources.

DeWitt Mill ca. 1913 (colorized). From the New York State Archives Digital Collections. See also the uncolorized version.

For more on the DeWitt mills (text and pictures), click here. I’m not 100% certain, but I believe Charles’ second son Gerritt took over the mill Charles ran on the Green Kill, a bit south of Kingston on the west side of the Hudson (close to DeWitt Lake, on DeWitt Mills Road, if you’re looking for it in Google Maps). Charles’ eldest son, John Charles, if I understand correctly, went across to the east side of the Hudson, in Dutchess County, and established a similar mill operation there. See his page (linked above) for more details. The town historian over there says Charles helped finance the launch of the operation on the east side of the Hudson (which also supplied Washington’s troops during the Revolution).

Charles DeWitt in his mid-20s served as manager for Livingston Manor, the estate of the noted Livingston family, which included signers of the Declaration of Independence, various statesmen, a long network of business associations, and the sponsors of Robert Fulton’s development of steam-propelled ships that revolutionized navigation. Charles kept a sporadic journal of accounts during that time and the following years. The journal can be found in the library of the New-York Historical Society. Its card reads as follows:

Livingston Manor, and the Ancram ironworks, were on the east shore of the Hudson, in Dutchess and Columbia counties. Other DeWitts lived over there, and other DeWitts were also involved with the Livingstons in various ways. I won’t go into further detail here, but there are rich stories if you start looking. Notably see Charles’s cousins John and Petrus, MVDW 100 and 101, 1717-1749 and 1722-1790, who worked successively at Livingston Manor and in other exploits with the Livingstons. John sailed to the Caribbean and back on business for the Livingstons, as well as the Reades and Yateses of New York City; when he died in Bermuda, it was Henry Livingston who sent word back to John’s father, Captain Tjerck, in Ulster County. That was just before Charles began his stint at Livingston Manor. (Olde Ulster says he was appointed “to succeed his cousin, Colonel Petrus DeWitt,” which may be true.)

Charles, at Livingston Manor, worked for Robert Livingston Jr., whose father was Robert Livingston the Elder and whose son was Robert Livingston also. Robert Jr. had been educated in Scotland and in London. The Livingston family story is intertwined with American history through several generations. Robert the Elder was born in Ancrum, in Scotland (near Jedburgh), and when he was nine years old his family was exiled for religious reasons; they resettled in Rotterdam, where he became fluent in Dutch.

Perhaps inspired by his employer’s education, in his early days at the manor Charles made a list of books he owned, a library of notable size for the time. (Below is just the first page; the list is sorted from largest volumes to smallest, as was typical in those days.)

(He repeats the list on June 30, 1752, with prices of each book added.)

I saw Charles’s frail little jounal on February 5, 2000. It’s written in English, and the handwriting is not too difficult. Many entries were rather mundane, a recipe for ink or indigo dye (or two other blue dyes, one a “never fading blue”), or beer with molasses and ginger (on the same page with a list of his children’s birth dates), another recipe for Spruce Beer, or the following tidbit:

A cord of wood is

8 foot long
4 high &
4 broad

2 cords wood yields about a load of coal or 100 B[???]

[Before you ask: The first use of BTU probably is in the mid-1800s.]

There seem to be at least two types of ink used in the journal (perhaps originally one was red?), and one has faded considerably more than the other. They are each used intermittently, often in sequence on the same page.

Much of the book consists of accounting entries, indicating when a list of people had been paid their wages, or tabulating a set of purchases, or noting some other debt incurred or paid. Some of the book notes agreements made or events taking place on particular days, contracts with workers who agree to be wagon drivers or furnace tenders or who don’t show up as agreed, and other business miscellany. He writes down instructions he is given by Mr. Livingston, other business arrangements, visitors who bring news. He sets out a method for calculating the diameter of a cog wheel if it is supoosed to have 84 cogs spaced 4 inches from each other. (He knows the number 3.1416, though he does not call it π.)

There were no computers then, no credit card receipts and bank statements, no checkbooks. People who did business were expected to keep an account book like this, which could be presented to a court if there were a disagreement, as evidence that an agreement had been made on a particular day, with particular terms. One of the values of being able to read and write was that you could keep a written record of business transactions. If you did business with someone who did not write down the terms of an agreement, it was your written word against his oath and memory (which, in courts at the time, were considered legitimate proof too).

Charles records what the preacher talked about in his Sunday sermon:

Other entries are more mundane notes: “Feb 14, 1750/1, Lon went to work with the forgeman at Anchoram.”

Charles writes a few notes about the harsh winter of 1763 as well as a storm on 22 January 1750/1 and the resulting high water that threatened the goods in a Livingston warehouse.

And there are more interesting entries. For example, the following, from January 30, 1754:

Pix

(Photo by Mary Sarah Bradley)

(Photo by Doug Bradley)
This version is a little more readable.

(Photo by Doug Bradley)
This is a relatively new monument for Charles DeWitt. It stands out in a burying ground filled with old colonial grave markers. The original markers for this family plot stand behind the big gray one:

To see a much larger rendition of this scene, with letters on most stones that become legible, or nearly legible, or tantalizingly close to legible but still really impossible to decipher, click here (the picture will open in a new window).

The big stone at least will finally be easy to read.

(Photo by Mary Sarah Bradley)
Presumably it is this Charles DeWitt for whom this Masonic council is named. We saw these markers holding up flags in July 1998 in the New Hurley Cemetery (where this picture was taken), but we did not learn the story behind them.

Someone named Claudia (clsd2 at hotmail.com), researching Brewers, helpfully found a large part of the answer: This emblem is not a Masonic symbol at all, but one from a completely different fraternal order, the Junior Order of United American Mechanics. For a little more discusssion about the difference (from a Mason named Marcus Orr), see “Arm, Hammer, Square and Compass,” from 2011.

Charles DeWitt came from a whole mess of immigrants, none of whom came in carrying any papers, so it is interesting indeed to see his name appropriated by an organization that promotes “native” Americans over those who have come in more recently from abroad.

Sources

Information is from Mary Veldran DeWitt’s “The DeWitt Genealogy: Descendants of Tjereck Claessen DeWitt of Ulster County, New York.”

Further notes from Andries and Jannetje DeWitt Bible (not available in print, but see photos at link above and on Andries’ page), courtesy of the Matthew Ten Eyck DeWitt Family Collection.

Baptismal and Marriage Registers of the Old Dutch Church of Kingston, Ulster County, New York (formerly named Wiltwyck, and often familiarly called Esopus or ’Sopus), for One Hundred and Fifty Years from their commencement in 1660. Transcribed and edited by Roswell Randall Hoes, Chaplain U.S.N., corresponding secretary of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, etc. New York 1891; available today from Higginson Book Co., Salem, Mass., 508-745-7170. Detailed information about baptisms has been filled in through the end of 1687, marriages through 1701. More information is available. Records begin 1660. Other baptisms may have taken place in Hurley and other locations nearby; also from time to time itinerant ministers would travel through and perform various rites, not always entered in the books. This is available online at archive.org.

Thomas Grier Evans, The De Witt Family of Ulster County, New York (reprinted from the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, October 1886), New York: Trow’s Printing and Bookbinding Co., 201-213 East Twelfth Street, 1886. Available online from archive.org. Evans’s work, reprinted in 1886 up to the point where it left off in Volume XVIII of the Record, was continued in 1890 (Volume XXI, commencing on p. 185) with additional names and family numbering. The reprinted portion includes names of descendants to the fourth generation; the extension shows their descendants, the fifth generation, with considerable further biographical information on some. This later addition to Evans’s work (he also published details on other families that intermarried with DeWitts in Ulster County, including Crispells, Bruyns, and others) extended into Volume XXII (January 1891, pp. 3-6). (I include here links to some publicly available copies of the individual issue and articles from the Record, but a better way to get access to it and a wealth of other genealogical resources, in addition to supporting genealogical research in general, is to join the NYGBS itself.)

Marbletown, New York, baptism records at archive.org.

Ulster County, N. Y., Probate Records, In the Office of the Surrogate, and in the County Clerk’s Office at Kingston, N. Y., compiled, abstracted and translation by Gustave Anjou, Ph. D., 1906. Privately published (?) in New York, but available at genealogical libraries (NYPL and others). Subtitle: “A careful abstract and translation of the Dutch and English wills, letters of administration after intestates, and inventories from 1665, with genealogical and historical notes, and list of Dutch and Frisian baptismal names with their English equivalents.” Introduction by Judge A[lphonso] T[rumpbour] Clearwater, LL.D. This is available in reprinted form. Note that there are two distinct volumes included in this work, sometimes combined into one physical book.

New-York Historical Society Collections, Vol. VIII [1899], “Abstracts of Wills on file in the Surrogate’s Office, City of New York, 1771-1776 (available at archive.org and in other places online).

Olde Ulster, an intriguing if haphazard periodical that was put out from 1905 to 1914 by Benjamin Myer Brink, bundled together a lot of reasonably accurate transcriptions and translations of old source materials from Ulster County, some of which doesn’t appear in other published sources. It can be found online today at (for example) the Internet Archive, as well as in reprinted form (each year’s issues added up to just shy of 500 pages of material, published in combined volumes), on Google Books, and in some other places.

Collections of the Ulster Historical Society, Vol. I, Part 1, p. 165, Kingston: Hommel & Launsbery, Printers, 1860, can be found on Google Books (see link). The same text can be found in a reprint excerpted from the larger volume, An Account of the British Expedition above the Highlands of the Hudson River, and of the Events Connected with the Burning of Kingston in 1877, by George W. Pratt, Albany: Munsell & Rowland, 1861, which can be found in PDF form online at Wikimedia (see p. 61). The smaller pamphlet may be found for sale on Abebooks and other online sources. The larger book is harder to find in its original printing, but reprints can be bought online from various sources, probably made from the Google Books scan. The title page of the book refers to the Ulster Historical Society (not Ulster County).

National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Vol. 61 (1973), hard to find in print form except in libraries, apparently not on archive.org, but available from the NGS online for paid members.

The New York State Archives Digital Collections has a deep and continually growing, searchable trove of images of original source documents, dovetailing some of the published translations. (Some of the documents’ supporting pages include translations on site; many just show the document itself.) This is a good way to see some of the challenges that modern translators are up against, when documents are singed around the edges, missing whole pieces or otherwise in fragile condition.

See also the Wikipedia article on Johannis Snyder’s Regiment of Militia, which lists a few sources I have not checked further.

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