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Archiver > Dutch-Colonies > 2005-10 > 1129049565


From: "Elsie H. Wilson" <>
Subject: Re: [D-Col] New York Slavery
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 11:53:18 -0500
References: <001501c5cc1b$98426ac0$9600000a@lan><012f01c5ce7a$1db8a7e0$541b4845@lbowdish>
In-Reply-To: <007801c5ce7f$f6403a60$0b00a8c0@CYCLOPSVI>


Dear Ron and Dutch Listers,
Aren't names fun?!
In reading old account of many of my Dutch ancestors, I find it listed that
they had a couple slaves and or servants. Some of them are of African
origin and were likely slaves, so were Hollanders who needed a passage paid
and worked to repay the passage.
Closely related to the Dumond family is the Van Wagenen family. Issac Van
Wagenen and his wife were helpful to obtaining Sojourner Truth's freedom.
Carl Van Wagenen has a wonderful web site dedicated to the Van Wagenen
family. Even if you are not of Van Wagenen ancestry, there are some great
things about the Kingston/Esopus area and connected families.
On this site, if you go down in the first page a ways you will see the
Sojourner Truth story and about Maria and Issac Van Wagenen.
http://www.vanwagenen.org/

Recently I was using some documents regarding the Van Alstyne family. Some
were from the Albany area just before the English took over and some were
just after. It was great fun to notice that the spelling was a real
challenge for them. English has historically had much variation in spelling
and when a bunch of Dutch tried to, suddenly, convert to English
recording, it got interesting. Of course the Dutch documents were in
translated English, so had much modern, conventional spelling. I have
noticed that the translators, Van Laer, Gehring, etc. have tired to keep
the names as close to that used in the Dutch documents as possible. Also,
as more English became the transcribers, the Dutch names were spelled more
English-phonetically. As a teacher, I love it when someone gets on their
soapbox about how "Those teachers don't teach spelling like they used to! "
Often this is followed about the lovely stories of pioneers having social
events centered around spelling bees. What they don't realize is that in
America, the movement to making a big deal of spelling was a turn of the
century 1800's to 1900's movement with many immigrants to learn to read and
write. If you look at old deeds from the 1700's and 1800's, you will often
find common words spelled with two or more phonetic spellings in the same
document.

Elsie Wilson

At 12:21 PM 10/11/2005 -0400, Ron Waldron wrote:
>Beers' History of Greene County, 1884, on p. 64 lists the county's slave
>owners of 1810, nearly a full page, about 100 owners. Two of which are
>Whitbeck relatives of mine (Leonard-2 and Teunis-1).
>Elsie, you may be interested to know that one Waldron Dumond owned 2
>slaves. Always wonder how he ended up with my surname as his forename. Any
>clue?
>If there is interest I could scan this page and post it for all to see.
>
>- Ron W. -
>Be Happy - Consider the alternatives.
>----- Original Message ----- From: "David Roberts" <>
>To: <>
>Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 10:29 AM
>Subject: [D-Col] New York Slavery
>


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