The Van Dusens of New Amsterdam

By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

THE project earned him an easy A.

“I was in seventh or eighth grade, and we were asked to do a little genealogy,” recalled Andrew Van Dusen, now a 47-year-old real estate broker specializing in Brownstone Brooklyn. “My dad handed me his file, and it was stunning.

Mr. Van Dusen learned that he was a 12th-generation descendant of one of Manhattan’s first few hundred settlers, the operator of a windmill where the Dutch ground grain, and he has been collecting anecdotes and artifacts about his sprawling family ever since. Inside his town house on a historic cul-de-sac in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, ancestors gaze down from gilded frames: There is Andrew’s grandmother, Helen Campbell Van Dusen, along with the two men she married — consecutively — Bruce Buick Van Dusen and his older brother Theron. And there is Theron’s grandfather, Charles Theron Van Dusen, who faithfully kept a daily diary on the front lines of the Civil War .

As with the Old Testament patriarch who gave birth to a nation, it all began with Abraham, whose forebears were from the town of Duersen in northern Brabant. Known in official documents as “Abraham the miller,” or “Abraham Pieterszen,” as in son of Peter, he landed on the island of “Manatus” some time before February 1627. Nearly 400 years later, he has more than 200,000 descendants over 15 generations scattered across the Americas, according to several genealogical experts who have built on intensive studies of the family over the centuries. In the 1880 census, there were 3,000 heads of household with the name Van Dusen — or Van Deusen, Van Deursen, Van Duzer and other common variants — all, the experts say, traceable back to Abraham the miller.

Theirs is among a small cohort of large, long-running Dutch families — including under-the-radar Rapeljes, with more than a million descendants, and the more prominent Kips and Rikers, with their names on neighborhoods and institutions — whose well-documented histories provide a compelling window into the development of what would become New York and, later, the United States.

Two of Abraham’s progeny — Martin Van Buren, a great-great-great-grandson; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (add four more greats) — served as presidents of the United States. A third, Eliza Kortright (Generation 7), married one, James Monroe. Egbert Benson (Generation 6) was the first attorney general of postcolonial New York. The Rev. Dr. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, a theologian (Generation 10), made the cover of Time magazine in 1954.

There were family members on both sides of the early border wars between New York and Massachusetts, the War of Independence and the Civil War. At the Battle of Gettysburg , Pvt. William Jackson Raburn of Indiana’s “Fighting 300” died of a gunshot wound on July 2, 1863; a day later, Matthew Henry Van Dusen — Raburn’s fourth cousin twice removed (by marriage) — a “reb” with the fabled Hood’s Texas Brigade, was sidelined with a head injury.

Cornelis Kortright (Generation 5) owned slaves accused of participating in a “Negro plot” in 1741. Jan Van Deusen Jr., Kortright’s second cousin, saved New York’s historical records when the British burned the state’s first capital to the ground in 1777.

Bruce Buick VanDusen Jr., Andrew’s father, asked the final question at John F. Kennedy’s last news conference in Washington. And Andrew had the first line of dialogue (“Hey!”) as a soldier in the 1989 movie “Last Exit to Brooklyn.”

There were lawyers, bakers, tavern owners, department store managers, carpenters and a homemaker whose 19th-century cookbook offers handwritten recipes for fried bread, “Plain Cake,” and a remedy for rheumatism using dandelion extract.

In the Berkshires, there was once a wisp of a place known as Van Deusenville, where Andrew recently stumbled upon a grave marker for a cousin from the seventh generation named Freelove Van Dusen (c. 1813-1883), sister of Increase, mother of Wealthy.

Today, Van Dusens are mayors of Astoria, Ore. (Willis, Generation 12), and Skokie, Ill. (George, who does not know the details). George is the rare Jew in a family tree that is overwhelmingly Protestant and white, though Andrew said he recently “found an African-American Van Dusen family on Facebook.”

What has been a hobby for Andrew is more like an obsession for his distant cousin Herbert D. Simons (Generation 11), a 75-year-old lawyer and accountant in Houston, who has compiled a 600-page monograph tracking 6,000 Van Dusens, mostly the six generations descending from Teuwis, a homebuilder who was Abraham’s eldest son. Mr. Simons also safeguards family treasures: the Bible in which his great-great-great-grandfather Jacob Van Dusen (Generation 6) recorded milestones after he journeyed from Jerusalem Township, N.Y., to Sand Creek, Ind., in the 1820s; the battered hymnbook that Jacob’s son carried at Gettysburg.

And for vacations, he goes on ancestor-hunting field trips to far-flung cemeteries with a nephew, D. Brenton Simons, the longtime president of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, who may even be, as he put it, “a double Van Dusen.”

“I’m my own 10th cousin,” Brenton laughed, though he is still trying to confirm the details on his mother’s side.

While the Simonses concentrate on long-dead characters from the 17th and 18th centuries, Andrew Van Dusen is interested in the present.

In recent years, he has connected with Ellen Duryea Van Dusen — a second cousin, once removed — who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and designs clothes under the label “Dusen Dusen.” He has gotten to know Jake Blessing, a first cousin once removed who is headed to Cornell for graduate studies in entomology. And he recently discovered that a probable 10th cousin, Kimberly Van Duzer, lives less than a half mile away, the latest example of what he described as “this wonderfully eerie line of coincidence.”

“I’ll find myself drawn to and settling into a certain place and feeling right at home, and then find out later I have some deep ancestral roots there,” he explained. “Buying a weekend house in Ulster County and taking pictures of my daughter playing in the churchyard in Kingston, and discovering later my ancestors were baptized there back in the 1700s. Or falling in love with Astoria, Ore., and then discovering the Van Dusens have been calling it home since at least the 1840s.”

Andrew grew up in Kentucky, and came to New York in 1985 to be an actor. He had bit parts on “China Beach” and “Law & Order,” and a two-year stint in California with a production of “Tony & Tina’s Wedding.” But he and his wife, Sharon Lehner, also an actor, decided to seek more stable careers after the 1997 birth of their daughter, Phoebe (who took up the family business, with a Broadway debut at age 10 getting murdered night after night in a production of “Macbeth”).

Phoebe shares her father’s fascination with the family, particularly since she read some of the excerpts from her great-great-great-great-grandfather’s Civil War diary. “It kind of amazed me that I knew someone who was part of what I was studying in school in textbooks,” she said. “A lot of my friends’ parents just came here and don’t speak English yet. And some came here two generations ago. The one who has been here the longest came from Scotland, and that’s only a hundred years.”

Two years ago, the family joined more than 100 members of the Detroit-based branch of the tree for its first reunion, on the shores of Lake Michigan.

For laughs, they snapped pictures of the eight Ellens and eight Catherines, popular Dutch names. They had sandcastle contests and wore corny T-shirts emblazoned with a family crest and the number “1636.”

That was the year many in the family had long thought Abraham Pieterszen arrived in the New World, based on records that mention a trading post he operated off of Rhode Island. But notarized records that surfaced roughly 40 years ago, long after several histories of the Van Dusens had been written, contain testimony that Abraham gave in 1632 about a dispute he witnessed in early 1627 concerning the colony’s earliest windmills.

Given when various Dutch ships made it to the New World, the Simonses think that Abraham must have arrived a year or two before the spat; the trip that Andrew’s branch had focused on from the mid-1630s was a return visit.

“That was the second time he came? Really?” marveled Andrew. “That really blows my mind.”

Of the T-shirts, he added, “Oh, now the date’s wrong.”