© DVN, een project van Huygens ING en OGC (UU). Bronvermelding: Willem Frijhoff, en, in: Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland. URL: https://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vrouwenlexicon/lemmata/en [13/01/2014]
JANS, Anneke, also known as Anneke Jans Bogardus (born Fleckerøy, Vest Agder, Norway, 1604/05 – buried New Beverwijck (now Albany, New York), 23 February 1663), mythical ancestress of the Dutch colony on the East Coast of North America. Daughter of Jan (Roelofsz?) and Trijn Jonas or Roeloffs, midwife of the Dutch West India Company (WIC). Anneke Jans married (1) Roelof Jansz (1601/02-1637), ship’s mate, later tenant farmer, on 18 April 1623 in Amsterdam; (2) Everhardus Bogardus (c. 1607-1647), Reformed minister, c. March 1638 in Nieuw-Amsterdam (New York). Anneke had 5 daughters and 1 son by her first husband, and 4 sons by her second husband.
Anneke Jans’s fame depends not so much on her life as on her status as the ancestress, owing to her numerous descendants, of the Dutch community of the state of New York and the surrounding area. Like many Scandinavian emigrants, Anneke Jans must have left Norway at a relatively young age to go with her parents and elder sister Marritgen to Amsterdam. There she married the Norwegian sailor Roelof Jansz and had three daughters, who were baptised in the Lutheran Church.
North America
In 1630 the young couple were sent by the Amsterdam jeweller Kiliaen van Rensselaer (c. 1580-1643), director of the Dutch West India Company (WIC), to his colony of Rensselaerswijck in New Netherland, to work as tenant farmers on De Laetsburch, a farm that had yet to be built. Three more children were born to them while they were there. Meanwhile the WIC had appointed Anneke’s mother, Trijn Jonas, as midwife of New Netherland, and she was now living in the recently founded town of New Amsterdam. The farm was not making much of a profit, but in any case Roelof was dismissed in 1634, partly because of the illegal trade in shop goods set up in the colony by Anneke Jans and her mother and sister.
The family moved to Manhattan, where Roelof became a foreman at one of the company’s farms on the Hudson River; in 1636 he acquired the title to this 26-hectare farm. When he died in the summer of 1637, Rensselaer remitted their old debts, and Anneke Jans probably continued to run the farm as a widow. This gesture, as well as Rensselaer’s puzzling choice of a sailor to serve as a farming pioneer, suggests the existence of a personal relationship between Rensselaer and Anneke Jans: had he previously employed her, or had her mother served the Rensselaer family as midwife? In New Amsterdam, and later in Beverwijck, Anneke Jans was actively engaged in trade. There is nothing to suggest that she was literate, but she did learn to write her name when she was in New Netherland.
In 1638 the Lutheran widow, who had five children to care for from her first marriage, married Everhardus Bogardus, since 1633 a minister of the Dutch Reformed church in Manhattan. Anneke Jans subsequently gave birth to another four sons. The farm in Manhattan, now known as Dominee’s Bouwerij (The Minister’s Farm), was leased out, as was a piece of land on Long Island called ‘Minister’s Hook’. Bogardus, who had grown up in Woerden in a Counter-Remonstrant, Puritan milieu, considered himself the guardian of the true faith and common decency in the colony. He was soon at loggerheads with the colony’s director, Wouter van Twiller (and, from 1638, Willem Kieft). The sources provide information on Anneke’s role as the clergyman’s wife in these conflicts and as a witness at baptisms, and contain gossip on fornication and indiscreet behaviour. In 1643, when war broke out in Manhattan between the colonists and the local Indian tribes, Bogardus became a leading opponent of WIC policy. He and Kieft were recalled to the Netherlands to justify their actions, but both drowned in September 1647, when their ship, the Princess Amelia, foundered off the coast of Wales.
Anneke Jans, whose two eldest daughters had meanwhile married, settled with her other seven children near Fort Orange (Albany). She traded in beaver skins, like many other colonists, and farmed a plot of land. When Beverwijck was founded in 1652, she was given the deed to a plot of land on the corner of Jonckerstraet. A satirical piece of 1655 calls her house De Gierswerelt (The Miser’s World). She acquired the title to the Minister’s Farm in 1654, and in 1657 she sold her house in Manhattan to her brother-in-law Govert Loockermans. On 29 January 1663 she made her will, in which she divided up her property and bequeathed to each of her grandchildren a silver goblet. She died a few weeks later. A commemorative plaque now marks the house (63 State Street) that is assumed to be the place in Albany where she died.
Anneke’s eldest daughter Sara Roelofs (1627-1693) – who in 1642 married the company surgeon, Hans Kierstede (c. 1612-c. 1662) – fulfilled the function in New Amsterdam of ‘good woman’ – a mediator in settling disputes. She was also known for her extensive knowledge of Indian languages, which she had probably learned while growing up in Rensselaerswijck, where the white people were in daily contact with Indian tribes, particularly the Mohawks and the Mohicans. Later she acted as an interpreter – for the Hackensacks, for instance – and in 1664 for Stuyvesant, during his negotiations with the Esopus tribe. Sara became a wealthy woman. Her will of 29 July 1693 mentions six slaves by name, including an Indian called Ande.
The making of a legend
Anneke Jans’s legendary life became a determining factor in the formation of the identity of New York’s ‘Dutch’ community when the English seized power in 1664 and 1674. The first stage in this process is connected with the legacy of her wealthy brother-in-law Govert Loockermans, which was contested from 1674 to 1692 in a lawsuit that attracted a great deal of attention because it highlighted the differences between Dutch and English law. In the second stage, the descendants of the colonists from the Dutch period made use of myths and symbols to present themselves as a ‘Dutch’ ethnic interest group. Three daughters from Anneke’s first marriage and three sons from her second marriage had provided Anneke with numerous grandchildren: Sara, Trijntje (1629-after 1663), Sijtje (c. 1631-c. 1659), Willem (c. 1639-1711), Cornelis (1640-c. 1666) and Pieter (1645-1702/3). Through these descendants, who married into almost all the important families in the state of New York, Anneke Jans gradually acquired mythical significance as the archetypal mother of the ‘Dutch’ population, at first largely anti-monarchist and Reformed Protestant.
Since the eighteenth century, Anneke’s family had continually instigated legal proceedings against the New York authorities and the Anglican Trinity Church, and these lawsuits were important in creating the ‘Dutch’ image. Her descendants were contesting the ownership of the farmland that had formerly belonged to Roelof Jansz and the Reverend Bogardus, which in their view had wrongfully come into English hands after Anneke’s death. During an endless series of proceedings, which continued until the Supreme Court definitely decided against them in 1935, numerous groups of real or reputed heirs demanded their share of the piece of land in Tribeca between Fulton Street and Canal Street – just north of ground zero, the site of the former World Trade Center – which had meanwhile risen exponentially in value.
All the while, Anneke Jans was developing into a legend. To support their claims, her descendants had put forward arguments that eventually turned her into the archetypal Dutch ancestress. She was said to be the product of the morganatic marriage of William of Orange’s (natural?) daughter Anna, and was supposedly raised at the ‘royal palace’ in The Hague, where she fell in love with the gardener Roelof Jansz. According to versions which probably draw on the stories of Washington Irving (1783-1859), the first romanticising historian of the Dutch colony, either Anneke’s mother Anna or Anneke herself was the daughter of the Amsterdam merchant Wolfert (or Jan) Webber, who was also called the king of Holland. Yet another version claims that Wijntje Sijbrants, the first wife of Anneke’s son Willem Bogardus, was the great-granddaughter of William the Silent through his natural daughter Sara Webber.
In all the versions, Anneke – after a secret marriage to Roelof Jansz – was banished and disinherited by ‘king’ William. However, he is said to have deposited her inheritance at the Bank of Holland (or the Orphans’ Chamber either on Borneo or the Fiji Islands), for the benefit of her heirs in the seventh generation. By the nineteenth century, the capital would have grown to tens of millions of guilders. Until well into the twentieth century, the myth acted as a powerful vehicle in binding the descendants of the Dutch colony, and several versions are still doing the rounds today, particularly on the Internet.
Reference work(s)
Dictionary of American Biography (lemma Everhardus Bogardus); NNBW (idem); Pioneer Mothers.
Archives
- Nederlands Scheepvaart Museum, Amsterdam: Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts.
- New York State Archives, Albany: Dutch Colonial Manuscripts.
- New York State Library, Albany: Van Rensselaer Manor Papers.
- New York Historical Society: Misc. Mss. and Bogardus Family File.
[Most sources have appeared in English].
Bibliography
- P.J. Risseeuw, Anneke Jans. Een roman uit de jaren toen New York nog Nieuw Amsterdam was (Kampen 1958) [novel].
- J.O. Evjen, Scandinavian immigrants in New York 1630-1674 (repr. Baltimore 1972).
- G.O. Zabriskie, ‘Anneke Jans in fact and fiction’, The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 104 (1973) 65-72, 157-164.
- [N. Plomp], ‘De vermeende afstamming van Annetje “Webber” uit Willem de Zwijger’, Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 28 (1974) 239-241.
- Peter Spier, The legend of New Amsterdam (New York 1979) [Translated as Nieuw Amsterdam (Rotterdam 1983); illustrated children’s book about Anneke Jans (“Crazy Annie”)].
- W.B. Bogardus, Anneke Jans Bogardus and Adam Brouwer: research aid bibliography (Wilmington 1989) [reviews all American references].
- M.L. Spijkerman Parker, ‘Old myths never die, or: Myths and truths of Anneke Jans Bogardus’, Dutch Family Heritage Society Quarterly 7 (1994) 50-67.
- W. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz. Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf 1607-1647 (Nijmegen 1995) [English translation Fulfilling God's Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, 1607-1647 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2007)].
- W.B. Bogardus, ‘Dear Cousin’. A charted genealogy of the descendants of Anneke Jans Bogardus (1605-1663) to the 5th generation (Wilmington 1996).
- W. Frijhoff, ‘Dominee Bogardus als Nieuw-Nederlander’, Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 50 (1996) 36-68 [with a transcription of Anneke’s last will]
- W. Frijhoff, ‘Reinventing an old fatherland: the management of Dutch identity in early modern America’, in: R. Bendix and H. Roodenburg ed., Managing etnicity. Perspectives from folklore studies, history and anthropology (Amsterdam 2000) [Anneke’s role as ethnic ancestress].
- J. Venema, Beverwijck. A Dutch village on the American frontier, 1652-1664 (Hilversum/New York 2003) [Anneke’s life after Bogardus’ death].
Illustration
The anonymous seventeenth-century portrait that according to family tradition depicts Anneke Jans, is owned by Mrs. Mary Helen (Robert H.) Purinton, Morriston, FL [on the attribution see Bogardus, Dear Cousin, 31; Frijhoff, Wegen, 812-815].
Author: Willem Frijhoff
last updated: 13/01/2014