Welcome to the eMarcurius, the New Netherland Institute’s monthly e-newsletter and a source of information for New Netherland-related events, activities, conferences, and research. Subscribe here. Something to share? You can reach us here.

Seven of the eleven talks in our 2019 Peter Gansevoort Ten Eyck Lecture Series are behind us and we thank everyone for your participation and attendance. We look forward to seeing you at the final four talks in June.

Amy Ransford, “‘She is a truly worldly woman’: Trading Women of the Colonial Hudson River Valley” 11 June, Rough Draft Bar & Books, Kingston. No charge.

Andrea Mosterman, “Social Power and Slavery in Early New York’s Dutch Reformed Churches” 12 June, Philipse Manor Hall State Historic Site, Yonkers. No charge.

Stephen McErleane, “The Purchase of Manhattan, Historical Memory, & William Ranney’s 1853 Painting” 13 June, West End Collegiate Church, Manhattan. No charge.

Russell Shorto & Len Tantillo, “Imagining New Amsterdam” 22 June, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, Manhattan. $10. Register here.

We at NNI extend our sincere gratitude to these individuals and couples for their $1,000 donation in recognition of the career of Charles Gehring on his 80th birthday.

Ronald Atkins, Janet Auten, Jerry Auten, Phoebe Bender, Judith Box, James & Margaret Bradley, Adriana Millenaar Brown, John Brownell, Kenneth H. Chase, George S. Damiano, Marion DeGroff, Marilyn E. Douglas, Peter A. Douglas, Arthur Fontijn, Elisabeth P. Funk, William & Diane Greer, Andrew A. Hendricks, Peter J. Hess, R. J. Jippe Hiemstra, Paul & Lois Huey, Carole & Michael Huxley, Jaap Jacobs, Richard Kiger, Peter & Elbrun Kimmelman, Kleinschmidt Family, John T. Lansing, Sandra Lazo, Laura A. Lee, Nancy & Dennis Maika, Rose-Marie van Otterloo, C. Carl Pegels, Annette van Rooy, Thomas J. Ruller, Herman Prins Salomon, Coryn Salomon-Quant, E. James Schermerhorn, James F. Sefcik Sr., John & Marion Stevens, Peter G. Ten Eyck II & Rose-Marie Ten Eyck, Andrew Terhune, Phillip Tilney, Russell Shorto & Pamela Twigg, Robert E. Van Vranken & Lori S. Liebert, Michael Vande Woude, Everett Law Zabriskie III, Alex & Marine Zagoreos, Ellen Zunon

Thank you again to everyone who attended and participated in our first Family History Day on June 30. An excellent time was had by all.

Comments? Suggestions? Interested in hosting the event next year? Let us know.

Also, those interested in New Netherland genealogy should check out Mary Collins's digital exhibit on using New Netherland documents to explore your family history.

Peter and I didn’t grow up together but there were connections. Our German ancestors came from communities only 15 miles apart. Peter’s wife grew up in Stone Arabia in the Mohawk Valley; my sister lived there most of her life. When Peter and I weren’t talking about the Dutch colonial manuscripts, we often drifted into talk about the Mohawk Valley or Baden-Württemberg. However, the human and cultural landscape of New Netherland was the subject of most of our conversations.

As head of the State Library’s Manuscripts and Special Collections section, Peter had been approached by Ralph DeGroff Sr. of the Holland Society to make certain translations available for publication. They were the first four volumes of the Dutch colonial manuscripts. A.J.F. van Laer had worked on a translation of these volumes before and after the tragic 1911 Library fire. For over fifty years they remained unexplored and unpublished. Peter wrote an introduction to the four volumes, which appeared in print in 1974 for the first time. They were received with acclaim by both colonial historians and genealogists. At the request of the Holland Society, Peter began a search for a translator to continue work on the remaining twenty volumes.

I knew Peter as the head of the manuscripts section. I had spent many hours there with the Dutch records while working on my dissertation. When he asked whether I would like to become a translator, I jumped at the opportunity. As I began working with the colonial manuscripts, Peter took such an interest in the 17th century that he began to transcribe the records of the English provincial governors. He was an extremely careful transcriber. When he first began work on the English manuscripts for the Nicolls/Lovelace volume, he consulted other transcriptions in printed sources. He was once shocked to find over fifty errors on a single page when compared against the original.

We worked together in parallel courses. He was several decades ahead of me in time. These temporal differences were usually the subject of conversations during breaks and lunch. I was his past; he was my future. After his retirement in 1987, I lost touch with Peter. Over the years we would email one another with questions. We always seemed to be satisfied with the answers.

Pictured from left to right: Bill Starna and Peter Christoph, ca. 1993

The eMarcurius is now fully launched with this, our second monthly issue. If you have friends, colleagues, or know someone who’s wondering ‘What’s happened to NEWMARC-L?’ remind them to sign up for the eMarcurius. You’ll notice I said monthly issue. That means if you have something of interest to share with our ever-growing New Netherland-interested family, you need to get it to us in good time so it can be included in the month’s issue. Please send those items to emarc@newnetherlandinstitute.org. I can still be reached at Marilyn.Douglas@nysed.gov.

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For those of you who’ve been lucky enough to talk with Charles Gehring, you know that he has much to say about New Netherland and its rich history. From time to time, I’ll be passing along one of these pearls which I hope you find useful, informative, or simply interesting.

For example, if you’d like to know more about New Amsterdam, Dr. Gehring recommends Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer’s History of the City of New York in The Seventeenth Century, volume 1, which is available digitally at the Internet Archive and Google Books and in print in libraries and on Amazon. Van Rensselaer was inspired to write this book at the time of the Henry Hudson tricentennial (1909) and used all of the sources available at the time. According to Charly, “It’s very well written and gives you a good sense of life in the 17th century, contrasting Dutch and English cultures at the time. It’s an excellent narrative history that doesn’t show its age.” Volume 2, New York under the Stuarts, is also available at the places listed above.

Marilyn Douglas, NNI board vice president

Researching New York 2019, due 30 June
Celebrate New York History Month at the annual Researching New York Conference. The conference meets annually in November, bringing together historians, archivists, public historians, graduate students, museum curators, teachers, documentarians, and more to share their work on New York State history topics.

“Colonisations, revolutions, and reinventions in early America and the Atlantic World 1600–1848”, the 8th biannual conference of the European Early American Studies Association, due 15 July 2020
For the past twenty years, the study of Early America and the Atlantic has reinvigorated the fields of imperial and colonial topics by focusing on the circulations of goods and people. Much current research on early America and the Atlantic world examines concepts such as empires, commerce, exchange, trade. At the same time, the political history of the revolutionary Atlantic is often overlooked as the approach of an older historiography. A number of historians criticize the very concept of Atlantic history by focusing instead on global and connected histories. Following this trend, specialists of North America have embraced new concepts and notions to study the continent, such as settler colonialism and vast early America.

2019 Greater Hudson Heritage Network Annual Conference, due 26 June
Consider the 2019 Annual Conference as a field guide to finding new ways to connect with science at your heritage organization: from injecting a historic perspective into STEM programs at your site; to analyzing how visitation at museums and historic sites can impact health and well-being; to exploring the many ways that science can help us understand our collections better, through conservation, forensics, and imaging technology.