The following excerpt is from a fascinating article by Alison Leigh Cowan, published in the July 22, 2011 edition of the New York Times.
“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.
