Chat
|
Daily Search
|
My GenForum
|
Community Standards
|
Terms of Service
|
|
|
Excerpts from:
http://worldroots.com/brigitte/dynasty.htm
Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, a Dutchman, was thee first of the line to reach the New World.* (Theodore Roosevelt called him his "very common aneestor.") It is recorded that Claes bought a farm in 1649 on Manhattan Island, south of Murray Hill, and just north of property owned by Governor Peter Stuyvesant.
------------------------------------
*F.D.R.'s daughter reports that her father, in all his study of family genealogy, had never been able to find out what Claes did for a livelihood before coming to America. ,,As a consequence, he said, he had come to the conclusion that our ancestor must have been a horse thief, or sorne other kind of a thief and, therefore, a fugitive from justice." F.D.R.'s conclusion, however, was only designed to tease his aristocratic mother. See Anna Roosevelt, "My Life with F.D.R.: The Road to the White House," The Woman, August 1949, p. 50.
------------------------------------
The background of the humble man who was to become one of the most distinguished of American ancestors-to-be received front-page attention in 1935 when his great gggg grandson was President of die United States. It was then widely rumored that F.D.R.'s forebears were Jewish. As one anti-Roosevelt tract stated, "Strangely enongh, there is no record whateer of Martenszen's marriage to Jannetje Samuels, or of either of them having been members of the Reformed Dutch Church, although their children were baptized there. This has led some people to suppose that they were of the Jewish religion, for baptism in the Reformed Dutch Church was the only practical way of registering births and the names of some of the people who had their children baptized there would seem to indicate that they were Jewish. (More probably no marriage was recorded in America because they were married in Holland.) F.D.R. recognized this sudden interest in his ancestry in a letter to the Detroit Jewish Chronicle. "All I kow about the origin of die Roosevelt family in this country is that all branches bearing the name are apparently descended from Claes Martenssen van Roosevelt (sic)." Continued the presidential descendant, "Where he came from in Holland I do not know, nor do I know who his parents were. . . . In the dim distant past they rnay have been Jews or Catholics or Protestants -what I am more interested in is whether they were good citizens and believers in God; I hope they were both.
.......
The two Roosevelt presidents were the same number of generations removed from their "very cornrnon ancestor."
.........
Notify Administrator about this message?
Followups:
|
| http://genforum.genealogy.com/roosevelt/messages/173.html | ||
 |
Link to GenForum Add Forum |
|