Tangent 2

The other tangent I went on recently came up, again, because my mother has said on many occasions when I refer to our Pruyn ancestors, "You know, the North Country [Warren and Washington Counties, generally speaking] is full of Pruyns. And of course, they were quite a force in Glens Falls as they owned Finch Pruyn Paper Co." I can't tell you how many times I have heard that. No time like now to figure out how we are related. After all, I have the tools!

The Pruyn family, as everybody knows, were principals in Finch, Pruyn and Co., founded in 1865 and still a privately-owned mill though now called Finch Paper LLC. At their mill, located on the banks of the Hudson River, they convert raw logs into pulp and pulp into paper, all on their own premises. Finch Paper employs about 850 people, making it the largest for-profit employer in the Adirondack region, and is the second largest private landowner in New York. In 2007, The Nature Conservancy purchased all 161,000 acres of the company’s forest land in the Adirondacks for $110 million, or $683 an acre. Finch Paper has a twenty-year agreement with The Nature Conservancy to continue logging on the timber lands. Samuel Pruyn (1820-1908) was one of the co-founders of the firm.

In this case, the family ties are a lot closer. Samuel Pruyn's father, Hendrick VanNess Pruyn (1783-1859), was the brother of my relative, Hannah Francis Pruyn (1791-1874), who married Ludowecus Viele. The Pruyns were an old Dutch family who settled in Albany, NY in the mid-17th century. Francis Pruyn, the scion of the family, arrived in Albany in 1661 from Reusel-de Mierden, Noord-Brabant, Holland. Pruyns figure in all the early history of Albany, NY.

My branch of the Pruyn family became big landholders in upstate New York when Francis Samuel Pruyn (1757-1812) married Maria Hendrick VanNess (1760-1847). Francis and Maria were the parents of both my Hannah Pruyn and Hendrick VanNess Pruyn. Maria owned a substantial amount of land along the Hoosick River in what became Washington and Rensselaer Counties through her father, Hendrick Gerritse VanNess (1718-xxxx).

The Van Ness family were proprietors of the Hoosick Patent, which was granted in 1638 to Maria Van Rensselaer of Albany, Hendrick Van Ness of Albany, Gerrit Teunis Van Vechten of Kaatskill, and Jacobus Van Cortlandt of New York. The patent comprised 70,000 acres on both sides of the Hoosick River.

Tangents

It's been three months since my last post, but I've not been ignoring genealogy. I went off on a tangent recently. Here's what happened. My parents were invited for dinner with their friends the M****s. My mother dutifully sent a thank-you note on her Crane's stationery engraved with Mrs. Stephen Viele Lewis II on the front side. Her friend Liz later remarked that she and my father must be related somehow because she is a Viele and he is a Viele and all the Vieles in upstate New York are related. Well, I took that as a challenge. I had never had any connection to other Vieles outside my own immediate family. I started with the precious little I knew and directly came up short. I thought about starting from what I know of the Vieles and working forward. It was useless, however, to follow the strands of my Viele line out in all directions searching for Liz Viele. I went back and forth with my mother, who would relay my questions to her friend Liz, who, like my mother, is in her 80s. My mother would scribble down some notes in her faltering handwriting, since she can't see very well. Then my father would read me my mother's notes over the phone. And nobody's memory is very good any more so the conversations would have boiled down to a few words on a scrap of paper. ["Stephen, can you read this to me again?"] I'd get snippets of information in each phone call, a last name of a grandfather, a place where a grandmother was supposed to be from, a list of so-and-so married so-and-so but I can't remember whether these were her grandparents or her great-grandparents. Or on her mother's side or her father's side. Hmmm. Not going to be easy. My mother asked, "How do you know if you get on a wrong track?" Well, with so little information to go on, you basically can't hope for much. My mother told me, "Her father's name was Howard." OK, I dutifully plugged Howard into my genealogy software. Nothing. After some searching around, I did find a Harold. I asked my mother, "Is her father's name Harold by any chance?" "Yes," she said, "I knew that. That's what I said." Un-huh. In another conversation, I found out about a grandfather, Frederick Viele, of Glens Falls.

Eventually, after several false starts, I got lucky.  As Tim says, "Bingos don't just happen. You have to be ready for them." I found a link to Google Books for "The Fort Edward Book," in which the search engine had found a mention of a Fred Viele. Fred C Viele apparently owned a drug store in Glens Falls. The book said that Fred was the great grandson of Barney Viele, who was well known to the author as a prominent citizen of Fort Miller, NY. And Barney was descended through a long line of Vieles all the way back to Aernoud Viele, the 17th century interpreter between the Dutch and the Iroquois. Aernoud was the son of Cornelis Volkertsen Viele, the first of the Viele line to arrive on these shores from Holland in 1636. Vieles were some of the earliest settlers of New Amsterday (Manhattan), Schenectady, and Schaghticoke. Cornelis is MY ancestor, through Aernoud's brother, Lowis Viele. Finally, the relationship came clear. Cornelis Volkertsen Viele is the 8th great grandfather of both my father and their friend Liz. Our families ARE related, but the tie goes back to the mid-17th century.

I cleaned up the genealogy file for Liz and exported some snazzy documents listing the descendants of Cornelis Volkertsen Viele all the way down to Liz. And one listing Liz's ancestors all the way back to Cornelis. And finally a "kinship" list, showing how she is related to each person in the genealogy file. This last one shows that Cornelis is her 8th great grandfather. I sent it all off to my parents with the request that they print it all out and give it to Liz. She may not even give a crap but at least her kids can stash it all away someplace and then someday if somebody cares they can dig it out again and get some laughs at what a PhD geologist and cancer patient in New Mexico, with nothing better to do, spent the better part of a week figuring out.