Named Fellow for the New Netherland Settlers project

The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation has awarded a $12,000 grant to the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society to support a Fellow for their New Netherland Settlers project. I am honored to announce I have been named in that position.

As a Fellow, I will research underrepresented and underexamined populations within New Netherland such as free and enslaved individuals, Indigenous people, and the many others who contributed to the diverse, multilingual dynamics of New Netherland.

For many of these people, this will be the first time a genealogist researches them. Record scarcity often prevents people today from tracing their descent from the Native Americans and enslaved people who lived in and around the area the Dutch claimed as New Netherland. This has heavily skewed existing genealogical publications toward white settlers, for whom better documentation exists. For the biographical sketches of the indigenous and enslaved population, I will be drawing on original records and wider historical scholarship.

Johannes Vingboons, View of Nieuw Amsterdam (New York), c. 1655. Source: map collection Leupe, National Archives, the Netherlands.