New-Netherland,
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Baptismal, marriage and death registers are usually the products of church administrations. In most cases this administration began in the Netherlands in the late 16th or early 17th century. Of course registration continued after the introduction of the Civil Register in 1811 (in most of the Netherlands). By virtue of an Act passed in 1879 these church registers were claimed as retrospective documents by the Civil Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages. As well as church records there are marriage certificates issued by the civil authorities. People could also be married in the presence of the bailiff and aldermen and in some cases registers of marriage permits have been preserved. It seems obvious that fees were paid for these permits.

Very little of the situation outlined above applies to New Netherland. No Civil Register was introduced there and by 1879 the Dutch government certainly no longer had any authority in such matters. However, well-preserved and practically uninterrupted series of baptismal and marriage records kept by the Collegiate Church of Manhattan have survived, beginning in 1639 and ending in 1800 and 1801 respectively. There are short gaps in both series during the American revolution, from 16 September 1776 to 9 July 1780 and from 12 November 1774 to 1 July 1780. The source publication of the baptismal registers assumes that the baptismal records from that period were lost, but in the last baptismal record before the gap, dated 16 September 1776, there is a note saying ‘Baptised at Schralenburgh, as the New York congregation has dispersed’, which suggests a completely different reason for their absence – probably war. It is striking that both gaps end on virtually the same day. Then it seems there was a catching-up operation as regards baptisms: a relatively large number of children aged one or more were baptised, evidently because their christening was put off until better times.

The other churches in Manhattan had to give the central church lists of their records of baptisms and marriages so that they could be registered along with the other baptisms and marriages. Sometimes something went wrong; for instance, some baptisms are entered in the wrong place with a reference to the right place, which is how we know about this practice.

When the chapel on Stuyvesant’s property was abolished in 1664, the baptismal records from the chapel were taken to the central church to be entered in the register there.

Several things should be taken into consideration when consulting these documents:

1. At that point no official spelling had been laid down and names were often written down phonetically, as they sounded. Apart from that, English-speaking clerks would have written Dutch names according to their own lights, and of course the same applies to Dutch people writing English names or names from other languages.
2. The formation of fixed surnames was still in full progress at that time. A family name consisting of a geographical designation or a trade may refer to a place or a trade or a real surname. Researchers should always take care to establish whether a person is named Bakker or is a baker by trade, or whether he or she came from Rijswijk or is named Van Rijswijk. Much the same applies to patronymics: sometimes they are real patronymics and sometimes family names. If an individual has no surname, any known patronymic takes the place of the surname in our system and will thus be entered in the family name column.
3. The Dutch ‘ij’ is unknown in English. As the English language prevailed to an increasing extent in the colony, the ‘ij’ was often replaced by a ‘y’. In Dutch the Latin word ‘obiit’, was written ‘obijt’, since the Dutch ‘ij’ was originally a double ‘i’; but in English this word ended up as ‘obyt’, and the relationship with the original word was no longer immediately clear.
4. In some languages, such as French, English and American, the surname prefixes are joined to the family names; in these languages van den Berg becomes Vandenberg or sometimes VandenBerg. Since these surname prefixes are part of the Dutch name system, we have endeavoured to keep them and where appropriate to change American versions back to the originals – for instance, to change Vandenberg back to van den Berg.
5. In the transcription of various names the prefix ‘Ver’ occurred frequently. While this word existed in Middle Dutch in the sense of ‘woman’, in the 17th century that meaning was already virtually forgotten. Probably in the original a palaeographic abbreviation for Ver was used, which was separated from the rest of the name by the transcriber. In this way names like Ver Weij and Ver Duijn appeared, which should really be Verweij and Verduijn. Where appropriate this has been changed back: Ver Duijn has been replaced by Verduijn.
6. Wherever possible, place names have been modernised and in some cases a country name has been added to make it easier for researchers to continue looking for their distant ancestors. However, sometimes this was impossible, in some cases because a name could not be related to a modern form, and in others because there are several places on earth with the same name and no further details are mentioned in the source. For example, there was a Middelburg in the colony, but there are also towns of that name in Zeeland, South-Holland and Flanders.

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