THE BYVANCK STORY
byTheodora Van Wagenen Ward
(1890-1974)
Theodora ("Teddy") as a child
I have recently made the acquaintance of two of my ancestors, a father and son named Evert and John Byvanck. These now obscure persons have haunted me for years, and in the end the encounter was inevitable, because I had in my possession a collection of John's business papers, which had lain in an ancient chest in the attics of several generations. (Why the chest and its contents came down to me through the family line, from John's daughter Jane, who was my father's grandmother, instead of having passed to someone else through one of his sons, is one of the mysteries connected with it.)
The survival of the chest itself through four centuries is certainly due in part to its romantic appearance. No one could throw away an oak strong-box, bound with decorative iron bands, tapered on all four sides to fit the sides of a ship, and furnished with an iron key six inches long. A museum expert has declared it of Dutch origin from the sixteenth century, and said that the oak with which it is reinforced inside was added about a hundred years later. At some time in its history two slits were cut in the top for the deposit of coins, but they were filled in and painted over later, perhaps when the chest came ashore for the last time.
Although no one within my memory examined the papers in detail, we did occasionally take out the most strikingly attractive items such as the parchment deeds of property in New York, of which the earliest was dated 1691. But until now the deeds, maps, bills of lading, letters and accounts have remained separate specimens of antiquity, unrelated to the lives of any known persons. The names that appear on the documents had no meaning for my generation.
Genealogy, to me, is interesting only when it is related to personality. Mere names of fathers and sons have little significance unless we can discover what sort of people they were. There is something false about the usual procedure of tracing one's lineage from a single ancestor. We may choose one of the more eminent members from whom we trace our descent, but a horde of less known persons also made their contributions to the stream of life that produced us. Whatever comes to us by inheritance may have been influenced more by the obscure individuals of whom no records have been kept than by those who made an impression on their immediate environment. To a very large number of Americans, immigrants all, at one time or another, even the names of grandparents are scarcely remembered. Traditionally, an American makes his own place in history, but to disregard the fact that he is inevitably attached to the past through a long file of ancestors who took some part somewhere in the life of their day robs him of perspective in understanding and evaluating his own time.
(ed. note:)
John Byvanck 1732-1799
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Jane Byvanck 1777-1871
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Sarah Anne Bleecker 1813-1875
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Bleecker Van Wagenen 1845-1921
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Theodora Van Wagenen 1890-1974
Evert and John Byvanck were not obscure among their contemporaries, for they were men of property in the rapidly expanding city of New York in the eighteenth century. They seem to have taken little part in public life, however, and except for two letters that have been quoted in the Iconography of Manhattan any personal correspondence they may have had has vanished. They were commercial gentlemen, and it is only through a study of their business papers that something of their personalities has appeared. As members of society they may have been fairly typical of the descendants of Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam, who by the middle of the eighteenth century had achieved a degree of integration with their neighbors of English blood and had ceased to use the language of their forefathers, though they still owned Dutch books. Whether their free spelling was the result of the shift from Dutch to English, or was due to greater attention having been given in their education to the skill of figuring in pounds, shillings and pence, is an unanswered question. In any case, it appears that the families of Dutch descent still clung together generally as a social group when it came to such important matters as marriage. In the genealogical tables of the Bleecker family, into which John Byvanck's daughter Jane married, such names as Schenck, Schuyler, de Witt and de Wint, van Dusen and van Doran abound. The Byvancks seem to have been too occupied with the pursuit of money to bother about such family records. From this distance in lime they appear under the spotlight for two generations out of a dark past and disappear again into the shadows. It is only through Jane and her numerous Bleecker children that the inheritance was carried on. What became of John's son Evert, whom he mentioned as 'an honest and sober lad', has not yet come to light.
The Byvancks were merchants, an occupation which in those days involved more than owning a store. They did own a store, in partnership with father Evert's son-in-law Garrat Abeel, and advertised their goods in a supplement to the New York Journal and General Advertiser for Thursday, February 24th, 1774, under the heading 'Abeel and Byvanck, near Coenties Market, Albany Dock'. The list includes domestic and imported articles of ironmongery such as 'Sweeds iron', 'German steel', 'London ditto'. Other items listed were indigo, sealing wax, fiddles and bows, and such mysterious articles as 'Bounders' and 'Neuremburgh salve'.
In order to obtain the goods they carried on an active trade in ships of which they were part owners. The brigantine Pheby not only sailed for a number of years between New York and the West Indies, but also plied the Atlantic Ocean carrying goods from one port to another, finally returning with wine from Madeira and European manufactured goods bought for the owners by their agent, Jacob Chabanel, in Amsterdam.
One of these voyages is made real for us through a letter of instructions Evert Byvanck wrote to Captain James Devereux, Master of the Brig Pheby. Charmed by the opening sentence, which suggests that the tough old merchant had a streak of the poet in him, I was genuinely disappointed to learn that the phrase 'embrace the first fair wind' was a common nautical term of the time. It is at least a pleasure to know that such lovely words were part of the vocabulary of the hardly men who undertook these long and dangerous voyages in their little sloops and brigantines. The copy of the letter that Mr. Byvanck kept follows, using his own orthography:
New York, October 19, 1773 Captn James Devereux, Sir, As Master & parth owner of our Briggtn Pheby, We Desire you to Imbrace the Firs Fair Wind & Sail to the Island of Mcdaro There Deliver your Cargo According to Bills of Lading. The Wine you purtchase on Our Accts Lett it be of the best New York Wines & Indeavor to Ship it Home by Captn Walker or any good opportunity Agree for the Freight & to be Delivered here Clear of Duteys if possible You may Take 2 or 3 Hhs of It with you For Sail Then proceed to the Island of May or Cape the Verdes & There purtchase a Load of Cattle Hoggs & Etc for our Accts Thence proceed to Cyan & there Indeavor to Sell your Cargo If you Can If not go to Surinam & there Settle all our Accts of the Two Former Voyages on the Protested bills on as good Terms as you Can You may send the Vessell Downe Rather than Detain her too long in Suninam To the Winderd Islands or Jamaica Where Probably you may gett a Freight for London or Elsewhere in Jamaica freight of Sugar was 5/ shar per hund on Rum & Cotton in proportion We leave the Whole to your good management To Do any Thing that will be mon for Our Mutual Benefit Remain your Friends P.S. If you Can Sell the Briggtn In the Westlngges for £1000 or More please to Sell her & Send us from Medaro a Box of Green Swetemets.
It is to be hoped that the green sweetmeats reached New York safely on a ship that was returning more directly to the home port. As for the Pheby, it becomes clear that Captain Devereux, who was after all, part owner of the vessel, did not sell her in the West Indies, for the accounts between him and Byvancks continued for the next three years, in spite of some evidence that relations between them were not always smooth. An undated letter from Captain Devereux, written just before the start of one of his voyages, brings the reader down with a jolt after the rather heady atmosphere produced Mr. Byvank's send-off on the first fair wind. It was attached to an account of all the cash the captain had advanced for outfitting the ship.
If you mean that the Vessel goes downe tomorrow Compleat the Acct & Lett us Settle, You have had my Acct going on five Months & I must have them Settled before I Go, What you have delivered I have no time to Luck Over, Send me all the papers I Delivered You of my former Voyage I send you the Voutchers for my disbursements which when you have Examined send me back the same Jas Devereux
In spite of the sour note struck by this message, the Pheby continued to serve the Byvancks until the beginning of the War for Independence. The last letter from the agent Jacob Chabanel in Amsterdam was dated the twenty-ninth of May, 1776. It was written in haste to bring the news that Captain Devereux had escaped 'the English man of warr' and arrived safely at Texel on the Dutch coast. What happened after that is not recorded except in a note written some years later by John Byvanck stating that the Pheby was sold in London in 1778. Perhaps she was captured on the homeward voyage. In any case, the money for the sale seems to have been received in New York, but how the transaction was accomplished in the midst of the war can hardly be imagined. Evert Byvanck had meanwhile fled from New York, where British cannon balls from Long Island were falling on both sides of his house on the East River, and he seems to have spent the rest of his life in New Jersey, where he died at the home of his son-in- law Garrat Abeel in 1781.
Behind the facade of energetic trade in a developing nation, there emerges from the papers a picture of two men and their relations with each other. It is plain to see that in the raw stuff of family life in any generation certain patterns were likely to appear. Evert and John Byvanck never heard any of the phrases of modern psychology and they would not have recognized themselves if one of their descendants had come back to explain to them what had gone wrong between father and son.
Evert's personality is easier to imagine than that of his more complex son, John. I see Evert as a heavy-set man wearing a full wig surrounding his self-assured face, which had an expression more of authority than of benevolence. He owned slaves, as did most well to do citizens of New York; he bought real estate in the growing city for speculation, and hundreds of acres of undeveloped land in the colonies of New York and New Jersey. He provided for his family with a carefulness that approached penuriousness. In a list of his possessions left with his son-in-law Garrat Abeel at the time of his death, every cracked cup and burnt bowl is accounted for.
When he was generous it was toward the young, but one cannot help feeling that his generosity implied some degree of demand. In a long statement about his relations with his father that John wrote after Evert's death, he tells how his father had encouraged him as a boy to follow him in business by sending him on voyages to the West Indies under the indulgent care of the captains, who permitted him to do some trading on his own. He was also given some small shares in the ownership of vessels that carried on the export and import business. In spite of this show of generosity, John complained in his bitter statement that his father had kept everything in his own hands. Perhaps this was an inherited trait, for a still earlier Evert Byvanck, probably the father of our man, who was Comptroller of the City of New York in 1702, refused to give an accounting of the funds for which he was responsible. Needless to say, he was forced to resign from his post. Unfortunately, this is all we know about the first Evert. The second Evert appears to have seen himself as the head of a business dynasty, in which all his descendants were expected to follow the pattern he set for them.
At what point and in what way John failed to live up to his father's desires for him we have no way of knowing. According to his own account, lie seems to have remained tied to the wheel of the daily round, and to have performed more than the necessary services for the welfare of the family, for which his father had promised to pay him a hundred pounds a year. John evidently loved money as his father did, and he was greatly irked when the old man withheld his salary on the grounds that John was still a bachelor and didn't need it. One can imagine him seething inwardly while he still obeyed the parental figure to whom he was tied, in the interests of his family whom he really loved.
John, who was born in 1732, must have been nearly forty when he married, for his children were all baptized in the Dutch Church after 1770. It was in that year, and perhaps at the time of his marriage, that he made an attempt at a business of his own, but his plan was conceived only in terms of an arrangement between him and his father. He proposed in writing to set up a bakery in an unoccupied building his father owned, using the labor of some of his father's servants, but paying what he considered a reasonable sum in compensation. His proposal to his 'esteemed' parent goes into considerable detail in regard to costs and presumed profits. But John must have been a dreamer. There are no traces of evidence that the plan was ever carried out, and it was probably vetoed by fatherly authority at the outset. How he obtained funds for investment in real estate deals of his own is hard to guess, but the deeds and mortgages that remain with his papers certainly show that he did carry on business of this sort.
After Evert's death in 1781 John made claims on his father's estate. His two brothers, Peter and Evert, and his brother- in-law Garrat Abeel were the executors. John was singled out for exclusion from this family group, and according to the will he was also left out in the division of their father's real estate. A copy of John's document as it was submitted to the executors was kept with his other papers, and it tells in dry terms that do not hide the emotion behind them how during all the years of his bachelorhood he had attended to the needs of the family without compensation. Writing his grievances must have added to his resentment, for he went on to list the other services he had performed for his father's benefit, such as 'running in forbidden goods at night' over a period of seventeen years. To be a smuggler was an accepted role for a patriot in the troubled times before the revolution.
John's claim was turned over to a law firm, with all the accounts he had kept of his dealings with his father. Their copy of the document, a duplicate of the one in the chest, has turned up at the New York Historical Society, with the notation that there were so many errors and exaggerations in the accounts that the claim was settled in favor of the estate, and the claimant was responsible for the costs. Poor John! At this point in the story one pictures him as a permanently embittered and shriveling soul for the rest of his life.
After working my way through the whole collection of documents, I came to the conclusion that the reason the papers had been put away in the chest and forgotten was that the subject was too sore to be mentioned. But I was in for a happy surprise. When I looked once more at the deeds and mortgages- some of them beautiful examples of calligraphy- I read in detail a deed that I had never studied before. Instead of being a deed of sale it turned out to be an act of family loyalty and affection. When the estate was finally settled in 1786, the Byvanck brothers, sister and brother-in-law bestowed on John his fair share of the property at Corlear's Hook which their father had divided among them.
Up to this point I had felt remote from the people whose affairs I had been drawn into after nearly two centuries. Knowing nothing of the nature of the trouble between father and son, I was unable to form any judgment concerning them, or to feel any connection with them as my ancestors. Suddenly, in this act they emerged as a family with human values, a sense of justice, or possibly a warm generosity toward a lovable but not wholly reliable brother. They had a life apart from business. They were husbands and wives, they had children whom they loved and who made their own contributions to the communities in which they lived.
John's daughter Jane became my father's grandmother, and lived to be ninety-four. Her father had given her as good an education as any girl could have at that time, for she attended the renowned Moravian Seminary at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In the list of students at the time she was there appears the name of Anna Schmalz, whose home was on the island of St. Thomas, in what was then the Danish West Indies. The two girls must have been friends, for later Jane's daughter Sarah Bleecker was to marry Anna's son, William Frederick Van Wagenen, and these two were my father's parents.
The Bleeckers and the Van Wagenens had long been friends, and Jane may have introduced Anna to the man she married. Garrat Noel Bleecker and his wife Jane had nine children, seven of whom were girls, but the eldest boy, instead of hearing the name of one of the Bleecker family, was named for Jane's father, John Byvanck, who had died soon after his daughter's marriage, a strong indication that Jane cherished her father's memory. John Byvanck Bleecker, a miniature portrait of whom shows him as a gay and handsome young man, died before he was thirty, leaving a considerable debt to his tailor.
John Byvanck Bleecker (1800-1828)
Possibly he received with his grandfather's name a resemblance in character to the man who had disappointed his autocratic father. If young John was the deviant member of his family as old John had been, his younger brother, who was named for his father, outdid his parents in piety by leaving the church of his fathers to become a pillar of the Baptist Church, where a sermon was preached about him after his death. A copy of it still exists in the Harvard College Library.
The face of young John smiles at me from my table, and some of his mother's silver spoons stir the tea when I have guests. A chest of drawers of West Indian mahogany came to me as a gift from one of Anna Schmalz Van Wagenen's daughters, and a bedspread, knitted in a leaf pattern, remains in perfect condition as the work of her hand. Ancestors are indeed people. The solid Dutch Protestant values and pieties of these families seem less real today than their material possessions, but in the genes of their descendants there must still be some traces of their stability and moral certitude. But what if something different but also valuable crept in by the back door because John Byvanck didn't fit the pattern laid out for him by his father?
JOHN BYVANCK, New York, merchant, to my son Evert, as my eldest son, when he arrives at the age of twenty-five years, all that lot of ground known by lot number seventy-four in the Northward of New York City, adjoining the ground of George Janeway, and formerly belonging to my deceased father; my executors to see that my children, Mary and Jane, are maintained and educated properly until they arrive at lawful age or marry, and I subject the whole of my estate (except the lot given to my son Evert) to the payment of the moneys necessary for the above purpose; to my wife Mary, the income of one equal fourth part of the residue of my real and personal estate during her widowhood, which shall be in lieu and ban of her dower and thirds to my estate, and of all contracts or settlements made before or since my marriage; to each of my children, Mary and Jane, œ500 when they arrive at lawful age or marry; to my son Evert, œ500 when he arrives at the age of twenty-five years or marries, which sums are to be paid out of my personal estate; if the same shall be insufficient for that purpose, I order my executors to sell such part of my real estate as may be sufficient to make up such deficiency; whenever my youngest surviving child becomes of age, I order my executors to sell all my real estate to make a final division; the moneys so arising from such sale I dispose of as follows: To each of my three children, the one full and equal fourth part thereof; the remaining fourth part to be put out at interest, and the income thereof to my wife during her widowhood; upon her remarriage or death, I give the said fourth part to my three children in equal parts; in case of the death of either of my children before the division of my estate, the share of the one so dying to be equally divided between the survivors, unless he leave issue; in that case I give the share that would have come to the parent to such issue. I appoint Elias Nixen, Thomas Ten Eyck, and Cornelius J. Bogert, New York, executors.
Dated August 31, 1789. Witnesses, Cornelius Schermerhorn, John Taylor, Student-at-Law; Garrit B. Abeel. Proved, July 18, 1792.