14 Generations

New Yorkers since 1624, the Rapeljes are on a mission to keep their history alive

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

The name of the baby was Sarah.

She was born on June 9, 1625, in a log settlement called Ft. Orange, alongside the river named after Henry Hudson. Her birth was a momentous event -- she was the first baby born in the fort, and the first addition to a tiny Dutch community that went by the ambitious name of New Netherland.

Her parents were Joris Jansen de Rapelje and Catalyntje Trico. The year before, the couple had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from the Netherlands on board a ship called the Eendracht -- the Unity. After arriving in a great harbor, they had slowly tacked north up the river more than 130 miles before dropping anchor at the site of the fort.

There, with only a handful of settlers to keep her company, surrounded by an unimaginably vast wilderness inhabited by thousands of Indians, Sarah was born.

Years later, when she lived on a farm on Long Island, she was hailed as the first European child born in the colony that would become New York State. She was given a land grant by Dutch authorities in honor of her place in the colony's history.

"I'm sure she knew all her life she was special," said Peter Rapelje (pronounced Rap-el-YAY), a 12th generation descendant of Sarah's. "The Unity was the first ship of Dutch settlers to arrive. There were ships before, but they were for explorers and fur traders. Now, families were coming over. Joris and Catalyntje had gotten married just before they left the Netherlands. In the beginning, they may have had to stay on the ship while Ft. Orange was being built."

IN TERMS of European settlement, the Rapeljes are the first family of New York. A retired Grumman engineer, 64-year-old Peter Rapelje lives in Glen Cove and is the keeper of a trove of family records dating to colonial days that chart the family's history. These records show that within a year of her birth, Sarah moved with her family to a log fort at the southern tip of Manhattan island and, shortly after, to a farm across the harbor on Long Island. This meant that the Rapeljes were in the first group of whites to live on Manhattan, and in the first group to buy land from the Indians and move to the settlement that would be called Brooklyn.

Not only are the Rapeljes one of the very first families of Long Island, they are one of Brooklyn's last farm families. Hundreds of family records, plus a collection of glass plate negatives taken in the 1890s by Peter Rapelje's grandfather, an engineer and amateur photographer, document the last days of the family's farm in Brooklyn.

"The photographs show the farmhouse, and the barns, and it all looks very rural," Rapelje said. "Yet in some of the pictures you can see tenements and buildings in the background as well as the arrival of the first subway line. The family farm shrank until there was little left of what it had been. The house and the last section were finally sold in 1925 and immediately built on."

From Sarah's birth at Ft. Orange, to the family's purchase of farmland on Long Island in the 1630s, to her brother Jacob's death at the hands of Indians on Manhattan island during the genocidal Kieft War,through the American Revolution when a Rapelje was taken prisoner by the British, to Peter Rapelje's work at Grumman during the glory years of the moon landing -- the generations of the family serve as mileposts in the long road of our history.

AND THEY HAVE preserved that history in perhaps the most extensive family archives ever kept by a Long Island family. They have original documents -- from land deeds and other transactions, some of which are written in Dutch, to a record providing for the financial security of a slave named "Dian," to a paper signed by a British general pardoning a Rapelje who had been taken prisoner in the Revolution.

Add to this document collection the more than 1,000 glass plate negatives of photographs taken by the current Peter's grandfather, also named Peter, of family members, the Brooklyn farm, and Rapelje homesites across Brooklyn -- photographs that document a people living in a place that was, in the most complete sense, about to be changed forever. And not a trace of it left to remind us that they were ever there. For that reason alone, the photographs are priceless.

"I guess everything was passed along and ended up with my mother and father," Peter Rapelje said of the photographs and documents. His mother, Anna, who is 95 and lives with her son and his wife, Eleanor, kept the documents plus other records that relate to her family's Dutch history. Her mother was a Rapelje, so she is also a descendant of Sarah.

"I think the family's history was always seen as special and we wanted to keep it and pass it along," Anna Rapelje said one recent afternoon. Her memory is sharp, and her eyes flash with pride when she talks about the family's history. She was born on a farm near Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn not far from the Rapelje farm; her family's land was sold in the 1920s, too, and quickly buried under concrete and asphalt, its history obliterated.

"ALL THE farmhouses, the beautiful barns, everything," she said. "Nothing was saved." She speaks in a soft voice about her grandmother's farmhouse, showing a visitor a grainy picture of it that she has had since her childhood -- it serves as a monument to a time and place that survives in Anna's heart. "I loved that house."

Today, Peter Rapelje's grandchildren are the 14th generation of Sarah's descendants. And they know it. The Glen Cove home is a museum to Rapelje history. Speaking with Peter, his wife, and with his mother makes it clear that the family today is enriched by knowing their history. It grounds them to Long Island in a way that nothing else can. It informs their lives.

The family story begins in France.

In the mid-16th Century, Protestants in France -- they were called Huguenots -- were persecuted by the government and the Catholic Church. French history records massacres of Huguenots, who were seen as traitors to their country and faith. They fled into Belgium, where there existed another Protestant community called the Walloons, who were French-speaking Belgians.

By the early 1600s, as word spread across Europe that explorers had discovered a new world on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, people seeking religious freedom were among the first to go. In England, it would be the Puritans; in the Netherlands, it would be Walloons and Huguenots. They were joined by business interests wanting to trade with the Indians.

EXPLORERS SUCH AS Henry Hudson, who was British, and Adrian Block, who was Dutch, discovered and then mapped out the waters around Manhattan Island and Long Island. They learned what the Algonquian Indians had known for thousands of years -- that the region was rich in farmland, forests and animal life. So by the early 1620s, small groups of families began to sail to the area, which stretched from New Jersey to upstate New York, that the Dutch called New Netherland. (The English, after seizing the region from the Dutch, referred to the land as New Netherlands, and this plural version has stuck for generations.)