Five Brothers and a War

van Pelts in America

The van Pelts settled in a place called Breukelen , which got its name from a small Dutch town northwest of Utrecht. Nieuw Utrecht (“New Utrecht”) was established in 1652 by Cornelis van Werckhoven, a surveyor born in Utrecht, who was a principal investor in the Dutch West India Company. Van Werckhoven bought land from the Canarsee and Nyack tribes of Native Americans while he was living in Nieuw Amsterdam (“New Amsterdam”), which was renamed “New York” when the British took over in 1664. New Utrecht was annexed by Brooklyn in 1894. As the British anglicized their new territory, they both changed the name of the town of Breukelen to “Brooklyn” and the island it sits on from Lange Eiland to “Long Island”.

van Pelt

Brooklyn was actually formed by combining six towns: • Gravesend, settled in 1645 (named either after Gravesend in Kent, England, or ‘s Gravenzande, a town just south of Den Haag) • Breuckelen, settled in 1646 • Nieuw Amersfoort (present-day Flatlands), settled in 1647 • Midwout (present-day Flatbush), settled in 1652 • Nieuw Utrecht, settled in 1657 • Boswijck (present-day Bushwick), settled in 1661. The name means “Forest District”.

Five Brothers and a War

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