The Verbeck Family History
I've been collecting genealogical information from my family for decades, but all of it has ended up in a file folder that has grown to three inches thick. It contains my grandparents' records, newspaper reports of retirements, even a songbook my great grandfather put together. I also knew that I had ancestors who came the America on the Mayflower, and my grandmother was a Daughter of the American Revolution.
Much of the history revolved around two parts of my family. There was a lot of discussion around the Verbecks, and particularly Verbeck of Japan and his son William who founded the Manlius School, within a mile of where I grew up. And there was a of story from my Mother's side of two Tarbell boys who were captured by Native Americans in Groton, MA.
Digging in to the information I have saved and other information that I have gleaned from Ancestry.com, I have found several great stories.
One branch of the family descends from Jacob Jennings Brown, an army officer who lead the forces that won the Second Battle of Sacket's Harbor in the War of 1812. Interestingly, my grandmother's middle name was Sackett, and it turns out these are alternate spellings of the same name, and one of her distant cousins was a land speculator who purchased land in the Town of Hounsfield on the eastern end of Lake Ontario and named the land after his family. There's a lot of great information about the Sacketts here.
Several branches of my family were early arrivals in New Amsterdam, now New York City. One of them, Harmen Meyndertsz Van Den Bogaert, was an early settler in Fort Orange. He ventured into the lands farther west and documented his visit in his A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634-1635 and created the one of the first written dictionaries of Native American language. He came to a rather bad end: he was caught in flagrante delicto with his slave and was imprisoned. He escaped and fled west into Mohawk territory and was caught again. He escaped again and fled across a partially frozen Hudson River — well, at least part way across.
I knew that my family had descended from John Howland who came to America on the Mayflower in 1620. His claim to fame, besides having more living descendents than any other pilgrim, was that he fell overboard on the way over. Through him I am distantly related to Presidents Bush, Bush, Nixon, and Ford, Mrs. Theodor Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill (though this isn't a huge feat: we're all distantly related). I have found we're also descended from William Brewster's family and Giles Hopkins's as well. I'm still matching up female Mayflower arivals from whom I descended.
Many parts of the family spent generations in Northern New York State. The DeLongs were one of them. My Great Grandfather Leslie DeLong was killed in a logging accident before my Grandmother was born.
I put all of my family tree information into a form that you can browse through it. Take a look.