Advice before editing this pre-1700 Terhune profile?

Question

I asked for help in a Comment on the profile for Stephen Albertse Terhune (Terhune-36).  When I received no response I posted the request on G2G, but no one has responded.  I believe that Stephen Albertse Terhune and Lidia Davidse DeMaree had a son Albert, born in 1708, who married Maritie Martesse and who was my 6th great grandfather.  

WikiTree has another Albert Jansen Terhune (Terhune-197) who was born in 1704 and is the son of Jan Albertse Terhune and Elisabeth Bertholf and hence is a cousin to the Albert born in 1708.  I believe this Albert married Sarah Lee Cornelis and had only 2 children.

These are some of the sources I used:

*Henry B. Hoff. "Genealogies of Long Island Families. From The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record". Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc, 1987. Volume II, pp. 134-143.

*Herbert Stewart Ackerman. "The Terhune family: descendants of Albert Albertse Terhune of 1654". Ridgewood, NJ, 1946

*"New Jersey, Church Records, 1675-1970," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSVY-99FP-Z?cc=2106099 : 3 October 2019), > image 1 of 1; Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey.

*https://www.ancestry.com/sharing/21394437?h=edd709&utm_campaign=bandido-webparts&utm_source=post-share-modal&utm_medium=copy-url US Dutch Reformed Church Records in Selected States, 1639-1989, Hackensack NJ, Book 62

*Ancestry.com North America, Family Histories, 1500-2000 "The Bergen family: or the descendants of Hans Hansen Bergen, one of the early settlers of New York". page 265

Not all of the sources are in agreement as to which Albert married Maritie Martesse and is my 6th great grandfather.  But I think it is clear that there was an Albert Terhune born in 1708 and his profile is not in WikiTree.

Am I allowed to create the profile for the Albert Terhune born in 1708?  Is there a way to determine which one married Maritie Martesse?

Thank you,

Barbara Regan

Comments

Barbara when you originally posted this request I wanted to ask if this is the ancestor line of American notable author Albert Payson Terhune?

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Interesting that you should ask that question.  I was told as a child that I was related to Albert Payson Terhune and I remember how much I enjoyed reading his dog stories.  But I never knew the nature of the exact relationship.  Last year when I became interested in genealogy it was a quest to determine my relationship to Albert Payson Terhune that motivated me to get an Ancestry account.  It was not an easy task to find the relationship.  I ended up creating a Tree for him, working backwards from what I found on Wikipedia and then making my tree working backwards from family records.  It wasn't until I got all the way up to Albert Albertzen Terhune (Albertszen-1) that I found the common ancestor.  My 8th great grandfather was Albert Albertse Terhune Jr. (Terhune-188) who was the 3rd son of Albert Albertzen, the immigrant.  Albert's first son, Jan Albertse Terhune (Albertsz-12), is the ancestor of Albert Payson Terhune.  I don't think the Albert Payson Terhune lineage in WikiTree is complete so I can't tell you what exact relationship I have to the author.  I just know it's a lot further up the tree than what I initially thought!

Answer 1

I'm sorry no one has responded to your postings. Since Stephen Terhune is part of a project adding a son should be discussed. I am not a member of that project, but I recently did a little work on a branch of that family and they are very confusing. You should tag this post with New Netherlands and hopefully you'll get a response from the project.

IMO you should create the profile. He has a baptism record in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Comments

Thank you.  I didn't realize that I hadn't tagged New Netherlands.

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I, too, am sorry that Barbara did not get a reply sooner, and I agree that she should create a profile. I had hoped that one of the various New Netherland project members with an interest in the Terhune family would respond.

For background, the New Netherland Settlers project is not based on an exclusive well-defined population like the Mayflower passengers or the Magna Carta project. Also, we do not benefit from a highly regarded body of scholarly research that it is regarded as a singular authoritative source for the New Netherland population. There is a lot of research material out there, but there is no single go-to place to serve as a starting point for finding it all (nothing like the Great Migration Directory and other Great Migration books that form the basis for the PGM project). And the project covers a time period of more than 150 years and is a profile manager on 17,000 profiles.

With that background, when you have done thorough research that included consulting some of the best available sources (as you have done) and found that a person existed who does not yet have a WikiTree profile, and you have posted queries here that did not surface any objections, it is entirely reasonable to create the profile. Please add the project box {{New Netherland Descendant}}, put wikitree-new-netherland-settlers@googlegroups.com on the Trusted List, and make that address (the New Netherland Settlers Project project account) an additional profile manager. 

Due to Dutch naming practices, every male child of Albert Albertszen Terhune (father of Stephen Albertse) and every brother of Albert Albertszen Terhune would have been expected to name his firstborn son Albert (and give the name to a later son if the firstborn died), so there likely were more than a few contemporary men named Albert Terhune in the New Netherland area in 1700s. To tell them apart, we look for records that indicate a patronymic name (often in the form of a middle initial on the baptism record for a child), wills and land records that name family members, marriage records that give a place of origin (helpful if different candidate fathers are known to have lived in different places), and the names of the parents and witnesses on baptism records for children. This last is often the best information source, as the names of the early-born children correspond to the names of their four grandparents, the grandparents often witnessed baptisms (particularly for the early-born children, and even more particularly for a child named after the grandparent), and brothers and sisters of the parents (usually with their spouses) were frequent witnesses at baptisms.

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Also, note that Terhune-36 is not project-protected, and the son was born born after 1700.  Anyway,  your research meets the standards for pre-1700, and your outreach to the project here im G2G was sufficient coordination.

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Ellen,

Thank you for this helpful information.

One note:  The Albert Albertszen Terhune (Albertszen-1) link in your comment about Stephen's father leads to the profile of Stephen's grandfather.  Albert Albertse Terhune Jr. (Terhune-188) was the third child of Albert Albertszen Terhune and it was this Albert Albertse who was Stephen's father.

I had noticed that the firstborn son of Albert Albertszen Terhune (Albertszen-1) was named Jan (Albertsz) Terhunen in WikiTree and that his profile is Albertsz-12.  Two of the other siblings have a profile name of Alberts.  Shouldn't all siblings have the profile name of Terhune?

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Ah, yes, I misidentified Stephen's grandfather as his father. But the intended meaning is unaffected. That is, every son of an Albert in this Terhune family would have named a son Albert, probably with a last name of Terhune. That naming practice can result in a lot of cousins with the name Albert Terhune.... (And on top of that, some other Terhune boys might have been named for an uncle named Albert...)

As for the names, the Dutch of this time used patronymic names (names derived from the first name of the father), not modern-style family surnames. There are different forms for male and female patronymics: the patronymic form for sons of Albert would be Albertsz or Albertsen or Albertszen or maybe Albertse (they were not rigid about spelling) and the girls would be Alberts or Albertsdr (for Albertsdochter). That explains the difference between Albertsz and Alberts. To further complicate matters, sometimes people would be recorded with nicknames, or occupational names, or geographic names (of which Terhuyn is one) to distinguish them from others with the same name, and after the English took over, people were supposed to adopt modern-style last names (which in many cases were nicknames, occupational names, or geographic names), but this did not happen all at once, and sometimes different people in the same family adopted different surnames.  This is the background for the New Netherland Settlers Project naming conventions, which call for us to give each person the name(s) we find for them in records -- we document the names we find, not the names we think they ought to have used.

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I have created the profile for Albert (Terhune-672).  I tried to add the New Netherland Settlers Project address as an additional profile manager but I got a message that said I couldn't add that address because I'm not on the Trusted List for it.

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That is strange. You did successfully add the project account (WikiTree-8)  to the Trusted List. You should have been able to return to the Privacy page and click a hyperlink to make it a manager.

Regardless of what happened, I fixed the situation (the project is now a second profile manager).

Thank you for creating the profile.

Answer 2

Now that the profile is created, my review of the biography leads me to conclude that the marriage and children you have mentioned in the biography of Albert Terhune-672 belong to Albert Jansen Terhune, the son of Jan Albertse Terhune (a brother of Stephen). I have several reasons for this:

1. Albert Terhune-672 is supposed to have been born in 1708, which makes him a bit young (for a man of this time and place) to have married in 1725. Girls could marry at 17, but young men seem to have been expected to be a bit more mature before they married and started families. Albert Jansen Terhune is supposed to have been born in 1704, making him better qualified to marry in 1725.
2. The first recorded child of Albert and wife Maritie is named Jan. From the Dutch practice of naming the firstborn son after the paternal grandfather, that makes it very likely that Jan (not Stephen) was the name of the father of Albert. The next child is Marten -- second son, named for Maritie's father. The third son got the name Stephen, probably for uncle Stephen Albertse Terhune. The fourth son is Roelof, possibly named for Maritie's brother. The fifth son is Guliaem, who seems to be named for the father of Elisabeth, the wife of Jan Albertsen Terhune.
3. Witnesses for the baptism of son Jan, born in 1725, are  Roelof Bongaart and Elisabeth Bertholf. Elisabeth Bertholf  is the wife of Jan Albertsen Terhune.

Taken together, I believe that these observations identify the Albert Terhune who married Maritie Martense as the son of Jan Albertsen.

There are no Terhune men among the baptism witnesses. That does not necessarily signify much of anything. Neither Jan Albertsen nor Stephen Albertse could have witnessed these baptisms, as they both died well before the children were born. Furthermore, it looks like neither Albert son of Stephen nor Albert son of Jan had much in the way of brothers.

I think that the content about the wife and children of Albert Terhune-672 should be moved to Albert Jansen Terhune.

Comments

Thank you.  I will work on moving the content, as well as adding additional information I have discovered about the wife and children of Albert Terhune-672.  I'm a novice at this so it might take me some time.

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When I move the Biography content that I had for [[Albert Terhune-672|Albert Terhune]] to [[Terhune-197|Albert Jansen Terhune]] I am not sure how much of the information in the original Biography for [[Terhune-197|Albert Jansen Terhune]]  I can delete.  There is a comment about deleting the two sentences describing the GEDCOM import and citation when primary sources are added.  But do I leave the other sources that are there?  I don't really understand the #S4 and #R2 notation.

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And, by the way, why don't my links to family members using their WikiTreeIDs show up as links?

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I deleted some of the computer-generated boilerplate content in the Terhune-197 profile while I was making changes to the profile for the son Guliaem. More content can be removed when you add other sourced information. The only content in the text section of that profile that has any actual information value is the FamilySearch record of his baptism -- and that information has not yet been incorporated into the biography. (Also, I think it is likely that the baptism is in the Hackensack church records book in the FamilySearch library, so we can quote and cite the full entry in records book instead of the abbreviate entry from a FamilySearch database.)

That profile also has citations to an unidentified Ancestry family tree and an unidentified GenealogieOnline family tree. I think these useful to keep around until such time as the facts in a profile are supported by footnoted citations to good sources -- not because they are good sources (they are not), but because the citations tell where the information came from (which can be useful to know when trying to research the person or improve the profile). But when the profile is supported by good sources, those citations can be deleted.

Confusingly, formatting and linking in G2G is different from formatting and linking in WikiTree proper. Square brackets do not work here for creating links, but we can link to WikiTree profiles in G2G by inserting the whole URL. Also, there is a link icon in G2G (to me it looks like an infinity symbol or a sideways number 8) that can be used to create an aesthetically formatted link, and when we copy-paste formatted text into a G2G edit box, the formatting will be retained.

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Lest there be any confusion, the Hackensack records book is at this link.