Grietje (Buijs) Francisco (abt. 1702 - bef. 1737)

Thanks for your comments. For Grietje, I have no baptism or marriage record, so I am reluctant to put in a location for her birthplace or marriage place, even though it was likely to be in the general area of Acquackanonk, which at the time was quite large. I have put in page numbers for the citations I do have, so hopefully that will direct the reader to the actual records I was citing. I apologize for not having done that before, it seems I was working on this profile somewhat hastily.

Sharon Olson

Which country or continent is Acquackanonk?

Any location, even continents, are better than none. Then the location gets picked up by the scripts and it is used in searching and matching.

Her name sounds Dutch, so that can be in Asia, Europe, South Africa or the Americas...

Grietje's husband Johannes' profile does have a known birth location, and you can see it says Acquackanonk, Essex County, New Jersey. I would need to do more research on Grietje to determine her parents. They may have emigrated from the Netherlands, so Grietje is not for certain born in New Jersey.

Wikipedia can be helpful, here is what it says: Acquackanonk Township was a township that existed in New Jersey, United States, from 1693 until 1917, first in Essex County and then in Passaic County.

I assume that Acquackanonk was derived from a Native American name, but the name-origin story may be more complicated than that. I've learned to think of it as being modern-day Passaic, New Jersey (but I confess that I don't have good knowledge of the geography of that part of New Jersey).

I don't think it's at all likely that Grietje was born in the Netherlands. I have formed the impression that immigration from the Netherlands to the New Netherland area halted almost completely after 1674. Immigration to the area didn't end, but the newcomers I've noticed in records as probably arriving around 1700 were Huguenots, Irish, Scots, and English. Palatines followed, starting around 1710. The only new arrivals I've noticed coming from the Netherlands at that time were clergymen sent by the Reformed church in Amsterdam to minister to the colonists. There's no reason to think that Grietje was a clergyman's child, so I assume she was born in New Jersey or New York, to parents who probably were the children of people who had come from the Netherlands.

Having said all that, I think it would be entirely appropriate to fill in the death place field on this profile to say that Grietje very probably died in New Jersey. She had children baptized in churches at Acquackanonk and Second River (both in New Jersey) and her husband remarried at Acquackanonk 4 years after Grietje's last known child was born, so it's unlikely that she was anywhere outside New Jersey when she died.

PS - Whenever I say that immigration from the Netherlands stopped after 1674, I remind myself that I have a pair of ancestors who married in the Netherlands in 1682 before emigrating to New York. I don't know what their story was....

About Acquackanonk, its history is really complicated. At the beginning it wasn't a town but a wide area, encompassing what is now Fairfield, Little Falls, Paterson, and Passaic, even New Barbadoes. In 1755 the Essex County Freeholders were divided into three sections: Elizabeth, Newark, and Acquackanonk, so at that time, even, Essex County considered parts of what is now Caldwell as "Acquackanonk," because if you look at the list of names there (these are many of my ancestors so I am familiar with them!) their homes were in Horseneck or present-day Caldwell and Fairfield. So pieces were broken off little by little, until now Acquackanonk is really just the town of Passaic. When there were so few churches, many settlers had to travel quite a ways to get to the closest church to baptise their children, and Acquackanonk and Second River were two of the earliest. I'm always aware that baptising a child in a place doesn't mean that the family lived in the same place as the church, as they could have come a long distance from their actual home. But it seems common to use the baptismal location as a "birth" location, especially when we have no other facts.

I don't have any problem with putting New Jersey as the location for Grietje at the time of her death. I think I will have to rethink my approach, as I often leave a location blank if I don't know for certain where the event, birth or death, occurred. And then I don't think of "New Jersey" as being very specific, but of course it is better than nothing if we are fairly certain the location was in New Jersey. So I'll add that, thanks for pointing this out.

Thanks for that education on the geography, Sharon.

Your comments emphasize for me that "Acquackanonk" is the indicated location of the church where many baptisms and marriages were recorded, but not necessarily the location where the baptism was performed or where the people lived. Similarly, in the New York part of "New Netherland," we should assume that the early baptism records are identified by the nominal location of the church where the domine who performed the baptism was based, but it's hard to document/explain this in WikiTree's data fields. There were just a few churches in the early years and they served large areas. Sometimes the church records do identify the place where the baptism occurred, and it's evident that some domines traveled over a very large region to perform baptisms. (Notably, the Kingston, N.Y., church records show baptisms in "Menissing" or "Minisink," which is about 60 miles overland from Kingston.) Unless there is other evidence for the person's or family's geography, we only have the church location as a rough approximation.

It's interesting that "Acquackanonk" had such a large geographic scope. The available church records for Bergen and Hackensack start much earlier than the Acquackanonk records found on Ancestry, so by the time those Acquackanonk records start, the Acquackanonk church may have been serving a somewhat smaller area than what you describe.

The birth and baptism dates on the page where Grietje's unnamed child was entered are a diverse collection! Makes me think that this might have been a collection of records that weren't entered in chronological sequence, but had been noted somewhere else (notes in the domine's pocket?) and were copied into the record books later...

One of the missing pieces here is that of Gansegat (now Fairfield). Many of the Francisco families (which I have been working on, which is how I got to this wife of Johannis) ended up living in the Gansegat area of Essex County, basically the upper portion of Horseneck. Before the Gansegat Dutch Reformed church was established there, people would have baptised their children at Acquackanonk or Second River. Acquackanonk was established in 1693 but we only have records beginning about 1726. We have records from Second River beginning about 1726 but the church itself was organized about 1697. So the Gansegat population, their Dutch Reformed church was established in 1720 (and might be where Johannis and Grietje were married, for example), but all the Gansegat records were destroyed in a fire in 1875. Johannis himself, by the time he married his second wife, was at Pompton, which is in Morris County but just Northwest of Gansegat/Fairfield across the Passaic River.

And by the way, Pat Wardell in her file on the Buys family, places Grietje Buijs in her list at the bottom of "unplaced Buys women." Which is probably why I gave up on her...!

Hope this is helpful! William Nelson has a great summary of Early New Jersey churches in an article in Jstor, CHURCH RECORDS IN NEW JERSEY, BY WILLIAM NELSON. Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society (1901-1930), Vol. 2, No. 4 (March, 2004) and No. 5 (JUNE, 1904), pp. 173- 188, 251-266.