VanDrie Genealogy


John is compiling a

van Drie family tree

using Broderbund's Family Tree Maker software. Follow the link above to a page, which has another link at the bottom entitled "InterneTree". That will allow you to see the full family tree, if your browser is "Java enabled" (most modern versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer are Java-enabled). Please be patient - that Java applet is slow, and all you'll see for the first minute or so is a blank gray screen.

This family tree represents the contributions of many people: myself, Rob van Drie (historian and genealogist at the Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie), Lida van Drie-van Leeuwen, Jacobus Cornelis van Drie and family, Gerhardt Van Drie, and Jeannette Van Drie-Hall, as well as dozens of individual van Drie familes.

The van Drie's descend from a family which once lived in the tiny town of Drie, in a house, the Boshuis, which still stands and is shown below. Here are some older photos.



Photos by John of the Boshuis in 1978.

'van Drij' first appeared as a geographical description of our ancestors; the name 'van Drie' appeared in Napoleanic times, as the Dutch were then required to take family names which are carried from parents to children (earlier Jan, the son of Dirck was known as Jan Dircksen, and Jan's son Cornelis was known as Cornelis Jansen). Most van Drie's live in Nijkerk or Amersfoort in NL and Michigan and Iowa in the U.S.A. Here is my line of descent:

It’s fun to speculate that our line goes even farther back.  The Malenboek in the Rijksarchief in Arnhem records the earliest history of Drie, recording the minutes of the meetings of ‘holtrighters’ (wood-judges who preserved the surrounding forest, the Speuldebos).  Some of the earliest inhabitants of the Boshuis are recorded in the Maelenboek.  The Maelenboek also preserves the older spelling of ‘Drij’.  The first reference to Drij comes in 1540, maelenboek1.htm, [this and the following linked images take a long time to load – a minute over a 56 Kb modem – so please be patient] with reference to a ‘heilige huijsken’ (a chapel).  The first reference to someone later identified as an inhabitant of the Boshuis was on May 26, 1598, “Jan van Drij” maelenboek2.htm.  The first reference to the house of Jan van Drij was in 1613, maelenboek3.htm; he appears again in 1617 with reference to ‘onze huis’ maelenboek7.htm.  Jan evidently had sons named Dirck, and Hendrick maelenboek4.htm.  Dirck appears variously in the Maelenboek as Dirck van Drij, Dirck Jansz. van Drij, and Dirck Jansen.  There is a 1709 reference to ‘Wouter, son of Jan van Drij, living in the Boshuis’, maelenboek6.htm, but this must have been another Jan van Drij (son of Dirck Jansen van Drij?).  Lida van Drie believes  that the father of Cornelis Jansen van Drij above is Jan Woutersen (b. Jan 21, 1682/3 in Ermelo), raising the possibility that Cornelis Jansen van Drij listed above is the grandson of the Wouter van Drij from the Maelenboek.   The earliest map listing the Boshuis that I’ve found is in v. Slichtenhorst’s “Geldersse Geschiednisse” (1646) vanSlichtenhorst.htm.  (Note:  if anyone can read and understand these pages from the Maelenboek, I’d love to hear what everything means.  I was able to read the parts I’ve noted, but there is much here that is unclear to me).

The first appearance of the modern spelling of ‘Drie’ was in 1753, in the Garderen birth and marriage records, maelenboek5.htm.  Amusingly, on a June, 2002 trip to Europe, I met a linguist Gerald Penn (gpenn@cs.toronto.edu) who upon hearing how my name is spelled, asked ‘did this used to be spelled van Drij?’.  He then explained that the dipthong ‘ij’ is an ancient remnant of proto-Indo-European, and has frequently evolved into other vowel sounds. 

The pictures above linked to the name Jacobus van Drie are a mystery. The original paintings were owned by Gerrit's first-cousins Aaltje and Jannetje, who told me they were of Jacobus and his wife Aartje Kroon. Lida van Drie spotted these pictures, and thought that could not be true, since the fashions they are wearing are more typical of the year of Jacobus' birth, not of the time when he was an adult. Rob van Drie consulted an expert at the Iconografisch Bureau , who said these paintings date from 1815-1820, and were painted by a man who lived at that time in Nijkerk, Jan Gerrit Erkelens (1775-1857). Another first-cousin of my grandfather Gerrit, AnneMarie Hoogebrugge-Gugler, also had the same painting of the woman, though she did not know who was in the painting.

There's a charming folk tale about the origin of Drie. It refers to trees which serve as a landmark to sailors on the Zuyder Zee, which was indeed true. Those trees were cut down in the 1960's due to disease, and of course polders have replaced the Zuyder Zee near Drie.

Rob van Drie has digitized a map of Drie from the 1832 "kadaster".

Here's a nice article about my first-cousin Karen.

John's wife Susan Holland Webster Van Drie has many illustrious forebears from the early days of New York and New England, including the Webster's , the Johnston's , the Brown's , the de Forest's . Susan is a 2nd cousin 6 times removed to Noah Webster of dictionary fame, and is the 9th-great granddaughter of Jesse de Forest, one of the founders of New York City (then called New Amsterdam), settling there in 1624.

last updated June 16, 2002



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