Greetings,
We welcome you to the website of the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames, Descendants of the Ancient and Honorable Families of New Netherland.
The Society of Daughters of Holland Dames was founded in 1895 as a lineage society whose purposes were to perpetuate the memory of our Dutch ancestors and to preserve and promote the legacy of the seventeenth-century settlers of New Netherland. Our mission focuses on the support of historical research related to New Netherland and the preservation of genealogical and historical documents relevant to the Dutch in America. The historical focus of our Society begins with the arrival of Henry Hudson in 1609 and the establishment of New Netherland as a Dutch colony in North America in 1614 until the 1674 Treaty of Westminster when the Dutch Republic officially surrendered the territory of New Netherland to the English.
The Society of Daughters of Holland Dames shares recordings of our Annual Meetings’ educational programs with the public on our website. Members also participate in a variety of fellowship activities which in recent years have included tours of museum exhibitions highlighting pre-modern Dutch art, a cruise on the replica Dutch ship, the “Onrust”, at the Connecticut River Museum in Essex, Connecticut, marching in the annual NYC Flag Day Parade, and joining with representatives from other patriotic, historical, and genealogical societies of New York to honor veterans and fallen servicemen and women by taking part in the Annual Flag Service and Act of Remembrance at Saint Thomas Church, New York City.
Since the first years of our Society, the Daughters of Holland Dames has honored the values of our Dutch ancestors and endeavors to ensure that their contributions to the founding of this country are not lost, forgotten, or overlooked. We accomplish this in a variety of ways. In our early years we placed Dutch-specific monuments around New York City, most notably at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, where a stained glass window of Petrus Stuyvesant (1610-1672), the last Director General of New Netherland, was donated and installed in1903, and at the New York Historical, where a stained glass window depicting the arrival of Henry Hudson’s ship, the “Halve Maen”, in New York harbor in 1609 was donated and installed in the Library in 1909. Through our grants program, our Society provides funding for scholarly research and educational programming about the history of New Netherland and Dutch contributions to the founding of the United States. In recent years our Society has provided grants to the New Netherland Institute in Albany to support its work of digitizing and translating the original seventeenth-century administrative records of the New Netherland Colony. In 2024, we were the Foundational Sponsor of the New Netherlands Settlers Project at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society in New York City. Other recent grants include funding for the “Mapping Early New York” project at the New Amsterdam History Center, and in 2026, providing major support for the 2026 “Old Masters, New Amsterdam” exhibition at the New York Historical.
We invite you to support the work of this organization and consider becoming a member of the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames!
With Kind Regards,
Mary Raye Casper
Directress General