Purposes of the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames
The purposes of the Society shall be to perpetuate the memory and promote the virtues of the Dutch ancestors of its Members.
In addition the Society shall collect and preserve genealogical and historical documents relating to the Dutch in America, encourage excellence in historical research relating to the Dutch in America, and establish commemorative and durable memorials in lasting tribute to the early Dutch settlers.
Several of the Society’s grants extend for more than one year. In these cases, the grant is shown with two dates: the year in which it was awarded and the year in which the grant terminated.
2022 New Netherland Institute received a Society of Daughters of Holland Dames grant of $50,000 for the Alida and Robert Livingston Correspondence Project. Alida Schuyler Livingston (1656-1727) and Robert Livingston (1654-1728) were married in Albany in 1679. Alida was the widow of Nicholas van Rensselaer, making her one of the wealthiest women in Albany. Prior to van Rensselaer’s death, Livingston had been his secretary. Livingston had learned Dutch in the Netherlands in his youth.
The correspondence has 355 individual letters over a total of 587 manuscript pages and is entirely in Dutch. It extends from 1680 to Alida’s death in 1727. Alida’s letters represent one of the most significant collections of women’s writings in New Netherland. The correspondence also shows the continued significance of Dutch language and culture in the decades after the English conquest.
The correspondence was the focus of the NNI’s 2022 Annual Conference held in collaboration with the New-York Historical Society: Alida Livingston’s World: Women in New Netherland and Early New York.
The letters will be translated and annotated by A. P. G. Jos van der Linde. He is a professional Dutch translator, having translated, among other works the First Book of Records, 1660-1752, of the Old First Dutch Reformed Church of Brooklyn, NY (1983), published as part of the NNI’s New York Historical Manuscript Series.
The translation and annotation of the correspondence are expected to take two years and another year is expected to be needed to prepare the translation and annotation for publication.
2020-2021 New Amsterdam History Center Mapping Early New York. Since 2020 the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames have given $34,500 in grants to support the Mapping Project. The goal is to map New Amsterdam from 1609 to 1773 with a “timeslider,” similar to Google Map technology, but using the Castello Plan of 1660 and other early maps of New Amsterdam as its base.
The timeslider has an “Encyclopedia” which has entries for New Amsterdam’s inhabitants drawn from a variety of sources. These include I.N. Phelps Stokes’ six-volume work, The Iconography of Manhattan Island and the translations by Dr. Charles T. Gehring of the seventeenth-century records of the New Netherland Colony which are part of the Dutch/New Netherland Documents collection at the New Netherland Institute.
The goal is a map that will show ownership of tax lots in New Amsterdam. It will be searchable by the owners’ names or the address of the lot. This will be a powerful tool that will allow new insights into the life of our ancestors in New Amsterdam.
To see the Map please go to: https://nahc-mapping.org/mappingNY/
Please also visit our website’s Activities page to see a webinar from October 2021 with the Map’s creator, Toya Dubin.
2017-2021 The New Netherland Institute received a Society of Daughters of Holland Dames Emerging Scholar Grant for $50,000 to fund the translation of the 638 pages in Volume 23 of the Dutch/New Netherland Documents collection, the seventeenth-century records of the New Netherland Colony. Volume 23 documents the administration of Anthony Colve, New Netherland’s governor during the Colony’s short-lived restoration of 1673-74. Artyom Anikin, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Amsterdam, translated these records which will be published pending final review.
Please visit the New Netherland Institute’s website for a link to the Dutch Colonial Manuscripts collection:
2020-2021 New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (OPRHP) A One-for-Two Society of Daughters of Holland Dames Challenge Grant of $10,000 for OPRHP’s Thematic Survey of Dutch Heritage Resources in the Greater Hudson Valley. This survey identifies and describes 934 properties in New York relevant to the State’s rich history of over 400 years of Dutch culture. These include buildings, cemeteries, and settlements. The Survey is an important documentation of this enduring legacy.
The survey is available here: http://ow.ly/gJ7T50HL1Lq
2021 Connecticut River Museum in Essex, Connecticut, received a grant of $5,000 from the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames for the Onrust Endowment Fund. The Fund provides for the maintenance of the Onrust, a replica of the Dutch ship built in 1614 by Captain Adriaen Block while he overwintered in New York Bay. The Onrust explored the east coast of the United States from New York Harbor to Narragansett and Buzzards bays and Cape Cod. Block’s voyage was used as a basis for the Dutch claim to the territory of New Netherland.
The Onrust programs at the Museum include dockside tours, sails for the public on the Connecticut River, and school programs on sailing and navigation. All of these activities educate the public about Block’s voyages of exploration for the Dutch.
[Photo Credit: Pim Van Hemmen]
2021 The New Amsterdam History Center was awarded $5,100 by the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames for a Fall 2022, webinar on the social role of women in New Netherland, Brazil, and other places in the expanding Dutch world of the seventeenth century: How Golden for Women Was the Dutch Golden Age? Women’s Lives in New Amsterdam and Beyond.
Panelists are Deborah Hamer, Director, New Netherland Institute; Susanah Shaw Romney, Associate Professor of History, New York University; and Moderator Valerie Paley, Director, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, Founding Director of the Center for Women’s History, The New-York Historical Society.
2021 David Major, author, was awarded $3,000 by the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames to support expenses incurred in writing David D. Demarest, D.D. 1819-1898, Theologian, Historian, Educator. A Biography with Selected Papers. Demarest was a prominent Dutch Reformed Church minister during the 1800s in New Jersey. A biography of his life will give insight into the significance of the residents of Dutch heritage in the post-colonial era.
2016-2020 The New-York Historical Society One-Year Short-Term Fellowship in the amount of $2,500 per annum was awarded to a post-graduate scholar coming to the Historical Society to study the Dutch and the Dutch experience in New York from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.
2016-2018 New Netherland Institute received a Society of Daughters of Holland Dames Project Assistance Grant of $75,000 over three years for support of the salary of the NNI webmaster. The website publishes all relevant material emanating from the New Netherland Institute. This includes the transcriptions and translations by Dr. Charles T. Gehring and Dr. Janny Venema of the seventeenth-century records of the New Netherland Colony in the Dutch/New Netherland Documents collection, as well as essays and articles written by the scholars at the New Netherland Institute on the history of that period.
Please visit www.newnetherlandinstitute.org to see the New Netherland Institute’s rich offerings.
2018 Dutch Heritage World Tours by Izi Travel in Amsterdam received a grant of $1,500 in support of their series of audio tours How Dutch Is New York. The tours are available for downloading: New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant Tour, Historic Richmond Town, Albany, Schenectady, New Paltz, Kingston, the Mohawk River Valley, and the Hudson River Valley.
The Society of Daughters of Holland Dames were joined in their support of these audio tours by Dutch Culture USA, a program of the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in New York and the Dutch Culture matching fund in the Netherlands. The New Netherland Institute and the New Amsterdam History Center are official partners of Dutch Heritage World Tours.
Please visit the izi.travel website:
2016-2017 New Netherland Institute received a Society of Daughters of Holland Dames Metadata Grant of $40,000 over two years. This grant funded the metadata component of publishing online the 12,000 transcribed and translated pages of the seventeenth-century records of the New Netherland Colony in the Dutch/New Netherland Documentscollection.
Metadata is an essential component of all digital documents. It contains an identifier number similar to a card catalogue number used by libraries to locate documents. It also incorporates a description of the document, the source, the contributor, date of original, date of digitization, related terms for the search engine, technician’s name, and descriptions of the scanner and software programs.
The Holland Dames’ grant is made in collaboration with a grant from the Dutch National Archives, which is funding the digitization of the records.
Please visit the New Netherland Institute’s website for a link to the Dutch Colonial Manuscripts collection:
2012 Restoration of Petrus Stuyvesant Window, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery The Petrus Stuyvesant stained-glass window was donated by the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames to St. Mark’s in 1903. It marks the Stuyvesant family vault, which is directly below the window in the churchyard. The crest of the Stuyvesant family is above the portrait of the Director General. The insignia of the Dutch West India Company, which employed Stuyvesant, is in the lower left corner and the arms of the Netherlands are in the lower right corner.
The Holland Dames’ restoration of the window in 2012 for $26,000 gave us the chance to correct Stuyvesant’s birth date, thought to be 1592 when the window was created, to 1612, which most historians now agree was the actual year of his birth.
Please visit: Dunlap, David W. “Peter Stuyvesant, Now Glowing but Still Glowering,” The New York Times November 16, 2012
2011 Restoration of the “Arrival of the Half Moon” Window at the New-York Historical Society The “Arrival of the Half Moon” stained-glass window was donated by the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames to the New-York Historical Society in 1909, the Tricentennial of the arrival of Englishman Henry Hudson’s ship the Halve Maen in New York Harbor. The window depicts Henry Hudson’s sighting of the island of Manhattan in 1609 aboard his ship. The arms of the Netherlands, the country for whom he was sailing, are in the border of the central upper section. The arms of Old and New Amsterdam are in each of the upper corners above the ship. The insignia of the Dutch East India Company, which financed the voyage, is in the lower left corner. The insignia of the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames is in the center of the lower border. The arms of New Netherland are in the lower right corner.
The window was restored in 2011 by the family of the Society’s past Directress General Anna Glen Vietor and William Hudson (no relation).
1933 Memorial Tablet at 39 Pearl Street in lower Manhattan This tablet marks the site of the first church built on Manhattan Island with Everardus Bogardus as Dominie. It was erected by the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames on the Tricentennial of the building of the church.
