New Amsterdam History Center: Promises and Perils

Wed, Oct 9 - Wed, Oct 9  2024

Arader Galleries, New York

Firth Haring Fabend, Sandra Lazo, and Wijnie de Groot share their research on New Amsterdam's first settlers, and the extensive research on documents and letters from the colony that reveal the hopes and dangers of life in the New World.

Many NAHC Trustees count ancestors among the first settlers to answer the call of opportunity in the trading post of New Amsterdam and other Dutch settlements in New Netherland. Others have done extensive research on documents and letters from the colony that reveal the hopes and dangers of life in the New World. During this program, they will share the experiences of the colonists they are most familiar with.

The talk is followed by a reception.

More details and registration here.

With speakers:

Firth Haring Fabend
Historian Firth Haring Fabend is a prolific author of both non-fiction and fiction, including New Netherland in a Nutshell, an essential guide to the history of the colony’s early days.Her own family’s experiences inspired her historical novel Land So Fair, the story of three generations who struggled to create and defend their home in the Hudson Valley wilderness.

Sandra Lazo
Sandra Lazo is an avid, amateur family history buff. One of her nine-times great-grandfathers immigrated from the Dutch Republic in 1634. She will discuss his and his family’s experience in New Netherland, and those of two other ancestors – father and son – who arrived in 1664, shortly before England took over the colony.

Wijnie de Groot
Wijnie de Groot is Senior Lecturer in Dutch, Department of Germanic Languages, at Columbia University. With her University of Amsterdam colleague Frans Blom, she teaches an annual seminar on 17th century Dutch. She will read from recently translated letters that reveal some of the unexpected challenges immigrants faced.