Spent my birthday in typical fashion by doing a genealogical research trip. This year it was a trip to the archives of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana where one of only two known copies exist of "The History and Genealogy of the Groendyke Family in the United States", published in 1950 by Howard H. Groendyke.
I'd made a trip over to the Lilly Library once before, only to find out that they were closed, so this time I planned ahead and made sure that they were going to be open and would be ready for me when I arrived.
The book was a typewritten manuscript full of information on the family, down to at least my grandparents and uncle - though they had misplaced him as a child of his grandparents. Mr. Groendyke had spent a lot of time compiling information from various family groups from across the country.
Though I was hoping that the book might have some insight on the earlier generations, I did not find any 'aha' moments that would straighten out the earlier branches of the family. The book did provide some background on the Dutch settlements on the South River and in New Amsterdam and some of the records found there with the early branches of the familes, but then made some suppositions as to how all of the branches were tied together.
Still nothing yet that will definitively tie our ancestor, James Groendyke (1770-1836) and wife Johanna Antonides into the earlier branches. Many interenet trees and sources have James as a son of Nicholas and Violet Story, whereas this work seems to feel that James was the son of Nicholas and Catherine Peterson.
Either way, the tradition of James' father dying in a shipwreck is repeated here and that he was raised by an uncle. Is that uncle the Revolutionary War soldier Johannes "John" Groenendyke (1718-1785) and wife Sarah Lake (1718-1771)?
Will be working through the images I was able to gather from this manuscript to search for further clues, updating my database and also entries of the family on WikiTree.
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