This post is written by Drew Blattner, a newly found Van Gilder cousin.
DNA Testing: The Genealogical Game Changer and
What
it Means for the Van Gilder Family.
By Drew Blattner
My
straight maternal great grandmother, that is my mother’s mother’s mother, was
Nora Acenith Van Gilder. She was the
daughter of William Jefferson Van Gilder and Anna Rebecca Graves. William was the son of James Van Gilder and
Asenith Masterson. James was the son of
John Van Gilder and Sarah who I now believe was a Masterson. That is all the information I had on the Van
Gilder family for quite a few years. We
all thought that at some point a Van Gilder had emigrated from Holland, and
that we all descend from that Dutch immigrant.
It was presumed to be the father of my fourth great grandfather John Van
Gilder. If you look at census records
and death certificates for John’s children, you see that John was born in Missouri,
Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, or Holland, depending on which one you look
at.
Seven
or eight years ago, while searching for information on any Van Gilders that
were in the Virginia area, that my John may be related to, I stumbled upon a
website of a lady named Linda Hughes Hiser who was descended from a Jacob Van
Gilder and an Anna Margaret Gibler of Monongalia and Marion County, Virginia,
now West Virginia. Jacob and Anna Margaret had a son named John the approximate
age of my John who left the family and went west. Four and half years ago I contacted her, and
she sent me some information and told me to check out her blog where she had
just written an article about the possibilities of the Cape Girardeau John being
the same as her West Virginia John. After
reading through the information, and then backing it up with more information
from the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center, it was quite clear to me that
our families had to be connected.
John
Van Gilder, along with a man named Frederick Gibler, disappear from the
Fairmont and Morgantown area of present day West Virginia after 1806. Both show up in present day Cape Girardeau,
Missouri in 1808 where they signed their names one below the other on a
petition regarding the city limits. The
Frederick Gibler of Morgantown had a tannery, as did the one in Cape Girardeau. There were many other bits of supporting
evidence proving that the two Johns and two Fredericks were the same. Given that John’s mother was Anna Margaret
Gibler, I am certain that Frederick Gibler is a relative of John, perhaps his
uncle.
This
past July, my wife and I drove to West Virginia to visit the graves of my fifth
great grandparents Jacob Van Gilder and his wife Anna Margaret Gibler, and to
search for the family farm. I found the Zion
Methodist Church Cemetery that their son had donated the land for, and their
graves. Every mailbox for two miles was
either a Van Gilder or someone who had married a Van Gilder.
I
spent two days visiting distant cousins up and down the road and hiked back to
the location of the original Van Gilder homestead. The cabin was long gone, but part of the
massive stone chimney still stood on land still owned by a Van Gilder. It was nice to see that most of the family
farm was still rural and owned by descendants, although it had been split up
numerous times over the last couple hundred years. The land was actually owned by one of Jacob
and Anna Margaret’s sons but it is presumed that they lived there as well. While in West Virginia, we spent time in the
Marion County Courthouse in Fairmont and the Monongalia County Courthouse in
Morgantown as well as libraries in both towns.
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| Fireplace of Jacob Van Gilder's home |
Returning
home from the trip, very satisfied, but yet yearning for more information that
I did not find, I turned back to the internet looking for immigration and other
early records for Jacob. Somehow I came
across where one of his descendants, John William Van Gilder of Maryland, had
done Y-DNA testing and his results came back with a Native American Haplogroup.
For
those unfamiliar with DNA testing in genealogy, there are three types of
testing. Y-DNA
testing can only be done by males and follows your straight paternal side. It his inherited from father to son. Tracing back from one man, it only shows his
father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s side. Going back to your fifth great grandfather
this test would only tell you about part of one out of 128 ancestors in that
generation.
mtDNA,
or Mitochondrial DNA, is the exact opposite.
Testing can be done by either males or females but then it only follows
the straight maternal side and is inherited from mother to child. Tracing back from one person it only shows
their mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s side.
Going back to your fifth great grandmother this test would only tell you
about part of one out of 128 ancestors in that generation.
Autosomal
DNA testing can be done by anyone and shows a little bit about all of your
ancestry. It sounds like it would be the
best, but as of now it only goes back so far where if you had one of your 512
seventh great grandparents that was Native American and all the rest were
European it may not show up that you had any Native Blood because the
percentage would be so small. In the
future this testing may be more useful with more scientific development.
Back
to John William Van Gilder’s results; I thought there was either a mistake or
he wasn’t really a descendant of Jacob Van Gilder. I contacted him and he said that he and his
cousin, Cole Van Gilder both had testing done through the National Geographic
Genographic Project. John then had his
results transferred to Family Tree DNA, where I had found his results under the
American Indian Q1a3a1: the Q-M3 Haplogroub Project. The results listed his earliest known
paternal ancestor as Jacob Wilder Van Gilder.
Jacob is my fifth great grandfather, and I knew this was the same Jacob,
as many descendants list Wilder as a part of his name although there is no
proof that it is. Jacob was known by all
descendants as being the original Van Gilder immigrant from the Netherlands. How could his DNA belong to a uniquely Native
American Haplogroup that does not occur in Europe at all?
I
thought that there was a good chance that somewhere along the line one of John
and Cole’s paternal grandfathers was not really their grandfather, and that
their grandmother had conceived by a man other than her husband. This was the only way to explain the
situation because DNA does not lie. The
only other option was that Jacob was not pure Dutch as all descendents claim
and that he was Native American at least in part. I immediately thought back to my recent trip
to West Virginia. Almost all of the Van
Gilders that I conversed with mentioned that they had Native ancestry along
with the Dutch and German. At the time,
I had not given it any thought as there were many generations separating them
and me, and that the Native ancestry could have come in at a later time after
my John had came to Missouri. After all,
Jacob was said to have been born in Holland and Anna Margaret Gibler, his wife,
was said to have been born in present day Germany. Then I thought back to having previously read
about the Van Gilders of New York and Vermont.
I
started reading all that I could about the Van Gilders. Originally most early histories had claimed
that a Dutchman by that name had taken up with an Indian woman and that they
were descended from of that union. That
would not explain the Native Y-DNA which comes through the father. Then I came across the research of Debra
Winchell in her paper, “The Impact of John Van
Gelder: Mohican, Husbandman and Historical Figure.” Debra is a descendant and very thorough researcher
of the Mohican Indian named Toanunck who was born to a Wappinger father and a Mohican
mother. He took the Dutch name Jan Van
Gelder and married Anna Maria Koerner, a
German immigrant from the Palatinate, and had nine documented children with
her. They lived in the Taconic Mountains
near Egremont in Berskshire County, Massachusetts, fairly close to the New York
border. Some descendants of Jan, or John
as he is normally called stayed near Egremont while others moved away, most
notably those that moved north, to Guilder Hollow near Granville in Washington
County, New York, close to the Vermont border.
I began to wonder if it was possible for my Jacob Van Gilder to be the
grandson of Toanunck, aka John Van Gelder.
I knew what I had to do. I had to find a male with the last name of
Van Gilder more closely related to me to participate in the Y-DNA testing to
see if the results matched the distant cousin in Maryland. With several Van
Gilders and Gilders in the area I picked Scott Vangilder because he was one of
the closest related to me and thus, leaving less generations for errs. I sent Scott’s DNA sample back to Family Tree
DNA and waited for the results. About a
month later, I got the results. Out of
all the thousands of people participating in DNA testing through Family Tree
DNA, Scott Vangilder had one match, John William Van Gilder of Maryland. This proved two huge things. First, the Cape Girardeau Van Gilder family
really is related to the Jacob Van Gilder family of Fairmont, West Virginia
(because some had doubted me) and secondly, there was no Dutch Van Gilder immigrant
forefather in our family; the name was taken by an Native American man and thus,
all Cape Girardeau Van Gilder descendants have some degree of Native American
blood in their veins. Now I was
convinced that our Jacob was a descendent of the Indian Tawanaut / Toanunck,
later known as Jan / John Van Gelder, but I would need a known descendant of
him to participate in DNA testing to prove a relationship.
With help from Debra Winchell, we
decided to start a Van Gilder Y-DNA Surname Project that would include all
variations of surname. After posting
information about the project on various websites, we received some interest,
but not from any known descendants of John Van Gelder bearing the surname. I decided to start making phone calls. I contacted Ricky VanGuilder of Granville,
New York whom I had read acts as Assistant Chief of the Hudson River Band of
Mahican. Ricky agreed to the testing, so
I ordered him a test and just received the results last week. No surprise to me, Ricky VanGuilder of New
York matched both John William Van Gilder of Maryland and Scott Vangilder of
Missouri. This proves that beyond any
doubt, the Cape Girardeau County Van Gilder family is in fact related to the
Mohican Van Gelder family.
Given that I don’t have a lot of
money to spend, the tests that I ordered for Scott and Ricky were entry level
12 marker tests that matched 100% with the first 12 markers of John William’s
37 marker test. This means they are all
related, but could be way back. All of these tests could be upgraded all the
way to the 111 marker test which would narrow down how closely they are
related. With the highest level of
testing, you can pretty much prove that two individuals are of a father and
son, brothers, first cousins, or uncle & nephew type relationship. If someone wants absolute proof, upgrades
should be done to establish the proof.
That would run several hundred dollars for each test upgraded. Meanwhile, I am content with the proof at
hand.
John Van Gelder was the first and
only known Indian to change his Indian name to the Van Gelder surname. All the other Mohicans and Wappingers were
going by their Native names at the time.
It is possible that we don’t descend from him, but through a relative,
but no other known Indians were taking the name. Even John’s brother, who died without siring
children, still went by Sancoolakheekhing.
I speculate that the name was taken to blend more with the Dutch
settlers from Gelderland, Holland, who bought land from the band of Mohicans
that John was born into. When John
married his German wife, he went on to live a very prosperous and well
documented life, bridging the gap between the Natives and the European
settlers. I truly believe we are
descended from John Van Gelder and his Wappinger father Awansous, although the
connection could theoretically be through another Wappinger relative.
The main task now is to determine
which son of John Van Gilder is the father of Jacob Van Gilder of Fairmont,
West Virginia. As usual, a fire is to
blame for the missing generation of baptismal and marriage records for the town
of Egremont, Massachusets. Depending on
whether Jacob’s mother was Native American or European, I would be between
1/256 and 1/512 Native American and 255/256 and 511/512 European. A drop in the bucket you might say, but
without that drop, I wouldn’t be here and neither would any other descendants.
Special thanks to John William Van
Gilder, Scott Vangilder, and Ricky VanGuilder for donating their DNA, as well
the others who have expressed interest in the project and some who are
currently being tested such as Kurt Van Galder of Wisconsin. Thanks also to Debra Winchell who has been
the source of nearly all my information on John Van Gelder, and for all the
in-depth research she has done. Thanks
also to Linda Hughes Hiser for her help in making the connection with the West
Virginia Jacob Van Gilder family.
For any upset Cape Girardeau “Dutch”
Van Gilder descendants who just lost all their Dutch heritage, there is still
hope. We know that the John Van Gilder
who came to Cape Girardeau had a wife named Sarah. A few years ago David Conley shared a letter
with me that was written to him by his grandfather about the Van Gilder family ancestry. It stated that when John came to Cape he
married a Masterson. The only Masterson
family here was William Masterson who married Anna Randol and their children,
who were the same age as John. Anna, or
Antje, as she was baptized was almost half Dutch through her mother Sarah Van
Gorden, who married Enos Randol. Thus,
all the Van Gilders here in Cape Girardeau County, Missouri would still have
some Dutch blood.
For more information
check out the following links:
http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/staffpubs/docs/20361.pdf Scroll to Chapter 10 of the Mohican Seminar
3, starting on page 127 and reading through page 144 for “The Impact of John
Van Gelder, Mohican, Husbandman, and Historical Figure” by Debra Winchell in
2004
This blog by Linda
Hughes Hiser helps make the West Virginia to Cape Girardeau, Missouri connection
more clear.
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| Inscription for Jacob Van Gilder on shared grave marker |
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| Inscription for Anna Margaret Gibler on shared grave marker |
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