Jacob Jansen de Lange van Etten

Born 1632 in Etten, North Brabant, Netherland. Arrived in New Amsterdam before 1663. He married January 11, 1665, at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston, New York.

From Brabant to the Esopus Frontier

Jacob Jansen de Lange van Etten, son of Johannes “Jan” Marinessen van Etten (better known as the Rensselaerswyck official Anthony de Hooges), was baptized October 22, 1634, in Etten, North Brabant, in the Netherlands, and had arrived in New Amsterdam by 1663. He worked as a farmhand for Aert Pietersen Tack and, after witnessing the baptism of a child born to Tack's wife under circumstances that suggest an affair — likely the reason Tack later left the household — Jacob went on to marry the same Annetje Ariaens once she was free to remarry. He ran into repeated trouble with the Esopus courts in the early 1660s, fined multiple times for harvesting without permission and defaulting on the resulting fines before finally paying up to the schout Roeloff Swartwout.

A Voice in Colonial Politics

Jacob settled in Wiltwyck (Kingston) and later Marbletown, New York, and remained politically active for decades: in 1676 he joined Roeloff Swartwout and others in petitioning Governor Andros for a bilingual minister for Esopus, and in January 1684 he was among a group of colonists arrested and fined by Governor Thomas Dongan for petitioning for greater local control of their own affairs. Jacob swore allegiance to the English crown in 1689, following the Dutch colony's final transition to English rule.