Aert Pietersen Tack
Aert Pietersen Tack was born at Etten, a village in the barony of Breda in the Dutch province of Brabant. He said so himself. On 23 October 1660 he stood before the notary Dirck van Schelluyne at Beverwyck, the village beside Fort Orange where Albany now stands. The notary wrote him down as "Aert Pietersz Tack, born at Etten in the barony of Breda in Brabant, dwelling in the colony." The colony was Rensselaerswyck, the Van Rensselaer family's great estate on the upper Hudson.
The business that day was an inheritance. His late grandfather, Teunis Crynen of Etten, had left him money by will, and his brother Cornelis Pietersz Tack, still living at Etten, held it. Aert could not collect it from across the ocean. So he signed over two hundred Carolus guilders of it, in Holland money, to Jan Hendricxsz van Bael, a trader at Beverwyck. In return van Bael paid him two hundred and fifty guilders on the spot "in good strong seawan," the shell beads that served as money in the colony. Aert signed by mark.
A Catholic baptism at Etten on 26 July 1626 has long been taken as his. The child was "Arnoldus," son of Petrus Petri and Maria Antonii. Arnoldus is the Latin form of Aert, Petri of Pietersz, and Antonius of Teunis. That fits a mother who was a daughter of Teunis Crynen. The entry carries no surname, so the identification is probable, not proven. A Cornelius Petrus Tack had a daughter baptized at Etten-Leur in 1632.
By 1661 he had moved down the Hudson to the Esopus, the farming country around Wiltwyck, which the English renamed Kingston in 1669. He held a farm of twenty morgens, roughly forty acres, between the farms of Jan Willemsen Schoon and Tjerck Claesen de Wit. He also had house lot no. 31 in the village. He stocked the farm on credit. In 1661 he bought horses from Jan Barentsen Wemp of Rensselaerswyck and from Gysbert van Imborch. Wemp's contract, dated 7 September 1661, included a two-year-old mare that Aert was to keep at the seller's risk for six years and then give back. From 1661 to 1663 he was sued again and again in the Wiltwyck court for wages and debts.
His wife was Annetje Adriaens of Amsterdam. Their son Cornelis was baptized at Wiltwyck on 14 August 1661.
On 7 June 1663 the Esopus Indians attacked Wiltwyck and burned the new village beside it. The magistrates reported that the new village was "entirely destroyed except a new uncovered barn, one rick and a little stack of reed." They listed the killed, the captured and twelve burned houses in Wiltwyck itself. Aert is not on any of the lists, and his house was not among those burned. Among the wounded, the list records Jan du Parck, shot "in the house of Aert Pietersen Tack."
In August 1663 a daughter was baptized Grietjen at Kingston. The entry names the parents as "Aart Pietersen Tack, Grietjen Vooght," with Jacob Jansen and Barber Andries as sponsors. Annetje was his wife before and after that date, and the charge later brought against him names only one other wife, in Holland. The mother was very probably Annetje, with a woman named Vooght, or a voogd, a guardian, standing in for her at the font.
The debts closed in. That October his mortgage creditor Gysbert van Imbroch sued Annetje over the harvest, and she answered for the household herself. By the spring of 1664 Aert had gone. On 10 July 1664 the court at Wiltwyck heard Sweerus Teunissen, who had succeeded to the claims of Jan Barentsen Wemp, ask to be paid out of the estate of "Aert Pietersen Tack who has absented himself from this place," since he was the principal creditor. The court found that Aert "has absented himself, and his wife, not wishing to have anything further to do with the estate, has had an inventory made thereof." It ordered him summoned by the ringing of the bell. His farm, horses and cattle were sold for his creditors.
Then Annetje petitioned the Director-General and Council of New Netherland for a divorce. Aert, she said, "has not hesitated to marry another woman at Amsterdam in Holland." The fiscal, Nicasius de Sille, the colony's public prosecutor, had Aert summoned three times by the court messenger and three times by beat of drum in the village of New Haerlem on Manhattan. He did not come. On 21 August 1664, at Fort Amsterdam, de Sille asked that the divorce be granted, and that Aert be arrested, whipped, branded and banished. His words are in the story below.
No record shows that Aert was ever caught. His Amsterdam marriage has not been found in the Amsterdam banns of 1663-1665. On 11 January 1665 the Kingston church married Annetje to Jacob Jansen of Etten, Aert's head farmer, and entered her as his "deserted wife." Aert's death is not recorded.
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Cite: Heirology, "Aert Pietersen Tack (b. 1626)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/aert-pietersen-tack-1626-c7431e.