Stijntje Douwes
Stijntje Douwes was born in Enkhuizen, a port town on the Zuiderzee in the Dutch province of North Holland. A girl named Stijntje was baptized in the Reformed church there on 22 January 1617. Her father was Douwe Wiggersz. and her mother was Agniete Coensdr., who had registered their banns at Enkhuizen in 1608. She is the only Stijntje born to a Douwe in Enkhuizen between 1616 and 1618, and her age at her marriage fits the baptism to the month. That entry is very probably hers.
Her name followed the Dutch custom of her time. Douwes means daughter of Douwe, just as her father's Wiggersz. meant son of Wigger. She was one of at least six children. Her brothers Johan and Koen were baptized in 1610 and 1613, and a sister Marijtgen probably in 1615. After her came Baeffje in 1618, a second Baeffjen in 1619 and Sara in 1621.
By the summer of 1638 she was living in Amsterdam, in the Angeliersstraat in the Jordaan, on the west side of the city. Both her parents were dead. On 28 August 1638 she and a young man from Wageningen in Gelderland came before the church to register their intention to marry. The clerk wrote the entry into a printed form: "Jacob Leurtsz van Wageninge, metselaersgesel, oud 22 jaer, geen ouders hebbende, woont inde Haerlemmerdwarsstraet, & Stijntie Douwes van Enckhuijsen oud 21 jaer, woonende inde Angeliersstraet, geen ouders hebbende."
In English: Jacob, son of Leurt, of Wageningen, a mason's journeyman, aged 22, having no parents, living in the Haarlemmerdwarsstraat, and Stijntie Douwes of Enkhuizen, aged 21, living in the Angeliersstraat, having no parents. The word for his trade is hard to read. The printed text asked for the three Sunday proclamations of the banns. It recorded that the two declared themselves free persons, not related by blood. The record of the wedding itself has not been found.
Jacob went to New Netherland, the Dutch colony on the Hudson River. By 1647 he was drawing wages from the West India Company, which owned and ran it. Their son Luur was baptized in the Reformed Dutch church of New Amsterdam, the town that became New York City, on 29 May 1650. Only the father's name was entered. Jacob moved up the river to Fort Orange, where Albany now stands, and kept a house beside the fort in the village of Beverwyck.
Jacob was dead by 9 January 1657, at about forty. That day the court at Fort Orange heard a claim against Claes Teunissen over a debt Jacob had owed. The court's officer stepped in "as protector of the rights of orphans" and asked for curators "to preserve the rights of the surviving children of Jacob Luyersen, deceased." The record says children, so there were others besides Luur, whose baptism is the only one found. In February the two curators became Beverwyck's first orphan masters. That spring a debtor told the court he had paid 80 guilders "to Pieter Bronck, for the widow of Jacob Luyersen."
Compiled family accounts say more. The Brouwer genealogy, followed by later online profiles, says that on 29 April 1655 she rented the burial pall for Jacob at Fort Orange. The pall was the black cloth laid over a coffin, which the church hired out. The same accounts say she married again, to Claes Teunissen, called Uylenspiegel, the name of a prankster of Dutch and German folk tales. Claes was already dealing with Jacob's debts in January 1657, which suggests he had married her by then. He is said to have taken the family down to the Esopus, the country around Kingston on the west bank of the Hudson. No record of the marriage has been seen.
The Kingston church books bear it out a generation later. On 2 April 1682 her son Luur and his wife Grietje Tack brought their first child to be baptized. They named the girl Styntie. The sponsors were "Styntie Douwes" and "Claas Teunisse." A Dutch couple usually named their first daughter for the father's mother.
Three months later, on 9 July 1682, she appears again, at Hurley, a village near Kingston. The Kingston minister entered a baptism there of a child named Pieter, "Child of a negress." The register names no parents. It records instead "Claas Teunisse, and wife Styntie Douwes, 'who have presented themselves as [in the place of] the Parents.'" She was sixty-five.
That is the last record of her. Her death was not found.
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Cite: Heirology, "Stijntje Douwes (b. 1617)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/stijntje-douwes-1617-bf1431.