The Vanderveer-Campbell Family: My American Story

Abstract

This thesis provides the history of the Vanderveer-Campbell family from the earliest known ancestor in Zeeland, Netherlands, in 1525 through his eighth great-grandchildren who grew up in Montgomery, New Jersey, the last of whom died in 2003. The family is an example of one of the many Dutch-American farming families originating in the Netherlands that immigrated to New Netherland, or what is now New York, in the first half of the seventeenth-century and eventually moved to farmland in New Jersey. The use of documents such as census records, land records, letters, photographs, and maps, helps provide a sense of what life would have been like for this family and other families in similar financial situations.