Fonda

[walkitout]

I'm increasingly satisfied with the accuracy and sourcing of the Veeder branch of my family tree. I've got the 1937 Vrooman authored Veeder Genealogy (a family registry, mostly). I've got Pearson's Contributions for Schenectady (albeit missing the Johannes branch supplied by Vrooman and the Kline's book). I even now have a couple local history books for the time-and-place (Burke's _Mohawk Frontier_, and Jacobs' _Colony of New Netherland_).

Obviously, whenever you have a surname-focused branch, you have a bunch of opportunities for additional research involving all the women who married those men. Names like Schenck/Schanck have caught my eye because I saw that name in the DRC records for Caughnawaga, and names like Fonda obviously caught my name, both as the name of the village and because of those famous people what have that name.

I don't know that it seriously crossed my mind that it might be possible to determine the relationship between me and those famous people. Also, because a lot of other surnames in Schenectady had a strong flavor of South Holland about them, I had sort of assumed there would be no more of this, goddess, please, not more Frieslanders, please.

Foolish, foolish, me. I thought, hmm, I should find out whether Fonda is in genlias. Not really: just one baptismal record from the Americas and one mother on a death record, so likely a returnee. Next step: where _exactly_ does that surname come from?

According to: http://www.fonda.org/

Descendants of Jellis Douw Fonda (1614-1659),
immigrant from Friesland, Netherlands to
Beverwyck (now Albany), New York in 1651

For further detail:

http://www.fonda.org/stories.htm#Origins

Lots of wacky, speculative stories there. However if you click through to:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nycoloni/renbioset.html#42

"Gillis Fonda
About 1646, Pieter Hartgers advanced some money to Gillis, a boy in the service of Antony de Hooges, possibly Gillis Fonda; Oct. 19, 1651, the court gave Gillis Fonda permission to distill liquor in't greenen bos (Greenbush), in a house belonging to Evert Pels, next to the brewery, on condition that he enter into a contract as to the Gerechticheijt vande Heeren Mrs (dues to the patroon and codirectors). Gillis Fonda is at a later period commonly referred to as Gillis Douwes Fonda. To judge from his name, he must have been a Frisian."

While that's _really_ inobvious to a casual reader, the point is extremely well taken: Gillis Douwes is _definitely_ Frisian as a name.

*sigh*

And yeah, I share ancestry with those famous people. Weird.

ETA: Perhaps setting some sort of new record for truly tiny village:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagum

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Okay, I am a dip. If I ever had a thought in my head about where "Fonda" came from, I am almost sure I thought it was Italian.