GERRIT van Zandt of Amsterdam spelled his name Vansant. Later generations corrected that, but he was a stubborn guy, a trait that ran in the family. Father Chris insisted, for example, on not giving Gerrit’s mother her own name. After he arrived in America as an immigrant in 1652 and registered his family, he said his own name was Stoffel, his son was Gerrit, and Gerrit’s mother was, simply, Moedertje, lil’ mama. There was a reason. She was only twenty when she died, right after Gerrit’s birth. This left a deep mark, as did the early death in Holland of Klaas, Gerrit’s little brother from a second marriage. That was the signal to leave for America on the next boat.
Three Van Zandt families came to America. One settled in New York, the other in Albany, and Gerrit and Liesbeth van Zandt pitched their tents in Pennsylvania, and from there later in North Carolina. They had kids.
DUTCH people in America were known for being willing to marry non-Dutch spouses. They adapted to their new environment and circumstances, and integrated effortlessly. This was in part because the Dutch, more than any other nation, were city people. In Gerrit and Lies’s time, 34 percent of the Dutch lived in cities with populations of ten thousand or more. In Italy this was a mere 15 percent, in England 12, and in France 9 percent. City folks are often more mobile than others, literally but also figuratively.
With the Van Zandts this took a while though. They first married into other Dutch families, with names such as Van de Grift, Korsten and Van Bommel, but eventually they, too, internationalized. So when one day Marie van Zandt fell in love with Walter, the Dutch-peeps-only attitude was done with, and she became a Wyatt. From there it was a small step to weddings with men from very far away. Like Armenia.
THE KARDASHIAN girls’ father, Robert, was the one with Armenian blood. People over fifty mostly know him from the O.J. Simpson murder case, because Robert was his lawyer and on live TV day in and day out. The girls’ mother is a Van Zandt family tree member, descending directly from Amsterdam’s Gerrit and Liesbeth. But if O.J. is something you only heard about, and nothing more, then you know her mainly as the matriarch of that never-ending reality TV series Keeping up with the Kardashians, and as the mother of the five K’s: Kim, Kourtney, Khloé, Kendall and Kylie. Her own name is Kris.
If Moedertje Van Zandt would have known what mothers would be capable of doing three or four hundred years later, she might have shaken her young head. But then, maybe not, because there is really little new under the sun. Women like Kris, Kim and the others are now called socialites, media personalities, they are famous for being famous. In Moedertje’s time and later, court circles behaved like that. Women were courtesans, hostesses with wigs and cleavages who fanned themselves, they had names like Madame de Pompadour, the common people knew their name. They were no better or different than others, but they provided for their support by being known.
Gerrit and Liesbeth Van Zandt named their children Jesinah, Josias, Johannes, Jacobus and Joris, the five J’s. They were not known, much less famous. But they were not a bit less than the five K’s.
