The History of the Faulkenberg Family: Netherlands and New York

FYI: Everything in italics at the beginning is an intro to my research on the Faulkenbergs of Perry, County, Indiana. To skip straight to the beginning of traceable Faulkenberg history in the Netherlands, scroll past the text in italics.

With the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing during the 2020 Christmas season, I did all of my Christmas shopping online instead of the usual sixty or seventy percent of it. As I was looking for something to get my dad, I found an 1850 census book from Perry County, Indiana on eBay. I figured there were probably Faulkenbergs in Perry County at that time - but I didn’t know for sure, and I wasn’t able to preview the inside of the book before ordering it. According to the census, which unsurprisingly showed up a couple of weeks late, Perry County had three Faulkenberg households at that time, all in Oil Township. The oldest person of all of them was “James Faulkenborough”, who according to the census was 65 years old in 1850 and had come from South Carolina.

An old photo from Tell City in Perry County

Years ago I had heard about this form of our last name, which to me, sounds very Scottish. So, I Googled “Faulkenborough Scotland” and found a link to a genealogy book written by the son of a U.S. President. “Faulkenborough” and “Scotland” appeared in two totally different sections of the book, but the author said that a direct ancestor of his father, the President, had the last name Faulkenborough and lived in Anson County, North Carolina not long before the American Revolution. So, I Googled Anson County to see if it was at all close to the South Carolina border, and as it turns out, its southern edge runs right along the South Carolina border for several miles.

A screenshot of the digital version of the 1790 Lancaster County, South Carolina census

At this point, I texted my dad and one of his brothers, and my uncle said he had an old Faulkenberg genealogy book that mentioned Anson County, North Carolina. Based on that, we all agreed it was extremely likely that we were distant cousins of this particular American President. The next day, I started looking up what counties on the South Carolina side share a border with Anson County. One of them is called Lancaster County. The first United States census was conducted in 1790, and when I found a digital copy of the Lancaster County census from that year, it listed eleven different “Faulkenburg” households and a total of 71 apparent family members.

Not long after, I asked my uncle if he could get me a copy of the genealogy book. So, he scanned every single page of it and sent me a digital copy. A lot of what I’ve been able to piece together is based on that book, which was compiled in 1977 by Victor E. Faulkenburg, a somewhat distant cousin of mine who graduated from Indiana University in 1934 and ended up living in Benson, Arizona. He says he has no recollection of his father, who died when Victor was very young. Though he does say that his father was a man named Oscar Arden Faulkenborough who was a teacher at Oriole Grade School in Oil Township. Oscar’s last name was apparently also sometimes printed as “Faulkenboro”, but Victor and his mother ended up going by “Faulkenburg”.

Many of my findings have also come from the documented histories of the Fortenberry, Helms, and Van Valkenburg families, all of whom appear to be related to us. In fact, the book that Victor Faulkenburg put together in 1977 was done with the help of Wanda Fortenberry, the wife of an apparent distant cousin of his. Wanda was living in Clarkston, Georgia at the time, and it seems that their family is a branch descending from the South Carolina Faulkenburgs. Apparently “Fortenbury'' and “Fortenberry” are names that developed out of ours.

Before you read my version of our family history, I should probably be up front about what my biases are in my research. First of all, when I discovered that there was a real possibility that we were the distant cousins of an American President, that was obviously a connection I wanted to confirm and not refute. To be as transparent as possible, I will add that of all the American Presidents, the one in question is not one that I was particularly excited about beforehand, nor is it one I particularly disliked.

More than wanting to be a distant cousin of a President though, I wanted there to be some solid answers to these questions: Where does the Faulkenberg name really come from? Who was the first Faulkenberg to come to America from Europe? And when did that happen? Specifically, my biases in this leaned mostly towards Scotland, Ireland, and Norway. Other than Italy and Spain - two countries the Faulkenbergs are absolutely not from - Scotland, Ireland, and Norway are right at the top of the list of European countries I’d like to visit in the future. I thought it would have been amazing to visit these countries and try to find where the Faulkenbergs lived exactly. Norway seemed like something of a long shot, but a very small amount of Norwegian appears in my uncle’s DNA profile. Plus, there is a street called Falkenborgvegen in Trondheim, a city on Norway’s Atlantic coast. Similar street names exist in Denmark as well.

Going back to the point of finding a place in Europe where the Faulkenbergs lived, there is a Falkenburg Castle in Germany and a Valkenburg Castle in the Netherlands. Castles are objectively cool. So I would throw in Germany and the Netherlands as fourth and fifth place in my biases - probably in that order because Germany is also close to the top of the list of European countries I want to visit. Plus, the castle in Germany is in much better shape than the one in the Netherlands.

I think you should know about these biases, but I also want you to understand this: After I had already done just about all of my digging and fully formed my theory of where our Faulkenbergs came from, I found a website put together by Adrianne Fortenberry Criminger, the daughter of Wanda Fortenberry who goes by Andie. She and I had come to the exact same conclusions about what country our family came from, who exactly migrated to America, and who our oldest known European ancestor is. There is one relatively small part of her version that is different from mine, which I will go into. But more importantly, her website provided significant evidence to confirm my theory of who exactly our European ancestors are.

One more thing: As you start reading, it won’t take long to notice that some names appear underlined and in bold, while most others do not. Anytime you see a name that’s formatted like this, all it means is that person is a direct ancestor of my dad and his five siblings and that it’s the first time they’ve been mentioned by their first and last name.

It’s hard to be 100% certain of anything in life, especially something that happened 472 years ago. But based on record keeping and DNA evidence, I feel very confident that if you descended from any of the Faulkenbergs of Perry County, Indiana (all spellings included), your oldest traceable Faulkenberg ancestor is a man named Andries Van Valkenburg. In fact, if I had to put a percentage on how confident I am that we’re Andries’ descendants, I would say it’s just north of 97.21%. Based on DNA test kits alone, that’s the percentage that familytreedna.com puts on the likelihood that men in the Fortenberry family share a common ancestor with Colonel David Van Valkenburg in the last twelve generations. The Van Valkenburg family tree has overall been very well kept during the past few centuries, and it extends all the way back to Andries, a man born in 1549 in Millen, Limburg.

The red pin represents the location of Valkenburg, Netherlands

At the time, this part of the Limburg region fell within the borders of the Netherlands. Today, it’s a part of Belgium, a country where roughly half the population are native speakers of Dutch, a language often referred to as Flemish when talking specifically about Belgium. Millen is only about fifteen miles southwest of the town of Valkenburg and Valkenburg Castle, which today are still considered a part of the Netherlands, lying in the country’s very small far southeastern pocket with Belgium and Germany very close on both sides. In modern vehicles and traffic, Brussels, Belgium is about an hour and a half to the west, and Cologne, Germany is just over an hour to the east. According to the Van Valkenburg family genealogy website, Andries worked as a tailor.

The ruins of Valkenburg Castle above the town of Valkenburg

There doesn’t seem to be any record of Andries’ wife, but he had at least two sons and a daughter. Our ancestor, Lambert Dryeskens Van Valkenburg, was born in Millen in 1580. His brother was Michiel and his sister’s name was Maria. Lambert married a woman whose first name was Maritje, and the two of them had four sons and two daughters. Our ancestor is the second youngest of these six children - a boy also named Lambert Van Valkenburg. According to the Van Valkenburg family genealogy website, Lambert was born in 1614 in the town of Valkenburg, which in 2021 is almost exactly the same size as Jasper, Indiana.

A Dutch language document with the names "Lambert Van Valckinburgh" and "Annitie Jacobs" - perhaps their marriage certificate

Lambert was married to Annetje Jacobs on January 4th, 1642 in the Netherlands, and the two of them came to New York City a year later. Of course when the Dutch newlyweds arrived in America, New York City was still known as “New Amsterdam”. And even though it only had about 500 inhabitants at that time according to the New Netherland Institute, it was the capital of the Dutch colony known as New Netherland. A specific explanation for the couple’s move to America doesn’t appear to exist today, but according to immigrationtounitedstates.org, a lot of the people who came to New Amsterdam in the 1630’s and 1640’s were Dutch people that had been sponsored by wealthy investors back home to do business in New Amsterdam and other Dutch settlements in the colony to help grow its economy.

Item N is labelled as the "house of Lambert van Valkenburgh"

Lambert and Annetje owned three different plots of land in New Amsterdam, the second of which was a grant from the Dutch West Indies Company. According to both the Fortenberrys and the Van Valkenburgs, the third plot had 50 acres of land, including the spot where the Empire State Building stands today. For what it’s worth, this was the world’s tallest building from 1931 until 1970. In 1652, the couple sold the land to Claes Martensen van Rosenvelt, a direct ancestor of Teddy and Franklin, and then moved to Fort Orange, another Dutch settlement just up the Hudson River that would soon be known as Albany.

A map of 1640's New Amsterdam made in the 1800's using old land grants from the Dutch West India Company. Zooming in, you can see "L Van Valkenburg" has a plot of land in blue next to the fort.

According to Genealogy of the Van Valkenburg Family in America: Volume I, Lambert and Annetje Van Valkenburg had three daughters: Anna, Catrym, and Rachel. They also had two sons named Lambert Lambertse Van Valkenburg and Jochem Lambertse Van Valkenburg. It is believed that Lambert died as a small child. The other son, Jochem, was born in 1646 in New Amsterdam and then spent most of his childhood in the Fort Orange (Albany) area, where he married Eva Hendrickse Vrooman.

Jochem and Eva had a pair of daughters, Engelite and Jannetje, as well as eight sons by the names of Johannes, Hendrick, Abraham, Bartholomeus, Lambert, Isaac, Jacobus, and Jochum. In the first volume of Genealogy of the Van Valkenburg Family in America, the author divides the entire family tree into ten branches, one for each of the children of Jochem Van Valkenburg and wife Eva. About 55 pages are devoted to all the known descendants of Johannes, their oldest son. The second branch is made up of the descendants of the second born son, Hendrick Van Valkenburg, who was born in 1676. This entire branch only takes up about half the space on page 59.

The Van Valkenburghs buried here in the Albany area were born in the late 1700’s. Funnily enough, one of their maiden names is LaGrange.

There you can find the name of Hendrick’s first wife, Cornelia Bever, as well as his second, Anna Huyck, who was the mother of all his children. Also listed are his daughter Eva and his five sons: Andries, Jochum, Hendrick, Johannes, and Isaac. Other than the name of Eva’s only apparent daughter, there is nothing more than a note saying, “There is no record of this branch other than that shown below though, no doubt, some of the 2,000 unidentified Van Valkenburgs belong to this branch.”