The Van Frank Family, part 1 - origins

One of our family tree branches goes back and connects with the Van Frank Family.  Here's how it goes:

If we start with my grandfather, Hubert Deal Hagan, here's what our family tree would look like:

 

I've not really spent a lot of time researching beyond John Van Frank, so the focus of these next few blog posts will be to explore the Van Frank/Van Vranken family.  In this blog post, I'd like to explore the origins of the Van Frank family.  The next few blog posts will then go back to each of our ancestors and review the documents that I've assembled about each ancestor.

Origins of the Van Frank Name:

In millenia past, people used to only go by a first name.  As the human race became more populated, there became a need to differentiate people in the same area.  Then as there became more Johns, or more Peters, or more Williams, there needed to be another name added.  So in some early European records that I've seen, you would start to see, for example, John, son of William.   Or John Sr. and John Jr.  Then when that started not to work because there were too many Johns, they would add a surname that reflected the town they lived in or their occuaption.  So you might start to see John Black, meaning John, the Blacksmith.

The surname Vranken came from the town of "Frankenburg".  In the Dutch language, "van" means "from". So when our ancestors took the name of "Van Vranken", that meant they were "of" the town of Frankenburg".

From my research, I know that our ancestor Philip Van Frank (1769-1838) had changed his name from Van Vranken to Van Frank.    Van Frank was definitely a more "americanized" form of his last name.

Immigration of the VanVrankens

Our immigrant ancestor was Claes Gerritsen.  He was born in Frankenburg, Germany sometime between 1600 and 1625.  Because of the Thirty Years' War and Frankenburg lying in the path of the warfare, Claes left his homeland and went 200 miles down the river Rhine to Amsterdam in the Netherlands.   By 1640, he had left and immigrated to America.  (Remember that the first settlement in America was Jamestown in 1607 and the Mayflower with the Pilgrims sailed in 1620).

Claes' had two known sons, Ryckert and Gerrit.   It doesn't seem as though Claes' or his sons actually went by Van Vranken surname until the grandson Gerrit Ryckertse Van Franken.   I'll dig into this more in later blogs.

Family Movement in America

So the immigrant Claes Gerritsen was in Rensselaerwyck in 1640 in the Colony of New Netherland (which was later very eastern New York).  The next 4 or 5 generations stayed in this area, which included Albany and Schenectady.  It wasn't until the Philip Van Frank (1769-1838) generation that several of the family group decided to move west.  Many of them ended up in Elkhart County, Indiana.

Early Religion

This family were members of the Reformed Protestant Dutch church for many generations.   Family historians have been very fortunate in this regard because the Reformed Dutch church kept meticulous records, way earlier than colonial and later state records were mandated.

In the next blog post, I'll start with our earliest known Van Frank ancestor, John Van Frank.  I'll write about his life and family.  Each blog post thereafter will go back, generation by generation and we'll just see what we see!