Deborah Wilson
Dutcher Line - DuChier
6 Dec 1997
I have been subscribing to the Dutcher mailings about 2 months now and have not really seen any information that pertains to my Dutcher Family...although what I have is very limited and sketchy. If anyone is familiar with the DuChier (spelling?) DUTCHER family I would be interested in comparing notes. The only info I have is that our family moved from France to Holland and that is where they changed their name from DuCHIER to DUTCHER. They then came to New York. I am really interested in finding out when the name change occurred and when our family first arrived in the US.
Thank you for any information on this or where I could locate additional info. I'm hoping to have some time over the Holidays to do some research.
Here is some of my recent family history line (forgive me if the format is incorrect):
As you can tell, it gets very sketchy here. Unfortunately, most of my older relatives have passed away or I do not know how to get in touch with those still living.
Thank you for any information.
The DUTCHER line appears to have come from a Wilhelm born in the town of Heerden, 30 miles NNE of Arnheim in what was then Gelderland. His two (known) children were:
(1) Roelof Willemszen who appears (already married) as Rollof Williamszen van Heerden in 1663 in Beverwyck, NY (later Albany); and
(2) Jan Willemszen ye DUITCHER, who appears in 1689 in Ulster County, NY.
The offspring of these two are the source of the New York DUTCHERS.
Walter Kenneth Griffin in his articles (The Dutcher Family) refers to an earlier work (De Duytscher Genealogy) by Whittemore, which suggests the DUTCHER family descends from the "De Dechiers" of France, but comments that Whittemore's proposed first American DUTCHER ancestor (Dirck Corneliszen Duyster) was drowned at sea in 1636 umarried.
I believe that the "De Dechier" descendancy is one of those family sagas that has been (erroneously) passed down both by word of mouth and by amateur genealogists (like us) that is unsupported by evidence. If you think about it, there would be no reason for them to call themselves (or be called) DUTCHERS until they had left the Netherlands. Once here, they were distinguished from others as Jan ye DUITCHER - Jan the Dutchman. (Nobody calls me Peter the American here, but in fact that is what I was called one summer in Austria, to distinguish me from the Peter from Graz.)
Much more likely, your ancestry ties to the Dutcher line beginning above. I've looked and so far found nothing that I can say matches your data - but hopefully someone else on the list will find a link. Sometimes it takes a long time, so keep at it.
peter h elias
I believe you, but I'd like to throw this out as a curiousity: once last summer I looked in the 1900 census of Chicago looking for the John Dutcher that had, according to family tradition, adopted his bro.-in-law Garret See's daughter Harriet. Instead I found around four John Dutchers, I think all of which had been BORN IN GERMANY.
Dave