The Fulkerson Family Pages
Araiantje Dircks, #8 of 9 of Dirck and Christina
Araiantje Dircks was born August 21, 1650 in New Amsterdam, New York, in Buswyck, Queens County. Araiantje was the sixth of seven sisters and the eighth of the nine children of Dirck Volckertszen De Noorman and Christina Vigne. Note that Amsterdam, New York, is a small town upstate in the vicinity of Schenectady; whereas New Amsterdam was renamed New York after the English Duke of York in 1665.
Minister Johannes Megapolensis served the Reformed Dutch Church of New Amsterdam from 1649 to 1670. It is likely Megapolensis baptized the two youngest children of Dirck Volckertszen De Noorman and Christina Vigne, Araiantje and Jennekin. Megapolensis had no use for papists, Quakers, or Jews, and met their ships in the harbor to try to prevent their disembarkment in the Dutch colony.
Pieter Stuyvesant would have been the Dutch Director-General in charge at the time of Araiantje's birth. Stuyvesant served as the last Dutch Director-General of the colony of New Netherland from 1647 until it was ceded provisionally to the English in 1664, after which it was renamed New York. He was a major figure in the early history of New York City.
This portrait, A Young Woman Wearing Pearls, from the 1600s Emilian School (Bolognese), depicts a woman who lived in the era of our ancestor. No doubt, as a woman of means, her wardrobe was likely much more sophisticated than that of a child grown up on the frontier in the New World of the Dutch colony in New York.
