July 9, 2008
Our family has lived on Long Island for 12 generations. Our ancestor Jaques Cortelyou came to the New World in 1652. Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn is named after him. He was a surveyor under Peter Stuyvesant and made the first official map of lower Manhattan.
He founded a town on Long Island on the "Bay of the North River" and named it New Utrecht. He built a house on the bluff that commanded a sweeping view across the Narrows to Staten Island and regularly traveled to Manhattan, perhaps as Long Island's first commuter. One of the villages now included in Brooklyn is Bushwick. This was another area of Dutch settlement that Jaques Cortelyou had an important part in starting.
The fifth-generation Jaques lived in the Old Stone House at Gowanus, also known as the Cortelyou House, a pivotal landmark in the Battle of Long Island. George Bruce Cortelyou, eighth generation and secretary of the treasury under Theodore Roosevelt, spent much of his life on his estate, Harbor Lights, in Halesite.
Our family moved to Briarwood, Queens, in 1945 and stayed until 1972. I married Robert Smith, a language teacher in the Huntington schools. My brother, Jaques Van Wyck Cortelyou, married Gale Windsor and settled in Smithtown. My other brother, Pieter Van Wyck Cortelyou, married Kathryn Thomas and settled in Saint James. Our children -- my sons, Robert and Thomas; Jaques' daughters, Colette and Denise, and Pieter's daughter, Kathryn -- are the 12th generation living on Long Island.
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