Family 1 : Margaret BRUNER
Phillip VOLCKERTSZEN
Folkert FOLKERTSON |
| | Ann VAN CLIEFT
Folkert FULKERSON |
| | Jacob BUYS
| | Femmetjie BUYS |
| | Marritje JORIS
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|--John FULKERSON
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| Marie BOGERT
The Santa Rosa Fulkersons of the 1880's knew their earliest ancestor only as far back as John Fulkerson, whom they also believed to have been German -- this point of view can be found stated in the biography of T. S. Fulkerson, M.D. in An Illustrated History of Sonoma County, California (The Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago: 1889).
It is also curious that these 19th century Fulkersons do not mention John's participation in the Revolutionary War -- it appears that they may not have known this. Furthermore, from the recorded dates, John Fulkerson only lived to be 80 -- not quite as long as the 1889 vanity biography suggests.
In truth, the Fulkerson line has been traced back to at least 1630 with the recording of a marriage between one Dirk Holgersen to a Christine Vigne. Christine was the daughter of one of the original 30 Walloon families from Valenciennes who were settled on what is now known as Manhattan by the Dutch West India Company in 1626. Dirk was a Norwegian ship's carpenter who gave up his sea-faring life, to become a city carpenter in the tiny and horrendously primitive Dutch settlement known at the time as New Amsterdam. He adopted the life style of a farmer and settler. He built a house for his family on a small lot which he had gotten from his father-in-law. Originally, the front of their house faced the shore of the East River, but after four centuries of New York debris it is now four blocks away from the river on present day Pearl Street close to the financial district of Manhattan. All that remains of Dirk's existence on the street is a slight curve as one walks down Pearl towards Fulton after crossing Maiden Lane. One can see the curve in the early maps about 250 feet on the left of his lot, but it rarely shows up on the contemporary ones -- one has to get out and walk the street. On Pearl Street quite near where Dirk and Christine once lived, one can now step down into a celler (which is probably at the same level as the original land in the area had been in the 1600's), and have a fairly decent slice of New York pizza rather inexpensively. Thoughts of seawan, General Kieft, Wecquaesgeek uprisings, the evil Cornelis Van Tienhoven, and "Peg-leg Pete" Stuyvesant are difficult to maintain in such an environment.
Dirk was familiar enough with the Dutch language, customs and laws to later become a local government representative. He probably also must have known how to speak French in order to communicate with his wife and her family. As much as it is now if not more so, early New York was a polyglot of tongues and cultures, and one had to be very tough and quick minded to succeed. Certainly, there was more to old Dirk than can be relegated within the constricted cubby-hole of an errant ship's carpenter.
To our good fortune, he was also a somewhat short tempered fellow who had a propensity to appear in Dutch Court upon a number of occasions. Though his more or less minor infractions were not enough to keep him from eventually becoming in 1681, the magistrate of Bushwick on the Brooklyn side of New York at a ripe old age. His house (that was still standing in the 1860's) which he had built there of stone and the family cemetery close by, where he was supposedly buried, was eventually dug up some time after the end of the Civil War and used in the construction of Manhattan -- it has been pointed out elsewhere, that the streets of New York City are paved with the bones of Dirk Holgersen and his family.
Several documents concerning Dirk's trials and tribulations are extant and available in English translations for us to rediscover him. His name in its loosely Anglicized form (as filtered through a few generations of the Dutch patronymic naming system) is "Richard Fulkerson". The fact that Richard is a common name for Fulkerson males, is a testament to the lasting influence which this feisty Norwegian has had on the family, even if the memory of his ancestry, as well as his existence, has long worn away and is as unaccountable as the gravel which makes up the sidewalks of New York.
The history of the Fulkerson family in America that descended from Dirck is a vast landscape into which one can lose themselves and never return. Early on in my study, I came upon Laila Fulkerson Thompson's work, A History of the Fulkerson Family 1630 to Present (Volume 51 of the D. A. R. California Bible and Family Records). This large document was completed in 1979 in Bakersfield, California. The extent of her massive study left few rocks unturned about the family I thought at the time, and what remained to be discovered were tough rocks to find indeed. A good place to start on the Internet for contemporary research on Fulkerson line is the The FULKERSON homepages. There is a lot of research on this site, as well as information which is difficult to find anywhere else.
Like a few other of the Fulkersons who were around at the time, our John Fulkerson participated in the Revolutionary War. Archival records of such participations exist on microfilm rolls from the National Archives in two forms: Series M804, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files, 1800-1900, which is supposedly everything (with the files for an individual divided into two parts: "Selected Papers" and "Non-Selected Papers"), and a Series M805, Selected Records from Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files which has only those pertinent files selected for the pension. There can be a marked difference between the material in M805 and the "Selected Papers" section of M804. However, in the case of John Fulkerson, these two microfilm rolls contain almost the same selected information. I have made a catalog of extracted material transcribed from John Fulkerson's Revolutionary War Pension File (#W8836) from the larger M804 series (printed on microfilm roll 1032).
The old Dutch bible which is mentioned in the above Pension Request, is of some interest: John's father, Folkert (also known as "Fulkard") Fulkerson, was baptized at the Middlesex Dutch Reformed Church (five of Folkert's brothers were also baptized in this church) in New Brunswick, New Jersey on 18 June 1727. It would not be too presumptuous, to assume that this same bible had been given to John from Folkert. If only we had it now to test this theory.
In the biography of T. S. Fulkerson which is in An Illustrated History of Sonoma County, it is mentioned that his father, "Fulkird" (the son of John Fulkerson) had five brothers who were killed in Kentucky by the Indians. If this is true or who these brothers might be is not known, however one would also surmise that they were killed some time before their parents' pension requests, and that the list of children included here is then somewhat incomplete.
Some additional material about John Fulkerson's life can be found in a note about him in A History of the Fulkerson Family from 1630 to the Present by Laila Fulkerson Thompson (Vol. 51 of D. A. R. California Bible and Family Records).
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This page created on 04/16/99 12:36. Updated 10/18/2015 17:25.