Before America: Two Van Lew Departures

The Van Leeuwen story in America begins not with one journey but two, separated by a century.

Fleeing Persecution (~1570)

Around 1570, the Van Leeuwen family fled the Southern Netherlands — the area around Leuven (Louvain), a city in what is today Belgium. In the 1500s, the entire Low Countries were under Spanish Habsburg rule, and the Spanish Inquisition was systematically persecuting Protestants. The Duke of Alva’s campaign was among the most brutal in European history.

According to family tradition — passed orally through five generations to W. Randolph Van Liew — the family were silk manufacturers and people of means near Leuven. The silk trade flourished in Leuven in 1570. When persecution made life untenable, they fled north, first to Amsterdam and then to Utrecht, where they lived for roughly a century.

The Golden Age and Its End

For the hundred years the Van Leeuwens lived in the Netherlands, they witnessed something extraordinary: the Dutch Golden Age. The Dutch Republic became the wealthiest nation on earth. Amsterdam was the richest city in the world. The Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602, controlled trade from Japan to India. The world’s first stock exchange opened in Amsterdam. Rembrandt and Vermeer were painting. The Dutch merchant marine carried roughly half of all European shipping.

The family tradition holds that the Van Leeuwens “acquired much wealth in Holland” and held investments in both the Dutch East and West India Companies. They were not marginal people. They were participants in the greatest commercial enterprise of the age. But by the late 1660s, the Golden Age was ending. Wars with England and France drained the treasury. Textile production peaked around 1670 and declined. Taxes climbed to among the highest in Europe. In 1672 — the Rampjaar, “Disaster Year” — France, England, and two German states attacked simultaneously. Frederick Hendrickson Van Leeuwen left Utrecht two years before the collapse.

Crossing the Atlantic (1670)

Frederick Hendrickson Van Leeuwen is the immigrant ancestor of every Van Liew, Van Lieu, and Van Lew in America. His name tells his story: “Frederick” is his given name; “Hendrickson” means “son of Hendrick” (his father, who stayed in Holland); and “Van Leeuwen” is the family name — he is a Van Lew. He left for New York in 1670, six years after the English had captured New Amsterdam and renamed it. The colony he entered was still Dutch-speaking, still Dutch-cultured, but now under English law. Fewer than 10,000 Europeans lived from Albany to the Delaware. The Dutch West India Company had struggled for decades to attract settlers — life in the Page 6Van Lew • From the Lion • Ten Generations

Netherlands was simply too comfortable. Frederick was among the last wave of Dutch emigrants before a near-total halt in immigration that would last over a century. He settled in Jamaica, on Long Island (Dutch: Rusdorp), married Dina Jans in 1681, purchased property in Middlesex and Somerset Counties, New Jersey, in 1701, and left a will in 1712 that described him as a “Gentleman.” His estate in Holland, “if ever it be obtained,” was to be divided among all his children.