About ten years ago I blogged through my family history. Whether I will finish self-publishing it, I enjoyed writing up chapter 2 so much, I thought I'd post it here.
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1. In 1620, Roelof Martense Schenck was born in what would become the Dutch Republic. In 1650, the year that his father died, he left for America.
He was from a prominent family in the land we now call the Netherlands, with a story that we can trace back at least to the 1400s. We have sometimes assumed in the past that Schenck is German. If it were really pronounced “shank,” German would make sense.
However, as we know within the family, it should be pronounced “skank.” The skank pronunciation reflects its Dutch origins. My wife Angie married a skank. One day in our early marriage, we were watching Saturday Night Live, and in one skit Mike Myers said, “Look at those two skanks.” We looked at each other with surprise. Let’s just say she didn’t want Tom and Sophie (or her as a teacher) being skanks in the public schools. I do hope to die a skank, however.
2. There is evidence of a Wynant Schenck living in the Bleijenbeek Castle in the Netherlands in 1405. The castle was built about fifty years earlier and would generally be in Schenck possession for the next couple hundred years.
As far as our direct lineage, I can go back to the mid-1400s:
Dederick Schenck van Nydeck
Dederick II Schenck van Nydeck (1481-1525)
Dederick III Schenck van Nydeck (1514-1560)
Pieter VII Schenck van Nydeck (1547-1580)
Maarten Schenck van Nydeck (1584-1650)
Roelof Schenck van Nydeck (1620-1704)
The “van Nydeck” or “van Nydeggen” part indicates the origins of the family in Nideggen, which is currently in western Germany. This is where the family was located when they took on the last name (or surname) Schenck. At some point in the Middle Ages, people began to take on surnames. Schenck has the sense of a cupbearer or, perhaps more likely for this area, a tavern keeper. So perhaps our ancestors in 1000s Nydeggen ran a tavern, a place for food and fun.
We also must remember that the national boundaries that exist now did not exist in the late Middle Ages. The Netherlands was not a country then, nor was Germany. All this land was then part of the Holy Roman Empire, which was a vast collection of almost 2000 small states, each with a castle of its own. Although it seems crazy to us, this area of the Netherlands was even under Spanish control in the 1500s when most of the ancestors I mentioned above lived. The part of Germany in which Nideggen is located only really became German in 1713 when Prussia took it over.
This part of the Netherlands at that time was mostly the Duchy of Guelders, and most of it is still in the province of Gelderland today. If you look at where our ancestors were born, they are in this area, although Goch was in the nearby Dutchy of Cleves. This is, by the way, where the family of Vincent "van Gogh" traced back to.
Dederick II (1481-1525) – born in Bleijenbeck Castle
Dederick III (1514-1560) – Bleijenbeck Castle
Pieter VII (1547-1580) – Goch
Maarten (1584-1650) – Doesberg
3. A fun story relates to Pieter’s brother Maarten, also born in Goch (1540-1589). Like his brother, who was a general, Maarten was a military commander in the fightings of that era. He fought with the Dutch William of Orange in the fight for independence from Spain. This fight began in 1568 and would continue off and on until the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648 (sometimes called the Eighty Years War). At the end of that war, the Dutch Republic was finally born as an independent state. And our ancestor Roelof left for America two years after independence!
Back to Uncle Maarten. He wanted Bleijenbeek Castle for himself, so he physically took possession of it from his cousin. But the court of William of Orange legally favored his cousin. He became unpopular with William’s court. The last straw was the crushing Dutch defeat by the Spanish at the Battle of Gembloux in 1578. You can hear the Schenck in him. “Incompetent leaders. Ungrateful idiots. I want to be on the winning side.” He switched sides and fought in the Army of Flanders (Spanish side) for a few years before coming to his senses.
Whichever side he was on, he was known for daring, charisma, and occasionally, winning by cleverness and daring. It is said he could eat, drink, and sleep while riding on his horse, “and his men followed him like dogs.” Again, in good Schenck fashion, after a few years, he didn’t feel like the Spanish were treating him right and he returned to the Dutch side in 1585. He became Lieutenant Governor of Gelderland. In 1586 he was commissioned to build a fortress in a village that still exists today, Schenkenschanz.
Interestingly, my dad always thought of the plains of Westphalia, Germany, when we would drive south of Gainesville, Florida, coming home from Indiana. The land there comes down from higher ground into lowlands, and it reminded him of his time in Germany. It is interesting that he would have been that far north. The Allies took the north Rhineland and Westphalia back from the Nazis from March to May 1945. I knew he was stationed in Nancy, France, and then later in Manheim, Germany. But he must have crossed into Germany at some point in the north. He had no idea that he was not far from where his Schenck ancestors had once lived.
Maarten would seem to have been a tricky character. In a move not unlike the Trojan horse, he got into one city by disguising soldiers on a salt wagon. Maarten met an untimely death that, again, somehow seems quite appropriate for a Schenck. He was trying to take Nijmegen for the Dutch by entering the city through windows on the river Waal.
The river was flowing faster than expected because of rain, and they were not able to enter where they had planned. Half their barges overshot their goal. When they finally were able to get in some windows, they stumbled onto a wedding party that ended their hopes for a surprise attack. In a hasty retreat, he jumped into the river, where his armor and the swollenness of the river caused him to drown. When they found his body a few days later, he was decapitated, his head put on a pike, and his body quartered. He died August 10, 1589.
4. Our ancestor Roelof Schenck was Maarten’s great nephew, the grandson of Maarten’s less controversial brother Pieter. Pieter was also a general for the Dutch throughout those conflicts—the whole time. Roelof’s father married a woman in Amersfoort, Utrecht in 1619. The Dutchy of Utrecht was to the northwest of Guelders. And that is where Roelof was born in 1620.
My impression is that these Schencks were doers, not so much thinkers. Plenty of thinking was going on at the time in the Dutch region, but I’m not sure how much our ancestors paid attention. They seemed much more interested in fighting the war for independence from Spain. The parts of Dutch culture from this period that we prize today largely took place in the County of Holland to the west, where Amsterdam is located. This area was a distinct culture where the primary language spoken was Frisian.
The fight for independence put them on the Calvinist side, and the Schencks would be devoted to the Dutch Reformed Church after they arrived in America. We cannot know whether they even knew of Jacobus Arminius, who argued for the doctrine we twentieth and twenty-first-century Schencks espouse: Wesleyan-Arminianism. Arminius argued that God empowered our human wills to be able to choose or not choose God, not that God predetermined who would be saved. Arminius taught in Leiden until 1609, when he died. In the aftermath of his death, his view would be considered heresy at the Synod of Dort in 1619, where the Calvinist TULIP became the official position. Again, who knows whether our ancestors had strong opinions on such things. They might at first have mocked those silly Frisians to the west and their arguments over unimportant things.
The TULIP
Total depravity – Humans are thoroughly evil.
Unconditional Election – God chooses the saved.
Limited Atonement – Christ only died for the elect.
Irresistible Grace – You will be saved if God chooses.
Perseverance of the Saints – You will make it.
5. This was the time Rembrandt was painting, also in Leiden (1606-69). This was the age of Grotius (1583-1645), one of the greatest thinkers of the time. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1618 for being an Arminian. He escaped and finished out his life elsewhere. Baruch Spinoza was about 18 when Roelof left for America. Spinoza was an unorthodox Jewish philosopher who believed in pantheism and is often mentioned in the trio of rationalists from this time period: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.
Descartes himself, sometimes called the father of modernism, lived in Holland from 1629-1649. It was here that he published his famous, “I think; therefore, I am” (1637).
Our ancestor thus left the Dutch Republic for New Amsterdam in the prime of the Dutch Golden Age. If some of the greatest thinkers of the day were in Holland, Roelof headed for a new conquest in the New World. His family would prove to be foundational there as well.
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