The following scholarly account was written by C. A. Baker:2769

Teunis Jansen Covert is believed to be the progenitor of the Covert family in America. He was born around 1620 in the village of Lommel located in present day Belgium near its northern border with the Netherlands. In the 1620s, Lommel and most of Belgium was part of the Spanish Netherlands and the only accepted religion in the area, at least by its Spanish rulers, was Roman Catholicism. To the northeast of the Spanish Netherlands was the United Netherlands, an area where the Protestant religion was the predominate faith and toLerance of all religious faiths was the practice. It is for this reason that the Pilgrims sought refuge in Holland (Netherlands) before embarking on the Mayflower to America in 1620, the Protestant Dutch Walloons including our ancestors Joris Janseen Rapalje and his wife Catalyntje Trico (see Chapter 1,) sought refuge before sailing to New Amsterdam in 1624, and Marie Warenbuer Ferree and her family (see Chapter 6) fled to the Netherlands from France and from Catholic persecution before emigrated to America in the early 1700s. We do not know whether Teunis Jansen Covert moved north to Heemstede in North Holland with his parents when he was young or at a later date, however it is safe to assume that the motivation behind his move was to escape the hardships imposed on them as Protestants by the Spanish. Furthermore, the period of 1618 through 1648, today known as the Thirty Years’ War, was a period of almost continuous warfare between the Spanish (Roman Catholics) and the Dutch (Protestants) over the control of the Netherlands. The war was finally settled in 1648 with the Treaty of Munster wherein Spain accepted the United Netherlands as a sovereign nation.

Teunis Jansen married Barbara Lucas Van Kessel in December of 1645 near her hometown of Hoorn located in North Holland, the peninsula shown on the map north of Amsterdam. After their marriage they moved to Teunis’ home in the village of Heemstede located just south of Haarlem and east of Amsterdam. Barbara and Teunis raised four children between the date of their marriage and their departure to the New World in 1651. Their youngest child, Jan, was born in January of 1651; their oldest child, Lucas Teunise, my 9th great grandfather, was born on February 24, 1647. The parents embarked for New Amsterdam sometime in the early summer of 1651 leaving all four of their children behind with relatives.

We can only speculate what motivated Teunis and Barbara to leave the Netherlands for America and leave their four children behind. The war had ended in 1648 and the Netherlands had become a prosperous nation. It may be however, that after the close of the war the influx of new immigrants into Holland resulted in a high unemployment rate despite the general prosperity of the nation as a whole. Teunis may have had trouble finding a job and he may have been influenced by the constant advertised promises by the Dutch West India Company of free passage to and free land grants in America and New Amsterdam in exchange for a short period of indentureship to cover the company’s expenses. Unlike the Puritan migration to the north in New England, the Dutch West India Company was a business venture that required workers and was expected to show a profit. They therefore encouraged and even sponsored the migration of young singles and young married Dutch men and women without children. The company was less interested in starting a new settlement in America than they were in promulgating a business, especially the fur trading business, and children were no help to them in achieving these goals. It is possible that the only way for Teunis and Barbara to take advantage of the company’s offer was to leave their children behind and send for them later. Incidentally, this attitude on the part of the Dutch West India Company was not appreciated by many of the early Dutch settlers of New York and when the English finally gained control of the area by treaty in 1674, the change in the political control of the colony was welcomed by many of the Dutch settlers.

Teunis and Barbara lived in New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan Island from the time of their arrival in 1651 until they moved out to Bedford on Long Island in the year 1660. In 1660 Bedford was a small growing community located just east of the village of Breuckelen (Brooklyn). While in New Amsterdam the family had grown by three with the birth of a child in 1653, 1654, and 1658. Church records show that they were members of the Dutch Reformed Church in New Amsterdam. In the 1667 map of Brooklyn shown on the left, Bedford is located in the lower right hand corner, southeast of “Brookland [Brooklyn] Parish” and almost due south of Wallabout Bay off the East River. In the upper left hand corner of the map is the tip of Manhattan Island. In the 1600s a ferry operated from Manhattan to Brooklyn and from there the road ran southeast through Bedford. Joris Jansen Rapalje, my 8th great grandfather (and the subject of Chapter 1 in my Baker Family Tree Blog) occupied and farmed a major parcel of land that fronted on part of Wallabout Bay (now the site of the Brooklyn Naval Yard). As the map clearly shows, in the 1660s most of what is now Brooklyn was a series of large farmlands.

Joris and his wife Catalyna were no doubt familiar with the Covert family as they were both members of the Dutch Reformed Church in Brooklyn Parish and in fact when Joris Rapalje died on February 21, 1663, Teunis Jansen Covert was elected to replace him as an Elder of the Church. The sketch of the church on the right is believed to depict the Dutch Reformed Church of Brooklyn constructed in 1666 and the location where the Covert family worshiped for many years and the location of the marriages and baptisms of many of their children and their grandchildren. The original Brooklyn church was constructed near the intersection of present day Fulton and Smith streets. The original village of Bedford is today part of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a gradually improving African-American community containing numerous tree-lined streets with affordable brownstone rowhouses. [“Affordable” is a relative term in New York City since when I googled “Bedford-Stuyvesant Real Estate” almost every rowhouse was priced at more than $500K.]

In 1663, the four children of Teunis and Barbara arrived from Holland to reunite with their parents at their new home in Bedford. Lucas Teunise, the oldest child was sixteen years old when he arrived in America with his two sisters and one younger brother. From the year of 1663 forward, Teunis Covert’s name appears a number of times in the public and church records although the historical records reveal little information about his life. In 1676 and 1683 his name was listed as having been assessed in Brooklyn. In December of 1663 he and Barbara witnessed the baptism of their youngest child, Mauritsz. In May of 1683, Teunis was listed as a witness at the baptism of his son Lucas’ twin sons, Abraham and Isaac (my 5th great uncles). In 1687, Teunis Covert signed the Oath of Allegiance [required of all citizens by the new English government that by treaty assumed control of New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1674 and renamed it New York.] His name appeared again in 1691 and in 1692 on baptismal records. The exact date of Teunis Covert’s death is not known although it is believed that he died at his home in Bedford around the year 1697. He would have been 72 years old. The date of the death of Barbara Covert is unknown.

One final comment about our first Covert ancestor in America is worth noting. When Teunis Janse arrived in New Amsterdam in 1653 he was not using the surname Covert nor any of the other numerous variations of that name such as Couvers, Coevert, or Coevors that appeared later in the early Dutch colonial records. Teunis’ use of the name Covert (actually it was Coevers) was not recorded until some ten years after his arrival. The use of surnames was a common practice in England during this period [see Chapter 16 about the Wolcott family for a discussion of the origin of surnames in England], however in other countries in Europe including the Netherlands, the last names were patronymic. That is, the child’s last name was a variation of their father’s proper name or first name. For example, Teunise Jansen (or Janse, Janseen, or Janszen) denoted that he was the son of Jan. Teunise Jansen’s oldest son they named Lucas which then became Lucas Teunise (or Teunissen) or Lucas the son of Teunise. The derivation of the Covert surname is unknown although it is possible that it came from Coevorden, or Koevorde, a fortified town in the Providence of Drenthe, Holland. Obviously, the Dutch in New Amsterdam adopted the use of surnames from their English neighbors in America.