Ancestral embarrassment or entrepreneur?

It has been said that one examines his or her roots at their own peril. We all have been conditioned to believe that a horse thief or two might be lurking in our ancestral past but - hopefully - a few honorable people as well.

It came as quite shock to me that one of my Dutch ancestors was known as "Manhattan's first and most famous prostitute." (And that was when Manhattan was a part of New Netherland around the 1630s before the Brits stole the colony from the Dutch and renamed it New York.)

Assuming the indigenous Indians didn't engage in this time honored profession, she might well have been the first European white hooker in Manhattan. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me give you a little background information that lead up to this revelation.

There is nothing more exciting than travel to my wife. She always wants to be somewhere else than where she is at the moment. She is frequently online checking flight information to anywhere on the globe.

She has often thought it would be exciting for me to visit Amsterdam, my father's birthplace, so I could experience the joy of connecting with my ancestral Dutch roots. It may sound kind of silly for a first generation American, but I intuitively think of our founding fathers when I think of my roots, not Queen Wilhelmina. But then again my father traveled all over the globe in the Dutch navy as a kid, and never had a desire to visit Holland after becoming an American citizen as a young man. He was a flag waving American patriot - a diminishing breed. The last time he visited Europe, he went to Germany on business and then Paris. He was a French chef and a committed Francophile. He bypassed Holland on that last trip.

About a year ago, I happened upon Grietje Reiniers (sometimes Reyniers) on the Internet, and that she had immigrated to the "USA" before the Dutch formally surrendered "New York" to the British in 1674. The Daughters of the American Revolution were not yet formed. I quickly notified my children that their ancestry predated the DAR! What an elite group they are. I had an ancestor who was here before the British. Do you have any idea what it's like to have your DNA in an "American" before the Brits were here and yet not being an American Indian? Nevertheless, little did I know where this story was going.

Now back to Grietje Reiniers, America's first prostitute. She was born in Amsterdam in 1602 and came to New Amsterdam in 1630. My father, Johan Reiniers, was also born in Amsterdam, but he came to "New Amsterdam," (by then renamed New York), in 1920, some three hundred years later. She came here because she was fired as a barmaid in Amsterdam for apparently being too "quarrelsome." My dad came here for career advancement in the culinary arts. There is an early reference to Grietje in "The History of the City of New York" (1896). On page 86 of Volume II, an account is given of Grietje Reiniers being sentenced for slander, the complaining witness describing her as "a woman of questionable character." She next appears as the main character in "The Drowning Room" (1995) a historical "novel" written by British journalist Michael Pye, based on facts that the author uncovered while researching his nonfiction study of New York City, which revealed her to be "a known prostitute who once publicly measured saliors' private parts with a broomstick!" It was favorably reviewed by The New York Times. (I had never heard of the book ,and if any of my friends read it, they were too decent to ask me a most obvious question.)

She next appeared in Russell Shorto's 2004 internationally acclaimed nonfiction best seller, "The Island at the Center of the World," a narrative history of Manhattan, the author's premise being that the Dutch set a multi-ethnic cultural course for what was to be ultimately typically American, not the uptight, straight-arrow British puritans in New England.

Shorto hooked up with Charles Gehring, a specialist in the Dutch language of the 17nth century who was asked to decipher 12,000 pages of obscure Dutch script of the 17th century that no modern Dutchman could read. The result was this book about a forgotten colony that shaped America. Forgotten because the victor always gets to rewrite history. So when the British took over after The Treaty of Westminster - 65 years of history was erased.

The Netherlands at that time was the melting pot of Europe. It is estimated that one half of the population in New Netherland wasn't even Dutch; that it was a quintessential, liberal, accommodating, tolerant extension of its European motherland.

This may explain the notoriety of my distant ancestress. Prostitution is still legal in Amsterdam three centuries later! Shorto talks about her "walking the strand, hiking her petticoats to display her wares for the sailors." She had a knack for publicity stunts. Grietje married a dark-featured pirate who was the son of a Dutch pirate who married a Moroccan woman. Although they had children, Shorto says, "since she kept at her work, it wasn't always clear who the father was."

Oh well. It is what it is, and we are what we are. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. observed in 1867, "We are all omnibuses in which our ancestors ride, and every now and then one of them sticks his head out and embarrasses us."

Or one could be more understanding and say that Grietje gave a more "fleshed out" meaning to the term entrepreneurial.