While we gear up for the next chapter in the Van Riper House’s history, we’d like to begin by telling its story. A good place to start would be in 1663, when Juriaen Tomassen (surname is patronymic, meaning “Thomas’ son”) arrived in New Netherland aboard T’Bonta Koe (“The Spotted Cow”) from the the city of Ripen, now the oldest city modern-day Denmark under the name of Ribe.
On May 25, 1667, young Juriaen married Reyckje Harmens Coerten in the Old Bergen Dutch Reformed Church in Bergen, a small, 6-year-old village that would later develop into Jersey City. The record image above shows that this was just the fourth marriage in what was New Jersey’s first permanently chartered municipality. Stay tuned for the next chapter of the Van Riper House story…
Sources & further reading:
http://wp.ripernet.com/descendants-of-juriaen-tomassen-van…/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribe
https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/…/a-tour-of-new-net…/
Holland Society of New York; New York, New York; Bergen, Hudson Co, NJ, Kakait, Book 59