Ancestry
Cornelius Vanderbilt's great-great-grandfather, Jan Aertson or Aertszoon, was a Dutch farmer from the village of De Bilt in Utrecht, Netherlands, who emigrated to New York as an indentured servant in 1650. The Dutch van der ("of the") was eventually added to Aertson's village name to create "van der Bilt" ("of De Bilt"), which was eventually condensed to Vanderbilt.
Read more about this topic: Cornelius Vanderbilt
Famous quotes containing the word ancestry:
“Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
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—Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901)
“I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)