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Rutger
Janse Bleecker
 Rutger Janse was born in Albany in 1675 - the son of blacksmith-turned-trader
Jan Janse and his wife Margarita Van Woert Bleecker. He followed his father
and brothers in the fur trade - an ambition that often took him beyond Albany
and into the Indian country.
Settling
in Albany by 1712, at age thirty-seven he married
Catharina Schuyler - the thirty-four-year-old widow
of Mayor Johannes Abeel. Already the mother of six,
she gave birth to four Bleecker children between
1713 and 1720. This middle-aged couple lived in her
house on Market Street where they soon became Albany
mainstays. In 1714, he became a deacon of the Albany
Dutch church where he and his wife were frequent
baptism sponsors.
Settling
in to the Albany end of an extensive family-based
peacetime trading network, Rutger Janse became quite
wealthy. With wealth came civic responsibility. He
was appointed city recorder in 1725 and mayor of
Albany in 1726. He held the mayoralty until 1729.
Over the next decade, he was commissioned as one
of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs. After
1740, he retired to his riverside home.
Rutger
Janse Bleecker wrote a will in January of 1756 which
stated he was "of frail body." He mentioned his dead wife, Catharina, and three surviving children. His estate included personal and real property as well as the lands left by his brother Nicholas. He died that summer and was buried under the Albany church on August 5, 1756. He was eighty-one years old.
Two
of Rutger Janse's and Catharina children, John Rutger
and Margarita, became prominent Albany residents.
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Notes: The life of Rutger Janse Bleecker is CAP biography number 227. This
profile is derived chiefly from community based
resources.
This portrait is attributed to Nehemiah Partridge and is in the collections
of the Albany Institute of History and Art.
By Stefan Bielinski, Colonial Albany Social History Project [http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany]
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