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Anna
Cuyler Van Schaick
 Anna Cuyler was born in Albany in November 1685, the first of the twelve children of Johannes and Elsie Ten Broeck Cuyler. Her father was a prominent merchant and one-time mayor of Albany. Her mother was the daughter of one of the founders of the Albany community.
While
most early Albany marriages involved brides in their
early twenties, in 1712 twenty-seven-year-old Annar
became the second wife of thirty-year-old Anthony
Van Schaick, Jr. He was a son of a faming-based,
early Albany business family. Over the next fourteen
years, Anna gave birth to at least nine of the previously
childless Van Schaick's children - the last arriving
as she passed her forty-first birthday.
The
couple set up housekeeping in Albany's first ward.
By the 1720s, they had moved across State Street
and were living in a house next to that of her parents
on the east side of Pearl Street. A decade later,
Anthony Van Schaick, Jr. inherited his father's estate
on an island in the Hudson ten miles north of Albany.
Like many affluent Albany business families of that
time, Anna's family enjoyed both city and countryside
residences.
The
beautiful pastel portrait shown here was done by
Henrietta Dering Johnston during the 1720s.
Anna
Cuyler Van Schaick died in July 1741 at the age
fifty-five and was buried in the Dutch church burial
ground. Her husband lived until 1759.
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Sources: The life of Anna Cuyler Van Schaick is CAP biography
number 367. This profile is derived chiefly from
family and community-based resources. She has been
the subject of a biographical profile by Shirley
A. Rice which appeared in Women of Colonial Albany:
A Community History Calendar for 1986 (issued by
the Colonial Albany Social History Project in 1985)
and available from the project.
Portrait
by Henrietta Johnston Derring in the collection of
the New York State Museum. Another portrait of this
wealthy woman may have been painted by a regional
limner.
By Stefan Bielinski, Colonial Albany Social History Project [http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany]
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