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Sara
Gansevoort
 Sara Gansevoort was born in 1718 the third of ten children of Catalina De Wandelaer - a Huguenot-ancestry Albany native, and Albany brewer Leendert Gansevoort. Sara's family lived in a home near Leendert's riverside brewery on the Market Street location that would remain a Gansevoort family landmark for many years.
As
the eldest daughter, Sara was expected to care for
her younger siblings. Although her family was only
slightly more affluent than their neighbors, Sara's
portrait was painted by limner Nehemiah Partridge.
Over
the winter of 1731-32, a sickness (probably smallpox)
swept Albany. Dutch church records recorded more
than seventy burials for that time - as the disease
claimed a large slice of the city's population. Before
the end of the year, the Gansevoorts had paid dearly.
On December 31, 1731, thirteen year old Sara was
buried along with her infant sister Agnietie (Agnes)
in the Dutch Church cemetery.
Sara
Gansevoort's sad story is further dramatized in an
essay written in 1986 by Colonial Albany Project
Associate Shirley Rice.
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Notes: Limner
portrait (painted during the 1720s) by itinerent
artist Nehemiah Partridge (died 1737) in the collection
of the Albany Institute of History and Art. Partridge
also painted Sara's parents and a number of other
early Albany people.
For
more information on the Gansevoort family, Alice
P. Kenney's The
Gansevoorts of Albany: Dutch Patricians in the Upper
Hudson Valley (Syracuse, 1969) is an
engaging yet definitive family history based on the
lifelong scholarship of a pre-eminent historian of
the Albany Dutch.
By Stefan Bielinski, Colonial Albany Social History Project [http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany]
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