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Janet
Glen Cuyler
 Janet Glen Cuyler
by
Stefan Bielinski
Janet (Jannetje) Glen was born in 1743 the daughter of Albany merchant Jacob and Elizabeth Cuyler Glen.
She
married Abraham C. Cuyler in the Albany Dutch Church
in April 1764. The first of her five children was
baptized there the following June. Janet Cuyler had
been a pewholder at the Dutch church since 1759.
The
new family settled into a comfortable house on North
Pearl Street where Abraham prospered as a merchant/trader
who became more and more closely allied with the
royal government of New York. After serving in several
municipal offices, he was appointed mayor of Albany
in 1770.
However,
the upward arc of this traditional early Albany family
was ruined by the conflict with the British. In 1776,
Mayor Cuyler was arrested, banished, and finally
found his way to British-occupied New York City.
Without her husband, Janet and her young children
fell back on both families - both of whom were closely
connected to the revolutionaries. But, by the end
of 1777, she was able to take her children to join
Abraham in New York.
With
the end of the war, these Cuylers initially returned
to Albany but decided emigrate to Canada where many
American loyalists went to begin a new life.
Janet Glen Cuyler survived the death of her husband in 1810. Sometime later,
she was buried beside Abraham C. Cuyler in
Yorkfield, Canada.
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Notes: The
life of Janet Glen Cuyler is CAP biography number
4929. This profile is derived chiefly from community-based
resources. See also, Maud Churchill Nicoll, The
Earliest Cuylers of Holland and America (New York,
1912), 31-32.
Portrait
by an unknown artist now hangs in "Cuyler Manor," a house museum and country estate
at Port Elizabeth (Uitenhage), South Africa. This
copy is from the Afrikans language Het
Geslacht Kuilart by J. W. Schaap and H. H. J. Kuilart (South Africa,
1984), 25. Nicoll, Earliest
Cuylers, 32, holds that
the portraits were derived from sketches made by
John Andre in 1776.
By Stefan Bielinski, Colonial Albany Social History Project [http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany]
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