M. before 1647, location unknown
Husband: Jurien Probasco
D. after 1666 in New York
Heyltien Aertss was a woman from 17th-century Netherlands who had a remarkable migration story that we don’t entirely know. The facts we do have are that in her short life, she moved between three continents at a time that many Europeans hardly left the town they were born in.
The earliest record of Heyltien was as the mother in a baptism dated March 24, 1647 in the Dutch colony in Brazil (also known as New Holland). How did she come to be living in such a place? Her husband was Jurien Probasco, a man thought to be Polish, and there is no indication whether their wedding took place in the Netherlands or in Brazil. If she was married in the colony, that meant she must have arrived there either on her own or with her parents, but no records offer a clue to her actual emigration circumstance. Heyltien and Jurien went on to have two more children baptized in New Holland, one in 1649 and the other in 1651.
Being a young mother in the colony must have been a difficult life. The Dutch were barely holding onto their territorial claim, which the Portuguese thought they rightly controlled, and the two sides battled each other over a couple of decades. The settlers from the Netherlands engaged in running sugar plantations, which required much labor to operate. This usually meant owning slaves, and it’s unlikely that Heyltien and her husband could have afforded that.
The Probascos time in South America came to an end with the Portuguese takeover of the colony on January 28, 1654. Most of the Dutch left soon after, and Jurien appeared on a contract signed in Amsterdam dated June 17th. The agreement was to move to the New Netherland colony in North America. Only one of their three children has been found in records after their baptisms, so probably the other two had died young in Brazil.
The Dutch colony in Brazil under siege in 1648.
The family ended up in Brooklyn, where Dutch Reformed church records showed Jurien as sponsor to a baptism in 1661. The following year, Heyltien made a small amount of money for sewing some shirts, likely to supplement her husband’s farm income. Presumably, life was better in North America for the Probascos, where the colony was more stable, and the climate closer to being like in Europe.
An amusing story emerges from a record dated May 14, 1662. On that day, the church gave Heyltien and her husband a cow and heifer to care for. In return for using the cow for their own milk supply, they were to donate a quantity of butter for the poor of the community. But Heyltien soon found that the cow wouldn’t give milk. Afraid that she wouldn’t be able to pay the required donation of butter, she filed an official complaint and asked for a different cow. The records don’t show how the matter was resolved.
It’s believed that Heyltien’s husband Jurien died in 1664. She lived at least until October 1666 when she last appeared as a sponsor at a baptism. The date and place of her death are unknown.
Children:
1. Margaret Probasco — B. before 24 March 1647, New Holland, Brazil; D. (probably) young
2. Christoffel Probasco — B. before 6 June 1649, New Holland, Brazil; D. after 3 Oct 1724, (probably) Brooklyn, New York; M. Ida Stryker, before 1675, New York
3. Anneken Probasco — B. before 17 May 1651, New Holland, Brazil; D. (probably) young
Sources:
"American Origin of the Probasco Family," William B. Alstyne, Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society, 1927
Register of the Early Settlers of Kings County, Long Island, New York, Teunis Bergen, 1881
"The Probasco Origins," Bryce Henderson Stevens, The Vanguard – The Newsletter of the van Aersdalen Family Association, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1998
Dutch Brazil (wikipedia article)
