The Sagamore Hill-Hyde Park Relations: Part 1

Family Ties.

The Common Bond

Claes Maartenszen van Rosenvelt came to New Amsterdam around 1640, about the time Peter Stuyvesant was its governor. He was not a wealthy man. He did not come for religious freedom. He did not come to escape hardship. He came for the promise of opportunity – which he found in what became New York.

He married and raised a large family. Its most prominent branches can trace ancestry to two of Claes’ sons: Johannes (John) and Jacobus (James). Both married propitiously and prolifically, siring more generations of spelling-changed Roosevelts, all born in Manhattan.

Four generations later, the Johannes branch claimed Theodore Roosevelt Senior (1831-78), who inherited a sizable fortune in the plate glass industry, and built a comfortable summer house near other relations in Oyster Bay, near Long Island Sound. The Jacobus branch produced James Roosevelt (1828-1900). His side was also…