Margaret (Cowenhoven) Wynkoop

In 1735 or 1736¹, Margaret Cowenhoven² married Philip Wynkoop, and they have numerous descendants, myself included. Margaret’s ancestry, however, is generally regarded as unknown.

Margaret Cowenhoven, daughter of Cornelius Cowenhoven and Margaret Schenck, was baptised in Freehold, NJ on Dec 5, 1714. Almost everyone seems to believe that she is the wife of Derick Sutphen, marrying around 1731.

I think this is wrong and that the two aforementioned Margaret Cowenhovens are the same person, and that Derick married someone else.

Origins: Coucheu

So far as I can tell, the claim of the Sutphen marriage originates in a series of articles entitled “The Van Kouwenhoven-Conover family” (spanning over 40 years!) by Lincoln C. Coucheu that appeared in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record.

In the October 1950 issue, vol. 81, p. 229, he states that Margaret (Margaretta), daughter of Cornelius and Margaret, married Derick (1712–1796), son of Jacob and Antje (Bennett) Sutphen, and had 9 children, and that she died Sept 11, 1794.

Here is a summary of Coucheu’s list of children, with what rough chronology is provided:

1. John, baptised Aug 27, 1732, died young.
2. Mary, married a man born in 1745.
3. Daniel, living in 1795.
4. Naomi.
5. Rebecca.
6. Phoebe, born in 1752.
7. John, born about 1755.
8. David, Rev War soldier, apparently married by 1782.³
9. Joseph, born Sept 1762.

One immediate observation is that the distribution of children is a bit odd, with over 30 years separating the oldest from the youngest. This is not impossible, but it is suspicious.

Also, one might expect a son to be named Cornelius for Margaret’s father, but none are (although of course a child could be missing).⁴

John supposedly died young, but no death date is provided. Maybe this is inferred only because there was another child named John born over 20 years later?⁵

Coucheu gives two sources for the information on this page, which I shall call Stillwell and Honeyman. We shall examine each in turn.

Source: Stillwell

Coucheu cites John Edwin Stillwell’s Historical and Genealogical Miscellany (1906), vol. 2, p. 325, in which is transcribed Monmouth County, NJ burial grounds. It includes these two entries:

Derick Sutfin died, June 27, 1796, in 84th yr.
Mary, his wife, died, Sept. 11, 1794, in 73rd yr.

The most obvious discrepancy is that Derick’s wife is called Mary, not Margaret. Also, her age at death would put her birth around 1721, not 1714. These could both be errors—after all, ages are often inaccurate—but they don’t support Coucheu’s claims.

By contrast, Margaret, wife of Philip Wynkoop, was said in Richard Wynkoop’s Wynkoop genealogy in the United States of America (1904), to have “died in 1775, aged 61”, which is an exact match for Cornelius’s daughter.

Source: Honeyman

Coucheu also cites five pages from Sutphen and Honeyman’s The Sutphen Family (1926). This seems to be where most of the details come from. The children are enumerated on p. 14, essentially as above, but the part that concerns us is on page 13⁶. It says that Derick “m. (supp.) Mary Couwenhoven.”

Again, Derick’s wife is named as Mary, not Margaret, and furthermore the authors express uncertainty about the identification.

The same page also repeats the information above, that “[t]he tombstone gives his wife’s name as ‘Mary’.”

Neither this source nor the last says anything about the parents of Derick’s wife.

Other bits

• There is also a marriage of Derick Sutphen and Mary/Maria Langestraat in 1742. Is this the same Derick as above? A lot would be explained if his first wife died and he remarried to another Mary, or even if there were two Derick Sutphens both married to a Mary, whose families were consequently mixed up. For example, if his wife was indeed born around 1721, one would not expect her to have had a child in 1732.
• The baptism record of Jan/John Sutphen (1732) shows his parents as “Dirk Sutphen” and “Marytie Couwenhoven”. One could argue that Marytie is a garbled transcription for Margaret, but this would be quite a stretch. Rather, it’s almost certainly a spelling variant of a Dutch form of Mary/Maria such as Maritje. Other names on that page are written -tie rather than -tje.
• In Richard Wynkoop’s Wynkoop genealogy, among the children of Philip and Margaret, he lists a Cornelius.⁷
• There are not many Cowenhovens in Monmouth County, NJ at this time⁸, so we’re not likely to find another Margaret of the right name, place, and age.
• Cornelius mentions a Margaret in his will⁹, so she was still alive as an adult. If she didn’t marry Derick, where did she go?

Conclusion

My conclusion is that the Margaret Cowenhoven that Philip Wynkoop married was the daughter of Cornelius, and Derick Sutphen married a Mary (or two). Here is the summary:

1. All records and sources before Coucheu call Derick’s wife Mary, never Margaret.
2. Derick’s wife’s age at death does not match Margaret’s baptism, while Philip’s wife’s does.
3. The family of Derick and “Margaret” doesn’t seem to add up, which indicates at least something about it is probably wrong.
4. The sources Coucheu cites do not support his claims. If he has other evidence this Margaret was Derick’s wife, he does not provide it.
5. All the information we have about the two Margarets lines up.
6. If Margaret, daughter of Cornelius, was not the wife of Derick nor of Philip then she is unaccounted for.

Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but I think the evidence supports this conclusion.

Notes

1. The date of the marriage is often claimed to be March 9, 1735, but (a) this is the date of the marriage license, and (b) it’s not specified what calendar is in use, and in particular whether this is 1734/5 or 1735/6.
2. There were many spelling variants of these Dutch names, but for simplicity I use consistent (sometimes Anglicized) spellings throughout.
3. “[B]oth [husband and wife] joined the Old Tennant Church in 1782”, although Coucheu does not explicitly say they were already married at that time.
4. A posting to the dutch-colonies mailing list goes further and says that, “None of their children fit the Dutch naming pattern”, although this is not explained.
5. There is a John Sutphen born in Freehold, NJ who married in 1757 and could be the boy baptised in 1732 (in Freehold), but I have not looked into this.
6. Direct links to individual pages do not seem to work; you can go to the page in question by entering 33 in the box in the lower right.
7. However, his “But see” may indicate doubt about the assignment to this family.
8. I realize this is an imprecise statement, but, just eyeballing, it looks like the only reasonable candidates for Philip’s wife are grandchildren of Willem Gerretse van Couwenhoven (1636–1728).
9. Cornelius’s will dated Nov 22, 1735 (proved June 22, 1736) is transcribed here. It’s not clear to me if he is implying that Margaret is not yet married.