The research was done, or so I thought. This was supposed to be the easy of the two family lines to research. But, no…my family of Angleman’s has proved to be quite difficult, indeed, to research.
If you belong to an Angleman, please give me a shout out, so that we can compare notes.
I’ve been researching for about fourteen years. Pop-pop and his father, Charles, had done research. I assumed (haha!) that the Angleman line would be easy to fill in the blanks. The story went like this…sometime before the 1770’s, a man named Jacob Van Angleman came over from Holland, fought in the Revolutionary War, and became a farmer in New Jersey. We were all told this story, so I believed it to be true.
Only parts of this story are true. There was a Jacob Angleman and he did fight in the Revolution from New Jersey. There was a Jacob Angleman who owned property in Somerset County, New Jersey. Is he the same Jacob Van Angleman who must have dropped the “Van” and was the progenitor of my family? After 14 years of research, I still don’t know.
When you try to search the name Angleman using Dutch surnames search engines, you find that the name is not a Dutch name. No one can find this name, any where. Oh. Hmmm…well, that’s tricky. I have used message boards to no avail. I don’t live in New Jersey, nor have I for seventeen years, so it isn’t as if I can pop off to a Somerset County library or hall of records and do the digging to find this man. And the more I try to isolate a search, the more disconnected Anglemans I seem to find. I just can’t find my Jacob Van Angleman.
Yes, it doesn’t sound Dutch. But it also sounds like it could be one of those names that was “translated.” Maybe go from the parts of the name and see what that would be in Dutch? Because the sounds like it’s saying “English man.” Not sure if that’s helpful or not LOL.
No, that’s really good, I’ve never thought of that! Thank you! We had come to believe that it was probably Engleman, or something like that, and that’s more German, I believe. Also, I did find a Revolutionary pension record for him and Jacob did not know how to read or write. The fact that there are so few mentions of him makes me wonder if he was, in fact, an indentured servant. Hopefully, I can get back to NJ at some point and do some real digging. Breaking the name down is a great idea, thank you!
Good luck with it all!
I was also once told by a Dutch ticket agent for Northwest Airlines (Northwest flew the sole non-stop flight from Boston to Amsterdam) that Engleman is also a Dutch surname.
(Or maybe “Engelman”. I’m not sure of the exact spelling there.)