Conjecture 2: Penelope’s first husband was English and his surname was Prince.

Today I argue against the commonly accepted idea that Penelope’s first husband was a Dutchman with the surname Vanprincis.

A Contemporary Record, 1648

The only contemporary record of Penelope is the September 1648 slander trial about milking a cow in the Gravesend Town Records, which recorded her name as Penellopey Prince. Notice how the other women in the trial are mentioned: wife of Tho. Aplegate; his wife; Ambrose his wife; wife of Ambrose London; Aplegate’s daughter; and Ambrose his wife. Under the English legal doctrine of coverture, as the saying goes, “husband and wife were one person as far as the law was concerned, and that person was the husband.” The fact that the English clerk wrote her name as Penellopey Prince strongly implies that she had passed from the legal status of feme covert (literally, covered woman in archaic Anglo-Norman French legalese, meaning married) to feme sole (single woman) because she was a widow.

In a Dutch context, one might reasonably argue that Penelope Prince was her maiden name, but the list of Gravesend founders was all English. Being mostly Anabaptists, they picked a location at the southwestern tip of Long Island that was as far as practical from the Dutch government, Dutch Reformed Church, and New England Puritans. Therefore, I find it implausible that Englishmen would apply Dutch naming conventions to an English woman.

17th Century Writings

I would like to know how other women (single, married, or widowed) were referred to in the rest of the Gravesend Town Records but, I as far as I know, the book has never been published nor put on the Internet. Instead I skimmed 300 pages of the John Winthrop’s Journal (1630-1640, Massachusetts Bay Colony) and found two women mentioned by their full name: “one Abigail Giffor, widow” and “Dorothy Talbye was hanged at Boston for murdering her own daughter.”

Winthrop used the customary English format for real ladies, that is, the title and first name, such as “the Lady Arabella,” for whom Winthrop's ship was named, and "Mr. Humfrey and the Lady Susan, his wife." Two married women who were personally accused of religious crimes were designated “Mrs. Hutchinson” (20 mentions because of her infamy) and “Mrs. Dyer.” Every other time that a female was mentioned in conjunction with a man’s name, Winthrop used phrases such as James Sagamore's wife, wife of one William Dyer, one Hawkins's wife, wife of one Scott, Faber's wife, his wife (numerous times), gentlewoman and two daughters. This are the same techniques cited above in Gravesend Town Records and confirm the tradition of coverture that a married woman’s Christian name was not written except in special circumstances.

Smith, 1765

The second written record of Penelope is in Samuel Smith’s 1765 The History of the Colony of Nova Caesaria, or New Jersey, where she is not mentioned by name but described first as the wife of a young Dutchman and later as “marrying to one Stout.” This phrasing sounds familiar. I realize Smith describes the husband as a Dutchman but the account uses the word Dutch five times including the historically inaccurate statement that the Dutch settled Middleton. The New Netherland Project website comments that “most histories of early colonial America either dismiss New Netherland in a few lines or rely on English sources, which portray the Dutch colony from an adversary's viewpoint.” Therefore, it is difficult to know which histories to trust, such as the next example.

Edwards, 1790

The third written record is my favorite description despite its inaccuracies, Morgan Edwards’s 1790 Materials Towards a History of the Baptists, repeated by Benedict in 1813 and Nathan Stout in 1823 and Mayes around 1890 where I first read it: “Mrs. Stout was born in Amsterdam, about the year 1602 (sic). Her father's name was Vanprinces. She and her first husband (whose name is not known) sailed for New York (then New Amsterdam) about the year 1620 (sic).” Notice that here the Dutch name belonged to her father, not her husband. Therefore, the common practice of calling the husband Vanprinces appears to mistakenly combine Smith’s description of Penelope as “wife of a young Dutchman” with Edwards’s “her father’s name was Vanprinces.”

Other versions

Nathan Hale Streets’s version in 1897 quotes Benedict as saying “her father's name was Vanprincis” with the “is” ending.

In 1916 John Stillwell  quotes Mrs. Seabrook in calling her ancestor “Penelope van Prince.”

I have heard that Kent or Lent is the traditional maiden name for Penelope, perhaps from a newspaper article at the Spy House Museum Complex in Port Monmouth, New Jersey. As far as I can tell, Deborah Crawford invented the maiden name of Thompson in her book Four Women in a Violent Time.

Is Vanprincis a real name?

I believe that Vanprinces is the result of “dutchifying” the English surname Prince to be better fit the story that Penelope and her first husband sailed from Amsterdam. If her descendants can’t remember the guy’s first name, how much should we trust their memory of the last name? Other commentators have pointed out that “van,” meaning “from,” and thus should refer to a place as the German “von” does. But no one has found such a Dutch place like “Princes” to be from.

Searching WorldConnect database

I searched in the WorldConnect databases and found numerous records for Vanprincis (60), van Princis (446), Vanprinces (17), van Princes (212), Vanprincess (11), van Princess (229),  Vanprincen (1), van Princen (53), Vanprincin (22), van Princin (143), Vanprince (16 plus 2 obvious errors) and van Prince (35 including some errors). Every valid record (except a Martin van Buren Prince sometimes listed as Martin Van Prince) referred to either Penelope, her first husband or her father. I feel sure that other genealogy repositories will produce the same results. If this were a real name there would be other relatives, as occurs for the name van Prins (16 different Dutch names in 39 records after 1764).

A Challenge to Researchers

Here is my challenge as to whether Vanprinces or Vanprincis is a valid name. Find another person in 17th century Holland with that name. What the heck--in the history of the world with that surname.

Real Dutch Surnames
I found a Dutch website purported to determine the frequency of Dutch surnames:  http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nfb/   Using the Google translator, I chose the “starts with” option for “van prin” and got a couple of hits for "van Prinsenbeek" and “van Prinsenhof” and several for Her Royal Highnesses because Queen Juliana of Holland had four daughters and “prinses” translates to “princess.” I still think Penelope marrying a baron is cute fiction but poor genealogy. But no hits for the Dutch versions of Prince that I have discussed.

The Question

The question boils down to which is the more plausible source for the surname of Penelope’s first husband: A) a contemporary legal document or B) family stories decades after her death, which disagree with each other, some assigning a non-Dutch Dutch name to Penelope’s husband and some to her father.

What do you think? Please leave a comment.

Sponsored by Jim's website  and the book Penelope: A Novel of New Amsterdam