Sara Kierstede

Sara Kierstede 

Sara Roeloffs was born in Amsterdam in 1627 to Scandinavian immigrant parents. Over her very long life, she would marry three times, and is known today mostly by the last name she used during her first (and longest) marriage: Sara Roeloffs Kierstede. Her father, Roeloff Jansz van Marstrand (aka Maesterland), was a sailor who had probably moved to Holland in search of work.¹ At the time, Amsterdam was a wealthy port city, filled with merchants who made their living by trading bulk goods like grain, wood, salt, and fish and luxury items like spices, sugar, dyes, and silk, as well as artisans who turned trade goods and raw materials into consumer products like finished clothing^.2 

Sara, her sister Trijntjen, and her parents moved to New Netherland in 1630, joined at some point by her grandmother and aunt, as well. They planned to work as farmers for the newly established Rensselaerswijk, a large rural estate, or patroonship, founded by the Dutch diamond merchant and West India Company director, Kiliaen van Rensselaer. The estate was located along the Hudson River, near present-day Albany. Sara’s father worked as a tenant farmer, meaning that the family worked for pay, alongside two hired hands, on land owned by the Van Rensselaers.³ Life for a farm family in the early days of the colony would have been difficult, with long hours tending to crops–especially wheat and rye–and livestock such as pigs, sheep, and cows.⁴ 

Eventually, her father, Roeloff, rose to become a member of the patroonship’s governing council. But soon, the family moved to Manhattan to work as farmers for the West India Company. Shortly, they received title to some sixty-five acres of land of their own, entering the higher social class of free farmers. Roeloff, however, died not long thereafter, leaving a widow and five children, with Sara, the eldest, just nine or ten years old. ⁵  

Sara’s mother, Anneke Jans, ensured that her children would continue to rise through the colony’s social ranks when she remarried. She selected as her new husband the New Amsterdam minister, Everardus Bogardus. Sara’s own marriage to the West India Company surgeon Hans Kierstede in 1642 signaled her entry into the small colony’s uppermost ranks, comprised of wealthy merchants and officers of the WIC. Sara’s sisters and her aunt also married into the colony’s higher echelons. Even her grandmother enjoyed a position of influence and respect, working for the Company as a midwife. Though left fatherless as a child, Sara and her sisters lived among the colony’s elite from a young age.⁶ 

Sara’s marriage to Hans Kierstede took place when she was only fifteen years old, much earlier than young people tended to marry in the Netherlands at the time. Her age at marriage serves as a reminder of the pressure that female settlers faced to wed at a time when white men continued to outnumber white women; her husband was some ten years her senior. Her first son, Hans, was baptized in the Dutch Reformed church just two years later. The couple would go on to have nine more children together, two of whom died young. Like other members of Dutch society, Sara and Hans expanded their family ties by asking important New Amsterdammers to serve as godparents to their many children. Director Willem Kieft, acting governor of New Netherland, was one of the many town residents who agreed to be a godfather to one of their babies.⁷ Sara and Hans, too, served as godparents to others, creating connections who their children could call on if they ever needed help. The family lived by the shore in New Amsterdam, on Pearl Street. By the time she became an adult, Sara would have been living a comfortable if busy life surrounded by family and kin. 
 

 

Yet Sara is best known for something quite different: she worked as a translator in negotiations with Manhattan’s and the Hudson Valley’s original inhabitants, especially Munsee-speaking peoples, including the Lenape. She interpreted at wartime talks, served as a conduit for news from Native visitors to the colony’s leaders, and developed a particularly close relationship with one of the region’s most important Lenape-Munsee leaders, Oratam of Hackensacky. Such political activities, while not unknown for Native women, were highly unusual among Dutch women.