Abraham Caleb Brokaw

Life

References for this account: [1][2][3][4]

Where they lived

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The pins show approximate places. The line only joins them in time order; it does not prove the route travelled. 1 of the places listed above are recorded only as a county or country, so they are not pinned. Cemetery and burial places have red pins.

Historical context

These background articles explain the places, work, and events in this entry.

What we still don't know

• [WHY A SOMERSET COUNTY DUTCHMAN DIED IN OHIO] He was drafted at Flaggtown or Millstone into Captain Abraham Ditmar's Company, Colonel John Freylinghuysen's Third Regiment, New Jersey Detailed Militia, enlisting 12 September 1814 and being discharged 9 December 1814 at Jersey City. For two months and twenty-three days he was paid eight dollars a month — $21.94 in total — and for the same service he received Bounty Land Warrant number 95.043, forty acres of land in Ohio. He died in Ohio twelve years later. The forty acres are the explanation, and they turn an unexplained death-place into a story: a man paid off in frontier land who went to take it up. His wife did not follow, or did not stay — Maria died at Somerville in Somerset County in 1856 and is buried there. None of this is proved yet. It comes from a compiled Find a Grave biography. But it gives a warrant number, a company and a colonel, so the bounty-land file is findable and would settle it.
• [THE TWO ACCOUNTS DISAGREE ON WHERE HE DIED] Find a Grave says Warren Township, Jefferson County, Ohio; the FamilySearch tree says Knox County, Ohio, while giving Warren Township, Jefferson County as the burial. They are eighty miles apart. Neither is a record.
• [A CURIOSITY, AND A USEFUL ONE] A Geni chart makes Gina Cacace and the actress Monica Potter fifth cousins once removed, through Abraham Caleb Brokaw and his wife Maria. The arithmetic checks: Gina is seven generations below Abraham and Monica six, which is fifth cousins with one remove. The connection rests on a user-built tree and is not evidence of anything. What is worth having is the corroboration. That chart was built by strangers, for another purpose, and independently of the Find a Grave biography this archive used — and the two agree on Abraham Brokaw, on his death in 1826, on Cornelia's dates of 1809 to 1907, and on a son named John. Two independent secondary sources agreeing is not proof, but it is a great deal better than one.
• His marriage of 8 January 1792, which is the record that would put this whole generation on evidence rather than on a volunteer's account. Dutch Reformed registers for Somerset County are the place to look.
• His death in Jefferson County, Ohio, in 1826.
• His own parents, and what the C stands for.
• This is a New Netherland Dutch family, and the surnames say so on their own. Brokaw is the anglicised Bourgeois of a Huguenot family long settled among the Dutch of Somerset County; Stryker is Strycker; and the names standing around this household in the records — Polhemus, Vroom, Van Dyck, Van Deventer, Ditmars — are all New Netherland families. The marriage of Cornelia's parents in 1792 was in a Dutch Reformed church. Franklin Township in Somerset County was one of the densest Dutch settlements in New Jersey. That is worth stating plainly, because it is the only non-British, non-Irish, non-Italian, non-German strand anywhere in this side of the family, and it is easy to miss behind a name as English-looking as Stilwell.

References

1. [1] Biography on the Find a Grave memorial for Cornelia Stryker Brokaw Stilwell (memorial 295247056)Back to citation 1
2. [2] Geni relationship chart: Gina D. Leahey and Monica Potter, fifth cousins once removed (created 3 March 2025)Back to citation 2
3. [3] Find a Grave memorial 32870741 — Abraham C. Brokaw (1773–1826)Back to citation 3
4. [4] FamilySearch Family Tree — Abraham Caleb Brokaw, LB7F-3MTBack to citation 4

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