Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

The region of Brooklyn where Jan Aertsen van der Bilt settled then became known as Flatlands (and would remain so up until the nineteenth century). Jan’s son Aris married a woman named Hillitje Hillegonde Vanderbeeck in 1677. They had several children, including Jacobus (Jacob) Aertse van der Bilt, who was born in 1692—the year of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, though not as dramatic a year in the rolling farmlands, on the wagon-rutted king’s highways, or on the busy waterfronts of Long Island. Jacob married and had a son, also named Jacob, and by 1731, he’d ventured with his family across the choppy Narrows of New York Harbor to settle and farm Staten Island. It was from this Staten Island branch of van der Bilts, a mere two generations later, that the Commodore would spring.