Scope and Content[Sylvia Randolph sends in some research done on the Van Leeuwen family by a niece. It is interesting to area historians because of the Singapore connections, and it documents the presence of the Hollanders in the Saugatuck area. It also demonstrates how some pioneers saw Michigan not as final destination, but as a jumping-off place to new homes further west.] --- My interest in tracing my father's ancestors began after his death in 1969. I have never lived in Michigan. My father was an entomologist for the U. S. Department of Agriculture. We moved from New Jersey, where I was born, to Yakima, Washington, and then to Washington, D. C. During my teen-age years I spent a few summer vacations with my aunts in Holland and Saugatuck. In 1969 I visited my cousin Beatrice Bekken Shashaguay in Grand Rapids. Bea knew more family stories than did I, and she willingly took me to libraries and cemeteries in the Holland/Saugatuck area. In 1856 two Van Leeuwen brothers, Cornelis (b. 1804) and Martinus (b. 1810) departed from Mijdrecht, Province of Utrecht, the Netherlands, with their wives and children. The brothers were the sons of Jan Van Leeuwn and Maria Horsteeg of Midrecht. They traveled on the ship Arnold Boninger of Prussia, bound for the port of New York, traveling second class. The majority of the passengers traveled third class. They arrived in New York on June 26, 1856. I have no further information about Cornelis, but Martinus and his second wife, Cornelia Zaal, arrived in the Graffschap/Holland area with four children, Cornelius, born 1832; Martinus, 1844; Jan, 1848; and Marie, 1853. The family settled on a farm in Graafschap and the parents lived there until their deaths in 1875 and are buried in the Graafschap cemetery. Cornelius married Gerritje Van Diest in 1867. They remained in Graafschap and raised a family of 14 children. Marie married Jan Van Diest in 1875 and moved to Holland, Nebraska, where they remained until 1888 when they moved to North Dakota and later Montana. Marie died in 1942 while living with her daughter in Lynden, Washington. Martinus, my grandfather, did not stay on the farm in Graafschap. He went to work in a sawmill owned by Otis R. Johnson in Singapore, Michigan, a town near Saugatuck. Singapore was a company town at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River with stores, a bank, and house owned by the company. The family story is that Martinus achieved the position of a head sawyer. In 1868 Martinus, age 24, married Grietje (Margareta) Bos, age 15. They were married in Graafschap and went to live in a company-owned house in Singapore. There their first child, Martinus, was born in 1869. With Holland and Chicago crying for lumber to rebuild their cities after the devastating fires of 1871, the remaining stands of good pine lumber in Allegan County were quickly cut and the mill days were numbered. In September of 1872, Martinus purchased a parcel of land on Holland Street in Saugatuck. Not long thereafter, the sawmill went out of business. Martinus was permitted to move his two-story frame house to Saugatuck, just upstream of Singapore on the Kalamazoo River. The family story relates that the house was moved in the winter on the ice. Today, with an added wing, it is owned by descendants of Pieternella "Hell" Van Leeuwen, the fourth child of Martinus and Margareta Bos Van Leeuwen. Martinus purchased fruit farms in the Saugatuck area. His daughters remember that they lived well until his death in 1895. He had been kicked by a horse and died of an infection. Apparently he had signed notes for other people, and those notes were called in when he died. The four oldest children were married, but Margareta was left with five children to support. The youngest, my father Earl, was just under two years old. As adults, all of my father's siblings eventually married and, with the exception of my father and Nell remained in Michigan. Nell and her husband, Loris Randolph, lived in Elkhart, Indiana, but spent their summers in the Saugatuck home. Earl was the only child to be able to go to college. He had to work during his first two years at Michigan State. Jobs included picking beans and washing dishes. Margareta Bos died in 1916. She had been living with her daughter Anna, and her latter years were spent in relative comfort. My father enlisted in the Army during World War I, was sent to Officers' Candidate School graduating a Second Lieutenant, and saved enough money to finish his last two years of college when the war ended. He never lived in Michigan thereafter, but he made trips "home" as often as possible and made sure that I never forgot my Dutch heritage. Aunt Nell's son, Frederick Randolph, died in 1975, but his wife, Sylvia, an artist, lives in the old Van Leeuwen house in Saugatuck at 996 Holland Street. I enjoy sharing my research with members of the Van Leeuwen family. Our ancestors who crossed the ocean made it possible for many of their descendants to have a prosperous and happy life in America. They deserve to be remembered. - Jean Lee (Van Leeuwen) Eareckson of Annapolis, Maryland [A copy of an "indenture" included by the writer shows that Martinus Van Leeuwen purchased Lot 4 of the Moore addition to the Village of Saugatuck from Horace D. Moore and his wife on May 25, 1872. The purchase price was $400.]