This morning I received a note from Perry Brewer from up in New Brunswick, Canada, informing me of the passing of William B. Bogardus. You can find his note in the comments on the post of August 15, 2012. Bill died a few weeks ago on December 5th. An obituary can be found online here.
Those who frequent this website would have encountered the mention of Bill's name in many posts. And of course there is the "William B. Bogardus Collection," which bears his name. He didn't give it that name. I did. But I'm sure he didn't mind. Bill very generously gave me physical possession of the very large collection of material he laboriously collected over many years. It consisted of published pieces, notes, and mostly correspondence between Bill and his uncountable "Cousins." His intent was to compile and publish a genealogy of the descendants of Adam Brouwer, of which he was one. However, along about 2008 he came to the realization that he would not be able to complete that quest, and so he passed the material on to me. It was a lot of stuff. In the pages of this blog, somewhere, you might find my comments on just how much. Even with all that, he mentioned to me that it was but a fraction of the material and correspondence that he had collected regarding his foremost mission, a genealogy of the descendants of Anneke Jans through seven generations, which sadly too, he apparently did not get to finally publish.
I spent countless hours over many, many months with this material. Much of it was correspondence, and to put it all in context you have to remember that Bill started this work back in the 1960s, long before there was an internet and email and terabits of digitized documents and publications available online. Everything had to be done the "old fashioned way" through handwritten or typed letters, travel to and from libraries and archives and court houses, spending hours over and money on copy machines. You get the idea. I very often found myself stopping in the middle of whatever it was I was looking at to just think about and marvel at how much time, effort and money Bill had to have spent accumulating it all. The most impressive part was the correspondence with his "Cousins." It started in the late 1960s and went right through to the early 2000. Hand written letters with questions and queries, literally hundreds of them. I can imagine that when his Anneke Jans correspondence was added in he had perhaps a few thousand correspondents sending questions and requests from all over. And as far as I can ascertain, he answered everyone of them! And not just with a short note, but with a letter, sometimes a rather lengthy one, typed out on his stationary. I was amazed. I would just try and imagine the amount of time he spent just answering his mail. I don't know that I could have done it. I don't know that too many people out there could have done it. And sometimes the correspondence would go back and forth over a period of months and even years. He always answered. That's what stuck with me the most. He always answered.
In 1996 Bill published, Dear "Cousin": A Charted Genealogy of the Descendants of Anneke Jans Bogardus (1605-1663) to the 5th Generation. If you are a researcher of Anneke Jans and her descendants it is the place to start (search online and you'll find copies for sale). As mentioned, Bill had hoped to expand this work to seven generations of descendants and to publish it in a traditional journal type format. Bill was also a co-author with Richard Brewer and Scott Kraus on "DNA Analysis: Adam Brouwer Berckhoven, Elias Brouwer of New Jersey and John Brewer of Ohio," which was published in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record in 2007 (Vol. 138, no. 4). This work was groundbreaking in that, as far as I can tell, it was the first article accepted and published by one of the "major" genealogical journals that focused on using DNA analysis to sort out lines of paternal ancestry. It demonstrated that Adam Brouwer of Gowanus, L. I. and Jan Brouwer of Flatlands, L. I. were not in anyway related and that anyone living today who was uncertain as to which one their Brower or Brewer ancestry would lead, could settle the question with a simple Y-DNA test from a direct male ancestor. The article was there as a seminal part of the early years of the Brewer DNA Project, and I also have to mention that Bill was, unsurprisingly, very generous with his time in helping and answering questions of the earliest participants in the Project. Myself included.
And so, for myself, and I'm sure for many others who have accessed some of Bill's collection through the pages of this website, and who had the chance to correspond or speak to him, I'd just like to thank Bill for all the selfless work and effort he put into solving so many genealogical questions. The fruit of Bill's efforts will hopefully live on.
Merry Christmas Bill.
Merry Christmas everybody.
BGB 699
