Luur Jacobson

Born in Fort Orange, New Netherlands, on May 29, 1650, Luur grew up as the colony was being firmly established on the banks of the Hudson River. His early years were spent in Esopus County (now Kingston, New York) and Rochester, especially after the death of his father Jacob in 1655 and Luur's mother Stynje was married to Claes Teunissen in 1657/8. The area was being rapidly populated by Protestant Dutch who established the Dutch Reform Church in 1642 and built the first school the year Luur was born.

In 1680, Luur married Grietje Artze Tack (1663-1720), daughter of Annette Ariens and Aert Pietersen Tack of Kingston. The couple had eleven children, eight of whom were baptised in the Dutch Reform Church in Kingston and the nineth in 1700 at the church in Minisink on the Delaware river near present day Port Jervis, New York. Port Jervis was a sparsely settled area south of Kingston, at the point at which the borders of present day Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey meet. There two more of Luur and Grietje's children were born and baptised. Luur and Grietje died after 1720 in Minisink.

The fourth child of Luur Jacobsen Van Kuykendall, Cornelius was born in Kingston on May 30, 1686, and married Maritje Westvael in 1705 in Minisink. Maritje was the daughter of Johannes Westphal and Maritji Kool; Johannes' parents, Jurian Westphal and Maritje Hansen, had emigrated in the 1600's from Westphalia, Prussia (present day Germany).

Cornelius dropped the ``Van'' in the family surname, probably influenced by his English-speaking neighbors in the Minisink and Deerpark, New Jersey, areas where his first four children were born. One record states that after 1747 Cornelius with his youngest sons Johannes (John), Abraham, and Petrus (Peter) moved south into Pennsylvania, Virginia, and finally North Carolina. However, Cornelius and Maritje are reported to have died after 1753 in New Jersey, so it is likely that either Cornelius and his wife returned to Minisink or that only their sons made the move south. Cornelius' sons were accompanied by the sons and grandsons of Matthew Van Kuykendall, a brother of Cornelius, so that the majority of the Kuykendalls were in North Carolina by about 1750. It is interesting to note that most of Cornelius' children were marrying outside the Dutch community, thus becoming part of the cultural melting pot of the American colonies.