Tragedy for an Immigrant Family (Origins 43:1, Spring 2025)

The Spring 2025 issue of Origins is in print and in the hands of subscribers. Here is a free article from the Spring issue.

In it, Robert Schoone-Jongen tells the story of the Wispelwey family. It migrated from the Netherlands to the United States in 1910, arriving in Passaic, New Jersey, in early July. Scarcely two weeks later tragedy struck the family. The Wispelwey story was both typical of immigrants, in how community connections across the Atlantic brought the family to Paterson, and in the way the Dutch immigrant community in Passaic rallied around them in the wake of the tragedy.

The other articles in the Spring 2025 issue tell a variety of stories:

• Marcia Lagerwey continues the story of her parents during World War II, following her father Walter in London at the end of the fighting in Europe and the hopes and strains it brought for him and Wilma, her mother.
• Berkeley historian Jan De Vries tells the first half of a two-part story about the emigration of his family from the Netherlands to the United State. Part I, in this issue, focuses on their decision to leave in late 1947 and the first months of their experience at their new home in Minnesota, where his father worked for a local farmer. Part II will continue the story in the Fall 2025 issue.
• Steve Staggs explores the life of Rev. Johannes Mecklenburg, a seventeenth-century Dutch pastor and missionary to Native Americans in the New Netherlands colony in the 1600s. He uses Mecklenburg’s career as a window into relations between the Dutch and local Native peoples in the region.
• I recount a chapter in the history of Calvin College in my essay, focusing on Calvin College in the Jazz Age and Depression (1920-1930s). This was Calvin’s first coming of age in an era of rapid change in the United States and for the Dutch Reformed immigrant community.
• Finally, I review Michael Douma’s new book, The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

Enjoy Bob’s story for free! For the rest you’ll need to subscribe (scroll down a bit for the subscription link). It’s only $15 a year for two issues. Or you can wait four years until we put them online for free on the “Origins in Print” page of Origins Online. The Fall 2025 issue is in the planning stages and, as usual, it will be in print and in the mail just after Thanksgiving.

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William Katerberg is a professor of history and curator of Heritage Hall at Calvin University. 

The cover photo of the blogpost is a photo of the Wispelwey family shortly before it emigrated from the Netherlands to the United States. Courtesy of Robert Schoone-Jongen.