Volume 17 , Issue 44

Is It Conover Or Kouwenhoven?

While searching and researching our ancestry on my mother's side of the family of CONOVERs, we found this 1920 article in The El Paso Herald, dated 13 Nov. 1920, Saturday, page 31, concerning the family name of CONOVER: "Is It Conover?" Wolfers Gerretsen Van Kouwenhoven was this NW Okie's 9th Great Grandfather.

Found on Newspapers.com

CONNIVER looks and sounds like a name of English origin, but it isn't. It belongs to a considerable group of names borne by Americans which are of continental European origin, the original form having been anglicized through contact with colonists bearing English names. So although these names appear to be English you will never find them borne by Englishmen and you would search in vain for them in any list of English surnames or in English books of heraldry.

The founder of the Conover family was a man with no less a name than Wolfet Garretsen Van Couwenhoven. He was the first American father of all who bear the names Conover, Cowwenhoven and Kouwenhoven. He came from Amersfoort in the province of Utrecht in Holland in 1630 and settled near Albany, New York. Later he went to little old Manhattan, where it was his task in the community to cultivate the company's bouwery, long before that bouwery ceased to bloom and became the Bowery of modern New York. It is supposed that the name was originally Von Couwwenhoven and merely indicated that Wolfert Garretsen had been a native of the town of Gouwenhoven near Amersfoort, in Utrecht. The name was simplified to Conover by one branch of the family about 1700.

Now although the Conovers are of Dutch origin as far as their paternal descent and their names are concerned, there was so much intermarriage with English stock during early colonial days that as a matter of fact the drops of old Dutch blood in the veins of the Connivers are not so very numerous. This is often the case with our fine old Dutch families. If your great-great-grandfather was Dutch, you would be only one sixteenth part Dutch, and when the admixture of Dutch blood comes from a Colonial ancestor you may figure yourself that there would be considerable dilution.
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