SURNAMES FAMILY TREE HOME The Beekman Branch

Gerardus Beekman 1559-1625 Gerardus Beekman's career indicates quite clearly that his family must have enjoyed considerable stature. According to the family document of 1702 (a letter from a cousin in Amsterdam in answer to a letter from Wilhelm Beekman), he studied in 1576-1578 at a German Protestant University where he reportedly "excelled" in literature and became proficient in five languages. His bride, it is said, came from a family associated with the noble House of Orange and Gerard himself was for a time a notary public at Cologne. The most clear-cut evidence of his standing, however, emerges from his involvement in an important historical development of the early seventeenth century. ... Gerardus, first, according to the family letter of 1702, was among the members of one of the many Protestant delegations which journed to England in the quest for support against the Catholic forces. Secondly, according to a standard history of Cologne as well as the family manuscript, Gerardus was among the Protest leaders of that city who in 1612 joined in the effort to erect at Mulheim, just down the Rhine from Cologne, an "evangelical stronghold" designed to usurp the commercial power of Cologne as well as to provide a fortress for the military security of Protestantism. ... [The failure of this effort] put Gerardus Beekman in a difficult position. The Catholic authorities at Cologne were now backed by Spanish troops; they could not be expected to welcome the return of a resident who had been one of the leaders in the Mulheim operation which aimed to destroy them. The family account reports that Gerardus was forced to flee to avoid capture by Spanish troops and that in doing so he sacrificed considerable property which he had acquired at Cologne. In any case he now entered the service of the Elector of Brandenburg in Cleve. The official record of his son's marriage in 1621 notes that Gerardus was then "auditor and secretary" in the government of that Germany territory. It is reported in the letter of 1702 that he died at Emmerick in the Cleve area in 1625 at the age of sixty-six.