My birthplace, Poughkeepsie, NY...has a strange and wonderful origins... some of it still a mystery.. From a story from a Vankleeck family on Ancestry. com One now widely accepted explanation of the meaning of the name Poughkeepsie evolves from a story surrounding the first legal settlement in the community. Johannes Van Kleeck and Myndert Van Den Bogaerdt, sons of the original settlers, frequented a spot close to the present New York-Albany Post Road, less than two miles south of the present courthouse at Poughkeepsie. The Indians followed a trail to this same point, known by the two boys as Rust Plaetz, and meaning Resting Place. The Indians had another name for the spot, which was marked by a spring, and, so the story goes, surrounded by cat-tail reeds, a small stream issuing from the spring. They used three words to describe it: uppuqui-meaning lodge covering, the name of the cat-tail reed; ipis-little water; ing-meaning place; and freely translated, The Reed-covered Lodge by the Little Water Place. The Dutch and the English settlers spelled the name phonetically, and it appeared in various combinations of letters. In the Van Kleeck-Ostrom lease it was Pockkeepsin. A more familiar later form of the word was Apokeepsing, resembling uppiquiipis-ing, until the A was dropped; and out of Poughkeepsing there came the accepted name, Poughkeepsie.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:58:22 +0000
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