Who was Ots Toch?

In conducting genealogical research using secondary sources, it can sometimes be difficult to sort out fact from myth. One such case is the parentage of the Mohawk woman Ots Toch, wife of Cornelius Antonissen Van Slyck (Van Slyke).

The dominant traditional story that was published for many years in Van Slyck and Bradt genealogies is that a French trader named Hartell or Hertel came to the Mohawk valley around 1620, where he married a Mohawk woman who under the law of the Five Nations owned Hog Island in the Mohawk River. Hertel is said to have had two children with this woman. Nelson Greene, writing in History of the Mohawk Valley: Gateway to the West, 1614-1625, describes the two daughters, Ots Toch and Kenutje, who would later go on to marry Cornelius Van Slyck and "a Bradt," respectively: "Ots Toch was wild and savage like her mother while Kenutje was small and handsome and very white like her father, Hartell."

Another theory was published by Giles Yates in 1857 in his column in the Schenectady Reflector, where he compiled, in his own words, "segregated fragments and broken facts of unwritten traditionary history." Yates advanced the idea that the last native owner of Van Slyck's Island was an Oron [Huron] chief named Shononsise who married the daughter of a trader named Jacques Hartel and had two daughters, "Otstock" and "Kanudesha."

Cynthia Brott Biasca, in an article in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, promotes the theory that Van Slyck's wife was a full-blooded Mohawk and was not the daughter of a French trader. Biasca also discredits Yates' story based on the discrepancy in dates and in the absence of any recording of Shononsise or the Huron in the published Jesuit Relations. Biasca attempted to find the earliest recording of the Hertel/Ots Toch story, tracing back to the Paige Diaries and a footnote in Jonathan Pearson's History of the Schenectady Patent. Biasca also points to the Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680, which includes a passage where Danckaerts speaks with Hilletie, daughter of Van Slyck. Danckaerts describes her as a "half breed," the daughter of a Dutch father and an Indian mother.

Barbara Sivertsen, in Turtles, Wolves and Bears: A Mohawk Family History, acknowledges the identification of Hilletie's mother as a full-blooded Mohawk in Danckaert's journal, but writes that Hertel's Mohawk daughters Ots Toch and Kenutje "may have been adopted by their mother's parents, a practice not uncommon in the Iroquois; thus the tradition of their being daughters of a chief would coincide with their fathering by a Frenchman. This would probably account for their being thought of as full-blooded Mohawks. The fact that Ots Toch and Kanetis [Kenutje] married (at least in the Indian sense) white suggests however that they were half-breeds." Sivertsen notes that a trader Jacques Hertel is recorded in the early records of New France and she hypothesizes that he could have had contact with the Mohawks near Schenectady around the time of Ots Toch's conception. Further, she claims that the French name of Van Slyck's first son, Jacques, around 1840 in a Dutch family suggests that the Hertel legend is accurate.

Given the paucity of original records in this case, researchers are left with questions and controversy, but little documentation -- and must draw their own conclusions.

For additional information about the Ots Toch question, see the following materials, all in the holdings of the Grems-Doolittle Library: New York Genealogical and Biographical Record; Turtles, Wolves and Bears: A Mohawk Family History; Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680; Forts and Firesides of the Mohawk Country; History of the Schenectady Patent; Van Slyck family file; Paige Diaries.

Thank you to Grems-Doolittle Library volunteer Dianne Gade, who researched and compiled the sources outlined.