The Family of John Boyce and Mary Van Camp

I have been going back through my tree and trying to fill in the information for brothers and sisters of my direct line. I have found that this is necessary if I want to connect with relatives through DNA tests. It is amazing to me how many people do a DNA test with little to no information about their ancestry. And there are a lot who can only go back 2 or 3 generations. So if I hope to make any connections with these people, I need to know what names I should be looking for in the 20th Century.

I have been working on my Van Camp line. I am starting with Peter Van Camp (or Van Campen) and Femmetje (or Phoebe) Bergen. Peter is one of my United Empire Loyalist ancestors. He and Phoebe had 9 children, 4 sons and 5 daughters. I have been working on his oldest daughter Mary Van Camp. Mary married Johannes Buys. I have not found a marriage record but I have found baptismal entries for their 2 oldest children in the Dutch Reformed Church in Schaghticoke, New York. The name Buys has morphed into various names depending upon the branch of the family. This branch seems to have settled on Boyce.

I started with a list under the name, ”Boyce, John of Matilda” in Loyalists in Ontario by William D. Reid.[i] Reid lists 15 names under John Boyce of Matilda. I have been very skeptical that these were all children of John Boyce and Mary Van Camp. These are individuals who applied for a grant as a son or daughter of a Loyalist. Grants were given to children who had reached the age of 21 or girls who had married. So if a young man is applying for a grant in 1836, we know that he was born at least in 1815. Most of the pedigrees on the Internet list the following children for John Boyce and Mary Van Camp: John(b 1767 in NY), Phoebe(b 1769 in NY), Peter(b 1772 in NY), Matthew(b 1775 in NY), Simon (b 1778 in NY), Jenny(b 1784), William(b 1786 in Matilda), Sarah(b 1788 in Matilda), and Mary(b 1789 in Matilda).

I decided to locate the grants for all people listed under John Boyce and determine if I could sort out any relationships. I went to the Archives of Ontario (See my posts on the UEL toolkit here.) I looked up Boyce and Boice and made a list of all individuals from Matilda or those on Reid’s list. I was missing several but, since women are listed under their married and maiden names, I searched for Jenny Pedge and found her under Bice. I found 3 others listed under Bice and one woman listed as a Baice. I found everyone on the list except for Elisher (Eleazer?). But since Elisher and William had the same dates for filling, I was hoping to find his in the documents.

I found lots of interesting information. One of the Mary’s on my list stated she was the daughter of John Brundage and was married to Peter Van Camp. I found an Elizabeth under Boyce but not on the original list. She stated that she was the daughter of Peter Prunner and married to John Boyce. I could not find requests from Peter, John or Simon but did find them from Sarah and Jenny. From reviewing all the rest of the grant requests, I was able to determine that John Boyce,Jr. was also a United Empire Loyalist since children born in the 1810s could not be children of Mary Van Camp. She would have been in her 60’s at the time. I even found one grant request where the child identified her father as John Boyce, Jr. I am just not sure of an entry for Mary. Was she the daughter of John Boyce and Mary Van Camp or the daughter of John Boyce and Elizabeth Prunner?

Not bad for a day’s work. Now I have to get all this information documented in my database and the documents labeled and filed.

---

[i] Reid, William D. The Loyalists in Ontario, The Sons and Daughters of the American Loyalists of Upper Canada, Hunterdon House, Lambertville, New Jersey (1973). Reprinted by Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., Baltimore.