We welcome you to this memorial website and ongoing genealogy research project for Maria "Polly" Hoagland. Born and raised in Somerset County, New Jersey in the late 1700's, Maria married another Dutch American, John Domenicus Stryker, in about 1803, and with him continued until her death to reside in Somerset County and to bear and raise their eight children. [See also The Ancestors of John Domenicus Stryker: Our STRYKER Research Homepage]

Two of their daughters, Aletta "Althea" Quick Stryker and Magdalena Voorhees Stryker, married William Brown Hageman and ventured west with the Dutch-American migrations to Illinois and even Nebraska. Their stories and that of their descendants are told on The William Brown HAGEMAN Family website.

On the following pages we will turn our attention to the question of identifying the ancestors of Maria "Polly" Hoagland. Please keep in mind that this ancestral report is an ever-changing research work in progress, rather than a finished or already fully-proved account of Maria Hoagland's genealogy.

On this website, various primary and secondary sources are being considered, debated, and evaluated. Our premise is that in some cases even early researchers whose works are full of errors and confusions of lineage are nonetheless worthy of our cautious attention, since they also got some things right. Two examples of imperfect but resourceful late 19th-Century researchers are Maria Hoagland's distant cousins Teunis G. Bergen, author of Register of the Early Settlers of Kings County, Long Island New York, published in 1881, and Daniel Hoogland Carpenter, author of History and Genealogy of the Hoagland Family in America from Their First Settlement at New Amsterdam, 1638 to 1891. Readers are encouraged to weigh the data from such sources carefully for themselves, and to keep a sharp eye on the more reliable sources of church records, wills, census records, etc.

We encourage you to explore these pages, and we invite you to add to or dispute the data presented if you are so inclined. We intend to vigorously pursue Maria's family history and to frequently update this information until her lines are fully researched and properly documented.

We are striving to meet and share ideas and data with as many of our fellow Dutch-American descendants as possible. We share an appreciation of our rich American history and a deep sense of gratitude for the hard work, sacrifice, and vision of all those who came before us and made our prosperity, our very existence, possible.

We welcome your feedback, contributions, and participation in this challenging project!