Catharina Lott

Catharina Hegeman, said to have been born 11 Nov. 1691, d. 19 Nov. 1741. She m. 15 Nov. 1709, Abraham Lott, said to have been b. 7 Sept. 1684, and bapt. 14 Sept. following at Flatlands by the minister of the Flatbush Dutch Church, d. 39 July 1754, son of Engelbert Lott, of Flatbush, by the latter’s wife Cornelia de Lanoy. Abraham Lott was one of the executors of her father’s will, and when his son Engelbert was baptized in 1719 in the New Utrecht Dutch Church, one of the witnesses was “Marytje Hegeman, wife of E. Hegeman.” This evidently refers to Egbert Hegeman, and some dim remembrance of the connections survives in the distorted statement that Catharina was Elbert’s daughter in the eighteenth-century manuscript Lott genealogy quoted in Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt’s Social History of Flatbush… (1881), pp. 184ff (Mrs. Vanderbilt’s husband being descended from the present line of the Lott family through his mother). It should be obvious that no daughter of Elbert Hegeman could have reached marriageable age by 1709, but Bergen (p. 190), perhaps having seen this manuscript, also calls her Elbert’s daughter, as does A.V. Phillips, who was certainly aware of the manuscript as he cites Mrs. Vanderbilt’s book in his The Lott family in America (Trenton, N.J., 1942), 15. However, the last-named work gives an otherwise useful account of Abraham Lott, and may be consulted for biographical details and a reliable record of his issue, except that it inexplicably misses the daughter Cornelia vouched for in the manuscript Lott genealogy.