Talk:Cornelis Melyn

Influential person?

Shouldn't Cornelis Melyn be included in the list of "influential people" under New Netherland series ::>

on the right? Does anybody agree? How can we make that happen?

DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 23:11, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Okay, I figured out how to add Cornelis to the list, i.e. by editing Template:New Netherland. Now, let's see if anybody else thinks he was "notable" enough to include in the list. I believe CM is neglected by historians. The 1936-37 articles by Paul Gibson Burton were wonderful, but are about the only hint that the man played a major role in New Netherland history. I plan to remedy this situation.

DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 16:29, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, after editing Template:New Netherland, my change didn't seem to show up anywhere except in this page when I clicked the "Show" button. I was mystified. Then, this morning (21 Jan), I noticed that the change had appeared in Cornelis Melyn's page. I also noticed that CM's page had been modified by RussBot a little while ago. Aha!! So a pagespace must be updated for template changes to become visible!?!? To test this hypothesis, I made a very minor change to Peter Minuit's page. Voilà! Now CM's name appeared in the the New Netherland template box on that page, too. I don't know if this kind of stuff should be considered a bug, but it sure was confusing to this WikiNewbie!

DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 17:53, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

My experiences with trying to add Cornelis to the "influential people" list now seem to be irrelevant. He was a member of the council of eight men, which nobody seems to dispute. The Eight are included, as a group, in the list of influential folks. Including groups of people in the template is a much cleaner and simpler solution than trying to include a bunch of individuals. Kudos to whoever thought of it.

DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 16:36, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Correct spelling of name?

When I created "redirect pages" awhile ago for Cornelius Melyn and Cornelis Melijn, I commented that I wanted to use them to link to the "correct" spelling of CM's name.

What I probably should have said is that I wanted to cause them to take the reader to the "most common" spelling of his name. Until well into the 19th century, standardised spelling was nonexistent and names and words were spelled however came to mind. So I'm just trying to tie together any references to Cornelis which might exist in various literature.

Cornelius is obviously the Anglicisation of whatever his name was in Dutch and may have been used in the public record in Connecticut after he moved there. It also appears in some people's genealogy files.

Melijn is another spelling which is used in a number of articles which I just discovered and still need to explore.

Have you seen other spellings for which more redirects should be created?

DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 00:29, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

I just created a redirect page for Corneille Melyn, which is the way CM's name was recorded among the baptisms at St. Walburga's church in Antwerp. I called this a "variant" spelling. It is the French equivalent. It appears that, during the Spanish control of some parts of the Netherlands, people's names were recorded in French, or occasionally even in Spanish or Latin, when they were baptised in the Catholic churches.

In her Cornelis Melyn genealogy site, Diana Gale Matthiesen provides an interesting discussion of Paul Gibson Burton's use of many French names in his 1936-1937 articles on Melyn's Antwerp ancestry. Her discussion is must reading if you're trying to decipher some of the names given by Burton.

DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 18:52, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

The name Corneille Melyn does not appear in the source you cited. It actually appears in published sources citing the St. Walburga register. The name is almost universally written Melÿn in his native language, both in Europe and in New Netherland. In modern Dutch sources, the letter ÿ is rendered ij. In American sources, Dutch spellings fell into disuse, particularly as English supplanted it beginning in the latter half of the 1600s. The archaic letter ÿ was almost always rendered y in later American sources. These English language sources also spelled the family name in more than 30 different ways, attempting to put into English spelling the distinct Dutch sounds. A standard spelling of the surname in English never came into being contemporaneous, although Melyn is certainly the most frequently seen spelling in works of history.

Quissett (talk) 23:03, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Belgium? No way!

I question, and oppose, the addition of this man's talk page to "WikiProject Belgium" this morning. Belgium didn't exist until long after he migrated from the Netherlands to New Amsterdam and died in New England. His birthplace, Antwerp, was a part of the Netherlands and he undoubtedly considered himself Dutch.

DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 13:33, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Today, I changed the "WikiProject" from Belgium to Netherlands. Melyn was Dutch. He was born in the Netherlands. He moved to Amsterdam as a young man, then to the Dutch colony of New Netherland, where he was intimately involved in the governance of that colony.

DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 14:53, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Reverting vandalism

I just reverted the vandalism committed by an anonymous user. There can be no good reason for deleting the whole section on Melyn's early life, and the i.p. user gave none.

DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 04:31, 27 April 2011 (UTC)