Lady Moody's Gravesend

The Municipal Art Society announced a tour of Gravesend, in southern Brooklyn, and entitled it "Discovering Lady Moody's Gravesend." The announcement is illustrated with a picture of Trinity Tabernacle (above, screengrabbed from Google Street View). Lady Moody (born Deborah Dunch, married Sir Henry Moody) left England in 1639 where she was prosecuted for her Anabaptist beliefs. She settled in Saugus, Massachusetts, where she soon got in trouble with the established Puritan church. She moved on to Gravesend, Brooklyn, where she is the only European woman known to have founded a town in colonial America. The Dutch West India Company was more tolerant of religious dissent than the Puritans of Massachusetts. More detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Moody

The tabernacle grabbed my attention with its quirky massing and Gothic Revival details. I was further intrigued because my mother's family has paternal roots in Gravesend. Among Lady Moody's followers who joined her in Gravesend after she was excommunicated in Massachusetts was a Thomas Poling who had a son John Poling. John's son Samuel Poling married the granddaughter of Pieter Claesen Wyckoff, an early Dutch settler. The early Polings used various spellings of the surname, including Poland, Polen, and Polan. My mother's people had settled on Polan a few generations before hers.

I am not as obsessed with genealogy as some folks but I do enjoy the probable connections. Bunches of religious dissenters. My father's paternal ancestors come down through the Clarkes of Rhode Island.