The Descendants of John/Jan Kidney

Welcome and Introduction

This Web site is dedicated to the American descendents of John or Jan Kidney. John comes from a family of English colonists who settled in Barbados. He was born in Barbados around 1673, came to the American colonies, settled in the area of Albany, New York, married Marritje Roelofs Van Der Werken, and raised a family that has spread the Kidney family throughout the United States. If you can trace your Kidney family in the United States to back before the Irish famine immigration, late 1840's or so, chances are that you are one of John's descendants, too.

If not, you may still find information about your Kidney family on this site. I am tracking every instance of the name that I find in the censuses, genealogical information, books, and such. Currently, I have over 2,000 Kidneys in my database and it is still growing.

I am not a professional genealogist. Much of the information that I present here has been sent to me by Kidney relatives and kin from around the world. If you have genealogical information that isn't reflected here, send it to me and I will include it in the next site update. Likewise, if I have something wrong, tell me about it. The Genealogy information presented here is only as accurate as I know it. I am continually discovering new pieces of data that will make this Web site an ongoing adventure.

I started this site because finding information about the Kidney family was very difficult. Such information seems to exist in small fragments and has never been gathered. You can't even search on the Web or in databases for the surname without being inundated with hits on kidney tranasplants, diseases, beans, and swimming pool shapes. It takes lots of weeding through to find one genealogical nuggget.

In contrast, the Van Der Werken family is easy. Not much chaff to separate from the wheat. So, Paul Prindle already has a whole book about them.

The Kidney family receives some treatment, 14 pages, in Settlers of the Beekman Patent, Volume 7, by Frank J. Doherty. You can order the book online at http://www.beekmansettlers.com/index.html. So far, Mr. Doherty has not make the Kidney family chapter available separately. The only other treatise on the Kidney family that I have found is Descendants of Orsamus & Betsy (Herrington) Kidney a 1973 small, self-published volume by Guy and Joy Kidney. It is currently available in the Denver CO Public Library, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, IL, and the Western Reserve Historical Society Library in Cleveland, OH. Since its print run was limited, I have unsucessfully tried to request copyright permission to place a copy if its 44 pages on this site. However, I have included information from these books in the family trees on this site. If you know of other volumes, clue me in.

Rather than writing a book, I decided to gather as much data as I can and publish it here for the use and enjoyment of Kidneys everywhere, now and in the future.

I hope you enjoy the site and find something useful here. You can also search the site using the search engine below:

PicoSearch

Gary Kidney
[email protected]
Page updated: January 4, 2007