For two centuries the Kortrights and the Gouverneurs have ranked among the leading families of New York. They have intermarried with each other, and with the VerPlancks, Tillostons, Lawrences, Livingstons and other great Colonial families. Kortryk, a Flemish town on the river Lys, gave its name to the family. The ancestors of the Kortrights were Protestants, of Flanders. In the religious troubles that vexed that country three hundred years ago, SEBASTIAN, or BASTIAEN, VAN KORTRYK went to Leerdam to escape persecution, and settled there. His two sons, Jan and Michiel, came to New Amsterdam in 1663. They first settled upon Governor Stuyvesant's bouwery, but afterwards removed to Harlem. From them have descended all the Kortright or Courtright families of New York and New Jersey.

Cornelis Jansen Kortright, the ancestor of Mr. Gouverneur Kortright, was born in Beest, Gelderland, in 1645. He came to this country with his father, JAN BASTIAENSEN , in 1663. His wife, whom he married in 1665m was Metje Elyessen, daughter of Bastiaen Eleyssen. He was a member of the troop of horse, and died in 1689, leaving four children, Johannes, laurens, Aefie, and Annettie. His eldest son, Johannes Cornelissen Kortright, who was born in 1673 and died in 1711, married Wyntje Dyckman and their son, Nicholas Kortright, who married Elizabeth Van Huyse, daughter of Eide Van Huyse, was a constable and collector of the town of Harlem.

Lawrence Cornelisen Kortright, the second son of Cornelis Jansen Kortright, was the ancestor of that branch of the family which Mr. Gouverneur Kortright represents. he was born in 1681, and was constable of harlem in 1708. His wife, whom he married in 1703, was Helena Benson, daughter of Captain John Benson, who was of an old New York family.
The oldest son of this union, born in 1704, was Cornelius Kortright, who married, in 1730, Hester Cannon, daughter of John Cannon, another New York merchant, who was an assistant alderman, 1738-40, and whose death occurred in
1762. Cornelius Kortright died in 1743, as the result of an accident, and his widow survived until 1784. Three sons and three daughters were of this family. The youngest son, Cornelius Kortright, married a Miss Hendricks, a wealthy lady of the Island of Santa Cruz. Maria Kortright married John W. Hanson. Helena Kortright married Abraham Brasher, and Elizabeth Kortright married William R. Van Cortlandt.

Lawrence Kortright, eldest son of Cornelius and Hester (Cannon) Kortright, was a noted merchant of New York a hundred years ago, being associated with Luke Van Ranst and Isaac Sears. He was a large owner in several privateers in the French War and one of the original incorporators of the Chambers of Commerce in 1770. The town of Kortright, N.Y., where he had purchased large tracts of land intending to found a manor, was named for him. His death occurred in 1794. His wife was Hannah Aspinwall. One of his daughters married JAMES MONROE, afterwards PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and another became the wife of Nicholas Gouverneur, of the great commission house of Gouverneur, Kortright & Co., after whom Gouverneur Street and Gouverneur Lane were named. The only son of Lawrence Kortright was Captain John Kortright, whose wife was Catherine Seaman, who, after the death of her first husband, became the second wife of Judge Henry Brockholst Livingston. Captain John Kortright was a member of the St. George's Society in 1789. His children were John L., Edmund, Robert, and Gouverneur;Eliza M., who married Nicholas Cruger, and Hester Mary, who married Billip B. Seaman. Edmund Kortright married Miss Shaw. Robert Kortright became a physician. Gouverneur Kortright married Miss Allaire, of a Winchester, Va. family.

Mr. Gouverneur Kortright, head of this historic family in the present generation, lives in East Fifty-sixth Street. He married Thérèse White, descended from Peregrine White, who was born on the Mayflower in the harbor of Plymouth in 1620. Mr. Kortright belongs to the Metropolitan Racquet and Knickerbocker clubs, and his interest in gentlemanly sports is indicated by his membership in the New York and Larchmont Yacht clubs. His summer residence is The Moorings, in Newport. he has one daughter, Alice Gouverneur Kortright.

Source:© New York Genealogical and Biographical Society's "Prominent People of New York", p. 345
Submitted by Jean Boutcher

AP HERNANDO COURTRIGHT Published: February 26, 1986 Hernando Courtright, who made the Beverly Wilshire Hotel a glamorous place for the rich, died Monday after a stroke and a heart attack. He was 81 years old. Mr. Courtright, who had owned the hotel since 1961, sold it on Dec. 30 to Regent International for $125 million. His wife, Florence Falzone Courtright, his six children and her six children were all at the bedside when he died, according to Helen Chaplin, president of the hotel. All the children were by previous marriages.

Lancaster
Eagle-Gazette
Wednesday, July 30, 1997

Lithopolis man was a Civil War Surgeon

Editors note: The following is the first article in a two-part series on former Lithopolis resident
George S. Courtright. The second article - which will run in the Aug. 6 Accent section - will
profile Courtright's book of his Civil War experiences in the western United States.

By DWIGHT BARNES The Eagle-Gazette Staff

If you just browse the Civil War books in Lithopolis' Wagnalls Memorial Library, you could miss a little, red 28-page pamphlet-sized book in the library's rare book room. The book might be as rare as the period it represents - the American West during the Civil War, seen, in part, by former Lithopolis resident Dr. George S. Courtright. Courtright wrote down his remembrances in his privately published book, "An Expedition Against the Indians in 1864; A true historical account of an Indian Expedition under the command of Col. Christopher (Kit) Carson." The book was published in 1911. Born in Pickaway County on April 27, 1840, he had four brothers, John, Samuel, Alva and Edson; and four sisters, Mary Jane, Sarah, Elizabeth and a girl who died as the infant child of Jesse D. and Sally (Stout) Courtright, according to the book, "A Biographical Record of Fairfield County, Ohio," vhich was edited by S.J. Clarke. Jesse Courtright is listed in the "Pickaway Quarterly" history magazine as a Walnut Township farmer. He also is listed as a state legislator from 1854 to 1855, according to a "History of Falrfield County and Representative Citizens," edited and compiled Charles C. Miller. Jesse's father, John, is listed in the quarterly history publication as having a farm near Royalton after emigrating from Pennsylvania in 1804. He served as a private in the North Hampton County, Pa., militia in 1782. George Couriright attended public school there and later graduated from South Salem Academy in Ross County. After graduating from Cincinnati's Medical College of Ohio in 1862, he was resident surgeon at Cincinnati's Saint John's Hospital in 1861, then at Cincinnati Hospital in 1862, according to the Clarke book. In November 1862 with the Civil War reaching its peak, he enlisted as an assistant surgeon with the United States Volunteers, a unit appointed by President Abraham Lincoln. His trek west wouldn't begin until he saw service at Ohio's Camp Dennison for a week in August 1863. Then in September he was at Camp Nelson convalescent hospital in Kentucky. The Pickaway County publication's article also mentions either letters or journals obtained from a since-deceased descendent, Donald P. Courtright, containing some aspects not discussed in Courtright's book. One of the main concerns is the doctor's desire to have the convalescent hospital removed from the general hospital and its commanding surgeon, A.C Swartzwelder. Tents had been requisitioned from the quartermaster corps to handle convalescent patients but were not enough in number with some taken over by other military departments at the camp. In October 1863, he wrote his request to the Department of Ohio headquarters of incompetent Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside. Gen. Burnside had been relieved of commanding the Army of the Potomac the previous January by Lincoln, according to "The Almanac of American History," by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. In addition to more tents, he requested an additional assistant surgeon and wrote that his 240 con- valescent patients included "many of whom need constant attention." In September, his efforts were rewarded with Special Order No. 427, which ordered him to prompt- ly report to headquarters at Santa Fe, N.M., then to Fort Craig, N.M. At first, Courtright defied the order and remained with his patients six days until properly relieved by helpful friend and fellow surgeon, Dr. John L. Carpenter. After a long and rough journey west, Courtright would find his new duties at Fort Craig anything but dull, experiencing raids by American Indians during the summer of 1864. His Western service culminated in his accompanying a U.S. Army raid against American Indians in October through November at the New Mexico-Oklahoma border. That expedition was led by former frontier scout and agent Col. "Kit" Carson. Courtright's service was rewarded by a promotion to the rank of Brevet major, and he returned to Cincinnati in 1866, first taking a position as "demonstrator of anatomy" at Miami Medical College before moving to Lithopolis in 1868. He married Margaret Cornelia Stevens of Lebanon in May 1868. They parented one son, Jesse, who later moved to Pickaway County, where he and his wife, Eveline (Pontius), parented six chil- den. Courtright, also according to the Clarke book, hadn't forgotten his military days and was active at Lithopolis as a member of the local Union Army veterans' Grand Army of the Republic organization, the Loyal Legion and on the Bloom Township soldiers' relief commission since its organization. His professional involvement incuded Hocking Valley Medical Association membership, State Medical Society of Ohio life membership and an American Medical Association member. Courtright continued further community and area involvement with a lifetime following of the Presbyterian church, where he was a treasurer; local board of pension examiners president for near- ly four years; Lithopolis school board member for more than 20 years, including acting as president; a Knight Templar Mason with a thirty-second degree Scottish Rite and active in the area Democratic Party. His Lithopolis home, according to the Pickaway Historical Quarterly, was torn down and now is the site of Wagnalls Memorial Library, administration offices and its youth center. Lancaster Health Department vital statistics records list George S. Courtright's death at age 74 as occurring at 11 p.m. on Jan.19, 1915, with burial in Reber Hill Cemetery.

The following is a biography of two Courtright women who made a difference in their communities by helping others in need. These biographies were donated by Ellie Pelcyger. Thank you Ellie.

2. Mary Estella (Stella) Courtright.[2] Born on 15 Sept. 1862 in Oxford, Ohio. Mary Estella (Stella) died on 28
July 1964; she was 101. Occupation: Teacher/Lecturer.

Stella Courtright Stimson was born September 15, 1862 to Sarah and Calvin W. Courtright in Oxford, Ohio where her parents had been attending university. Stella was their first child of 15 and before Stella was fifteen years old, she saw four of her siblings die from disease and accident. She was particularly close to the next born, her sister, Kitty, and throughout their lives the two were more guardians than sisters to their surviving siblings. The girls helped to raise all the children who came after them ; Stella delayed her college education at Wellesley in Philadelphia to help out at home. Still, she attended Wellesley from 1882-84.and taught there as well. She taught school in McConnellsville, Ohio, where her family lived; there she met and married Charles Miller Davis in 1886. She lived with him and their son, Miller, in Wichita, Kansas, and for a time, in Colorado. A second child, Dorothy, died in 1892 when her brother was five. Her birthdate is unknown at this writing but the following year, Charles Miller Davis died as well and the combination of these losses left their mark on Stella for the rest of her life.

Stella went for a time to Chicago, where she and her sister ran their own school for primary through high school aged children but in 1894 she took a position teaching Latin at Coates College in Terre Haute, Indiana, where she met and married Judge Samuel Cary Stimson in September, 1897. Two months later she saved the life of a window-display artist who caught fire as the largest store in Terre Haute burned to the ground, the worst fire disaster in the history of Terre Haute. She wrapped him in her coat as her ll-year-old son looked on in terror.

This life-saving instinct in Stella was second nature. Having seen what she had seen in her young life, she had a great desire to break the cycle of poverty, pregnancy and abuse suffered by so many American women and children. After the births of her two Stimson children, Stuart Courtright and Margaret Elizabeth, Stella became "a potent force in the Legislative Council of Indiana Women". (Terre Haute Tribune, 3/7/99) In 1912 she organized an effort with a few other women to became poll watchers in a hotly contested Mayoralty election where they recorded so many people voting more than once that the Mayor of Terre Haute was ousted by their efforts. (Chicago Daily News, 11/27/57)

Stella was President of the Florence Crittenton Board in 1912 and wrote an influential article outlining a project that made sex education "available through parent-teacher clubs and social centers of the schools, YMCA and YWCA at Indiana State Normal School." Stella was a National Treasurer of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and a member of the Indiana League of Women Voters. Her daughter, Margaret Huddlestun of Indianapolis said about her mother that her "Mother was always busy at something," and that something had usually to do with educating and improving the lives of poor women and children. She was a charter member of the Woman's Press Club Of Indiana in 1913; a leader of the first Boys Club and the head of the first business girl's club. She taught the boys' class at the Washington Avenue Presbyterian Church for years. She was the first woman to be elected to the Terre Haute Board of School Trustees.

Stella Courtright Stimson died at the age of 101, having travelled to the West Coast twice and to Europe at least once. She was skilled in Latin and Greek and taught her daughter, Margaret both languages at home. Stella was an avid gardner, like her father and her sister, Kitty, and worked her own sizable garden herself until she was quite old. She was one of a small army of American women who, by her own sheer determination, shaped the lives of women who came after her.

3. Katherine Louise Courtright.[2] Born November 11, 1863 in Brookville, Indiana. Katherine Louise (Kitty)
died November 2, 1954 in Ithaca, New York. She was 91. Occupation: Teacher, Social Worker, Lecturer.

Katherine Louise Courtright was born November 11, 1863, the second child of Sarah Eliza Albach and Calvin
Whitfield Courtright. When Kittie was two years old, the family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where her father was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary. Kittie was very close to her older sister, Stella; in a diary of Sarah's that describes their life for a few months of that time, she writes of the two little girls' time spent together, playing, taking walks around town, learning Bible verses as soon as they learned to speak. The family was deeply religious, holding family "devotionals" daily and living under the watchful eye of God.

Before she was three, Kittie's eight-month-old baby brother died in their home of diphtheria. It was the first of four tragic childhood deaths for the family. Her parents apparently felt the mandate of God to go forth and multiply and Kitty and her older sister virtually raised eleven younger siblings before they were able to take possession of their own lives. They lived for a time in McConnellsville, Ohio, where Kitty graduated High School in 1881. In her record of employment she lists as her first job, "stripping tobacco at a local factory." Her father put a swift end to that and Kitty enrolled in a "kindergarten course" in Columbus, working off her tuition at $1.50 a week. She attended Wellesley Preparatory School in Philadelphia with her sister and got an Ohio teaching certificate allowing her to teach young children. Kitty and her sister, Stella, opened their own school in Chicago, The Durant School for Children and Young Women, in 1891.

Kitty and her sister had a passion to educate indigent women in birth control and to train them in work that would support themselves and their children. Kitty wrote short stories which were occasionally published by broadsides and church magazines, describing the plight of poor, single mothers who were victims of their husband's alcohol abuse and desertion.

It was hard to make ends meet but Kitty was energetic. She managed a boarding house, worked for Ginn and Co. publishers for $20 a week and eventually gave up the school. In 1896 she went to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois to assume the duties of Dean of Women . Harper's Bazar published her photo among other "Leading Women Educators" of the time and said of her that she: "…presents attractive suggestions to those interested in the woman movement. Miss Courtright is a very young woman to hold the position she does, but in addition to that she is also a young woman who received no 'higher education' as it is furnished in schools. A college dean with no degree, no alma mater even, is a rarity worth comment, and when that dean is a teacher with an enviable record and a director of fine methods, there is something to be said to the women who lament that so many doors are closed to them because of their lack of college training. In an interim between two principalships Miss Courtright also made herself a business record second to few held by young women." (Harper's Bazar, 1896)

Katherine Courtright married William Edward Simonds, a professor of English Literature at Knox College in 1898 and bore three daughters, Marjorie, Katherine and Eleanor, by 1902. Two months after the birth of the third baby, Kittie took the three children to a farm, answering a young "bachelor farmer's" ad for a housekeeper. Will visited them on weekends and her own father, Calvin, came along and worked the garden while Kitty fed sometimes twenty hired hands. In a letter written years later, Will said of her homecoming: "(When you all) came home early in October it took a big farm wagon to hold the barrels of apples and the 300 delicata squashes and the 600 bunches of pink plume celery and the sacks of potatoes and small vegetables that Grandfather Courtright had raised in his quarter-acre garden-to say nothing of the jellies and canned fruit that mother had made."

Katherine continued to write hair-raising stories about the plight of poor women; she taught kindergarten and first grade that included her own children. In 1909 she became a volunteer in the Knox County probation department and subsequently a paid probation officer. Her daughters remembered that "…several times we had one of 'her girls' living in and working for us." Her husband was made Dean of College in 1912 and in 1914 he booked passage for the family to Europe for a sabbatical. The First World War intervened and the family spent the year in Boston while he taught at Harvard and the girls attended Boston Latin School. Katherine, at 52, enrolled in a vocational guidance course at Simmons, her first college course, and worked at Jordan Marsh in the book department (9$/week.) They returned to Boston from Galesburg the following two summers and Katherine organized the Committee on Summer Training for Girls. She saw to it that "…in five sections of the city fully one hundred girls have been busily at work since early in July…putting up preserves…making articles of clothing, learning how to keep house in a cleanly, healthful manner…" (The Boston Transcript) She, herself, kept house for five in an apartment and Will wrote text books at Houghten Mifflen.

Katherine was Executive Secretary of the Woman's Department of the National Civic Federation in Boston and began a demanding lecture circuit around the USA. She founded the Knox County Day Nursery for women who worked in defense factories and kept up with her responsibilities as the Dean's wife at the College. She lectured on homemaking and family hygiene for the Illinois Farmers' Institute and traveled to California on the train for her parents' 50th Anniversary in 1911. Her daughters all moved out into the world after graduating from Knox and assumed careers in publishing, university administration and journalism. Kittie and Will traveled to warmer climates in winter when he retired in 1930 and she assumed more and more responsibility for her husband's failing health. He died in 1946 and she in 1954. My mother, her middle daughter, Katherine Simonds Wensberg, carried Kittie's passion for writing, her community activism and her desire to change the lives of poor women and children.

By Eleanor Pelcyger, Los Angeles, 1999

Compiled and submitted by Jean Boutcher

***The photograph Of Elizabeth Kortright Monroe is copyrighted by The White House Curator, Washington,DC.

Click Elizabeth for a short ancestral chart for Elizabeth Kortright.

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