About 1750 to 1944
From Breukelen to Warren County
What the family record says about the first VanOrds in America. A family from Breukelen, in the Dutch province of Utrecht, that crossed to the United States in the late 1840s, lived in New York, and settled in Warren County, Pennsylvania.
The earliest people on the VanOrd line in the family record are Antonie van Oort and Aleyde Sparling, both born about 1750. Antonie died in The Hague in 1838. Their son Egidius van Oordt was born on 5 August 1773 in Maarssen, in the province of Utrecht. He married Gerritje van der Neut on 28 July 1799 in Breukelen, a few miles down the river Vecht, and died there on 23 December 1812.
Their son Jan van Oord was born in Breukelen on 12 May 1803. He married Margaretha Olthuis in Hoorn on 30 January 1828; she was born there in 1806. Their first children were born in the Netherlands between 1829 and 1843, in Hoorn, Breukelen, and Amsterdam among other places.
The family came to the United States in the late 1840s. The 1900 census gives 1848 as the year of arrival for their son George, and the next child, Katherine, was born in New York in October 1852. They stayed in New York State through the 1860s: Lewis Kinde Van Ord was born in Rochester in December 1860, and the eldest daughter, Cornelia, died there in 1863.
During the 1870s the family moved to Warren County, Pennsylvania. George’s son William George Van Ord was born in Warren in October 1877. Jan died in Warren on 3 June 1879, and the 1880 census found George’s household in Glade. Margaretha died on Creek Road, Warren County, on 15 December 1893. The sons stayed in the county: the younger Egidius died in Russell City in 1893, George in Pine Grove in 1907, and Lewis in Pine Grove in 1944. Pine Grove, Russell, and Youngsville recur in the record for the next several generations.
The spelling changed along the way. The elder Egidius was recorded as van Noord at his marriage in 1799 and as van Oordt at his death in 1812. Jan was Van Noort at his baptism, van Noord at his marriage, and van Oord in American records, and his children in America were Van Ord. VanOrd, written as one word, appears in the record from the 1880 census on and is the form the most recent generations use.
Source: the family tree kept on Ancestry.com, as of April 2026. Dates and places are as recorded there; where records disagree, the better-sourced value is used.