[or more correctly, Annetjf (Jansen) Bogardus]. Dutch heiress in New Amsterdam (New York), the litigation over whose property was the Jarndyce versus Jarndyce of New York’s courts. Born in Holland in 1638 she married Eberhardus Bogardus, New Amsterdam’s second minister. Her husband resigned under charges in 1647, and she sailed with him for Holland. The vessel was wrecked on the English coast, September 27, 1647, Bogardus and eighty others being drowned. In 1654 his widow obtained a patent in her own name of a farm of 62 acres, comprising the most valuable part of the present city of New York. She died at Beverwyck, NY, on the 19th of March 1663. The claimants to her estate have been plentiful to an extreme degree. After the title to the major portion of the property had been confirmed by the New York legislature to the Trinity Church Corporation, which had come into possession, pretended heirs arose to claim inheritance. In 1899 several societies of so-called Anneke Jans heirs were in existence, which, regardless of a first essential of civilized government—a statute of limitations—spent much hard-earned money annually in pursuit of an ignis fatuus, and enriched the unscrupulous persons who deluded them with false hopes. The subject of the Anneke Jans estate was dealt with in an article on Unclaimed Estates, by H. Sidney Everett, in The Atlantic Monthly of Feb. 1896.
