neither of my predecessors served very long with the King's troops, my
father in particular selling out at the end of his second campaign; but
the military experience, and I may add the military glory each acquired
in youth, did them good service for all the rest of their days. Both were
commissioned in the militia, and my father actually rose as high as major
in that branch of the service, that being the rank he held, and the title
he bore, for the last fifteen years of his life.

My mother was of Dutch extraction on both sides, her father having been a
Blauvelt, and her mother a Van Busser. I have heard it said that there was
even a relationship between the Stuyvesants and the Van Cortlandts, and the
Van Bussers; but I am not able to point out the actual degree and precise
nature of the affinity. I presume it was not very near, or my information
would have been more minute. I have always understood that my mother
brought my father thirteen hundred pounds for dowry (currency, not
sterling), which, it must be confessed, was a very genteel fortune for
a young woman in 1733. Now, I very well know that six, eight, and ten
thousand pounds sometimes fall in, in this manner, and even much more in
the high families; but no one need be ashamed, who looks back fifty years,
and finds that his mother brought a thousand pounds to her husband.

I was neither an only child, nor the eldest-born. There was a son who
preceded me, and two daughters succeeded, but they all died in infancy,
leaving me in effect the only offspring for my parents to cherish and
educate. My little brother monopolised the name of Evans, and living
for some time after I was christened, I got the Dutch appellation of my
maternal grandfather, for my share of the family nomenclature, which
happened to be Cornelius--Corny was consequently the diminutive by which I
was known to all the whites of my acquaintance, for the first sixteen or
eighteen years of my life, and to my parents as long as they lived. Corny