The Kean family may be one of New Jersey’s oldest and most celebrated political dynasties, but Rebecca Bennett’s ancestors were living in the Garden State more than 60 years before the family of her opponent in Tuesday’s congressional race, Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), arrived.
Bennett, a former U.S. Navy helicopter pilot seeking to unseat Kean in New Jersey’s 7th congressional district, can trace her New Jersey roots to 1709, when her ancestors settled in Six Mile Run, a Dutch colonial community in what is now Franklin Township in Somerset County.
The Bennett family came from New York, where ancestors of predominantly Dutch and German descent had begun arriving in America as early as the mid-1600s.
Her seventh great-grandparents, Adrian and Barbara Vonck Bennett, were born in New York before moving to New Jersey; they had ten children. Adrian Bennett was an elder at the Six-Mile Run Dutch Church. After their deaths, their eldest son inherited the Bennett farm, not Rebecca Bennett’s sixth-great-grandfather.
Her eighth great-grandfather, William Bennett, emigrated from Holland around 1636. He bought a 930-acre farm in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn from the Canarsee Lenape people; it’s said to have been the first house built by a white man in Brooklyn. Native Americans destroyed the house in 1643; he was killed the following year while fighting in the Dutch-Indian War. (Had the 930-acres in Brooklyn remained in the Bennett family, it would be worth more than $50 billion today, according to Douglas Elliman Brooklyn Market Reports.)
By comparison, the Kean family arrived in New Jersey from South Carolina around the 1770s, beginning a political legacy that would eventually produce governors, congressmen, legislative leaders and other prominent public figures.
John Kean served in the Continental Congress; his wife was then niece of William Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first Governor of New Jersey. His father, James, was born in Bermuda.
The two families established roots in different parts of the state.
The Keans became closely associated with Union and Essex counties, while Bennett’s ancestors had connections to Somerset, Middlesex, Monmouth, and Burlington counties. Some branches of the Bennett family later moved to Brooklyn and upstate New York.
Tom Kean, Jr. and Rebecca Bennett each have ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War; Bennett’s military service has been central to her congressional campaign.
But Kean’s family tree extends even further into early American history.
He is a descendant of Myles Standish, the military leader of the Plymouth Colony who arrived aboard the Mayflower in 1620. His ancestry also includes Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch director-general of New Netherland, abndJohn Winthrop, an early governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Kean’s father, Thomas H. Kean, served as governor from 1982 to 1990, and his grandfather, Robert Kean, represented New Jersey in Congress for 20 years. His great-grandfather, Hamilton Fish Kean, and his great-great uncle, John Kean, served in the United State Senate; their father, Col. John Kean, was the first New Jersey Republican State Chairman and a key political ally of President Abraham Lincoln.