Jets’ Tebow Can Trace His Lineage to New JerseyBy JOHN BRANCH and JACK BEGG
New York Times
Published: March 23, 2012
Tim Tebow arrives in New Jersey, where the Jets practice and play, as the world’s most famous backup quarterback. It is a homecoming, of sorts, centuries in the making, because Tebow appears to be the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of a man from
Hackensack.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Photos of Harvey Day Tebow, left, and Clarence L. Tebow, right.
MetLife Stadium, home of the Jets and the Giants in East Rutherford, is about 10 miles from where an immigrant, Andries Tebow (spelled variously as Thybaut, Tibout, TeBow and other derivations), settled down after landing from Europe in the late 1600s. One of his children was Pieter, born in
Hackensack and baptized there in 1696, records show.
More than 300 years and 10 generations later, Tim Tebow brings the family name full circle, according to the amateur genealogist — and Tebow’s fourth cousin, once removed — Dean Enderlin.
“One characteristic in our family is a prominent nose,” Enderlin said. “Tim may think otherwise, but his distant cousins see it. We vote thumbs up. He’s got the Tebow nose.”
It is unclear how much Tebow knows about his genealogy. While his own recent background is well chronicled — born to Christian missionaries in the Philippines, raised in Florida, now a preacher in a championship quarterback’s body — little has been examined about his deeper roots.
But there is no doubt that early generations of Tebows settled in what is now Bergen County, and Tim Tebow appears to be the latest link in a long chain of North Jersey arrivals.
“It’s strange that his ancestors came right through that area where he’s going to be playing,” said Glenn Corbett, a Bergen County author and historian. “You could throw a pass from the Meadowlands and basically hit where his ancestors came from.”
A message left at the Florida home of Tebow’s parents, Bob and Pam, was not returned.
The details come from Enderlin, a 50-year-old geologist in Calistoga, Calif. He has been tracing his own ancestry since he was a teenager, learning the hobby from his maternal grandmother. (His paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Tebow.) When Tim Tebow became famous as a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback at the University of Florida, Enderlin set off to determine whether they were related.
Enderlin said that, like many Tebows in the country, he and Tim Tebow can be traced to Andries Tebow, who sailed to the New World out of Bruges, Belgium. Enderlin is unsure where Andries lived — either Belgium or Holland — but he believes his family was Walloon, a French-speaking minority rooted in southern Belgium.
“Belgium was governed by the Catholic rulers of Spain and persecuted Protestants, forcing many to flee,” Myra Vanderpool Gormley wrote in an article for Genealogy Magazine titled, “Belgian Migrations: Walloons Arrived Early in America.”
“Many went to the northern parts of the Netherlands,” she wrote. “It was from their exile in Holland that they emigrated again.”
Andries Tebow landed in New Amsterdam — later renamed New York — and settled sometime before 1686 amid what was then open farmland of North Jersey and fast-growing smatters of Dutch immigrants. One online history says that he purchased 261 acres between the
Hackensack River and Sprout Brook, north of what is now Midland Avenue near Paramus, in 1686.
Andries Tebow’s descendants spread slowly. Pieter Tebow, a great-grandson of Andries Tebow who was born in Paramus in 1755, later had a farm a few miles north, between what is now known as Allendale and Waldwick, likely along the road now known as the Franklin Turnpike. (Despite the family’s apparent wealth and growing size, and geographic location in the middle of the Revolutionary War, there is little record demonstrating active involvement in the war with the British.)
According to “Allendale — A Background of a Borough” by Patricia Webb Wardell, when Pieter (sometimes spelled Peter) Tebow died in 1803 or 1804, his became the first estate inventory on record at the Court House in
Hackensack. The inventory of March 2, 1804, was overseen by Tebow’s widow, Susanna.
His possessions included two male slaves (Sam, valued at $275, and Lamore, valued at $250), two female slaves (Phillis, $162.50, and Dine, $75) and three black children ($25 to $62.50). The list also included a huge assortment of kitchen items, tools, saddles, four horses and eight cattle.
The Tebows of Tim Tebow’s lineage stayed in North Jersey until 1811, when Ryer (sometimes called Uriah) Tebow moved his family to Elizabethtown, Ohio, near Cincinnati.
Religion, apparently, runs in the family.
“The story goes that they went to Cincinnati, which was just a few bars at the time, and they didn’t like the looks of it,” Enderlin said. “They were very religious folks. They saw Cincinnati as a den of iniquity. So they went to the small town of Elizabethtown.”
His family included a son named Peter (for several generations, Tebow sons were named for grandfathers), who married Olive Hobart in 1829. Peter was a hotel keeper and farmer, and after a tornado wiped out a local Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1860s, as part of the church’s building committee, he donated $500 to the cause.
Peter and Olive Tebow had 12 children. And that is where the lineages of Tim Tebow and Dean Enderlin diverge, Enderlin said. Tebow can be traced to James Tebow, and a lineage that stuck around the Cincinnati area for several more generations. Tebow’s paternal grandfather, Robert Ramsey Tebow, was born in Cincinnati in 1921 and died in Oregon, where Tebow’s father, Bob, went to seminary school.
Enderlin’s lineage splinters through Harvey Tebow, a side of the family that moved to Kansas before spreading further, landing Enderlin in Northern California.
But his football allegiance knows no geographical bounds.
“I go where Tim goes,” said Enderlin, who has never met Tebow or his immediate family. “Yep — Denver’s out.”
Alain Delaquérière and Jack Styczynski contributed research.
