I have received so many requests about my origins and ancestry, that I have
taken this way of replying.
The Koops who were my forebearers were caught up in the Anabaptist dispersion
in the Netherlands in the late 1600s and although I can't prove it, family tradition says that the first Koop arrived in Brooklyn, New York, in 1690. We were apparently an infertile lot because for all the generations until mine, there was only one reproductive male in each and no females born with the name of Koop.
When my wife and I had four children, three boys and a girl, one boy was killed at 20, one had two girls, and the other son had two boys and a girl. So time will tell.
Apparently many Koops at the same time left the Netherlands and went eastward
as my family came westward, and I have more inquiries from eastern Europe
about my origins than I have in the United States.
C. Everett Koop, M.D.