HUDSON AND BERGEN COUNTIES
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THE FIRST SETTLERS AND THEIR ORIGIN |
Up to the close of the Civil
War family origin and lineage received but a small measure of
attention in the United States. Here and there, along the line
of the centuries, persons possessed of wealth and leisure had
caught up and reunited the broken threads of kinship; but the
great mass of the common people considered time thus spent as
time squandered. In accounting for this it should be remembered
that the early settlers of the country never expected to set
foot again on European soil. Having deliberately severed all
the ties that connected them with the past, they lived to remember
only--and that with hatred--the tyranny, despotism, hardships,
and persecutions of a church and state which had forced them
from the land of their birth. Again, these pioneers of a new
civilization had little time to think of remote family ties.
With them "self preservation was the first law of nature."
Boundless forests must be felled; lands must be cleared and tilled;
crops must be reared, harvested, and protected; the savages must
be watched, fought, and exterminated; civil government must be
organized and maintained; highways, canals, churches, schools,
court houses, and jails must be constructed and paid for; villages,
towns, cities, counties, states, even a nation, must be built
up; and, when, after long years of untold hardships, all these
things had been accomplished, then came the great revolt from,
and struggle with, the mother country for freedom and national
independence.
After the republic, the War
of 1812, then the war with Mexico, and, lastly, the Civil War,
the great and final struggle for national life and perpetuity.
This "building of the nation," and the wars incident
thereto, did not stimulate genealogical research. The American
Revolution arrayed the descendants of the early settlers against
the descendants of their European oppressors, and the American
Civil War arrayed father against father and brother against brother.
Both of these conflicts tended to keep alive in the breasts of
Americans the animosities kindled by wrongs committed on European
soil several generations before.
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But the surrender at Appomattox
soon changed all this. The new nation had emerged triumphant
from her great crucial struggle, freed from the curse of human
slavery. Moreover, and quite as important, she had shown that
she could and would maintain the integrity of the Union. She
immediately took a commanding position
INSERT NO. 1
among the nations of the
earth, a position which has grown stronger and more commanding
as time has rolled on, until at last the respect of Europe has
been won. Equality breeds sociability. And now the descendants
of the early emigrants to America hobnob with Europeans with
as much freedom as if they were members of the same household.
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All this has aroused a deep
and abiding interest in family lineage, and this interest has
been greatly intensified in the last decade by the organization
of the Holland Society, the Huguenot Society, the New England
Society, the Colonial Dames, the Sons of the Revolution, the
Daughters of the Revolution, and numerous societies of a similar
character. The desire among all classes of the people to know
something of their ancestry has been still further stimulated
by
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the numerous genealogical
societies now established throughout the Union.
It is a source of deep regret
that the early records of Northern New Jersey are so widely scattered
-- more so, perhaps, than those of any other section of the country.
The historian and genealogist must find them at Albany, New York,
Goshen, Richmond, and New City in New York State, and at Trenton,
Perth Amboy, Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, and Hackensack in
the State of New Jersey. Then again, the chirography of the early
records of this section is peculiar, and many of the documents
and records are in a foreign language. Thousands of grants, deeds,
wills, and other documents relative to Bergen County, all of
the greatest importance to the searcher for knowledge, were never
recorded and never even deposited in any public record office,
owing to the bitter controversy between the Colonies of New York
and New Jersey over the location of the boundary line between
them, --a controversy which lasted more than a century from the
time the country began to be settled by Europeans. I am forced
to the conclusion that he who would make a successful plotting
of the early grants of land in Northern New Jersey would need
to spend at least five years in a house-to-house hunt for the
necessary data, in trunks and chests of the old pioneers, now
hidden away and forgotten, in the garrets of their descendants.
I have prepared this article from such data as I have been able
to find, but for the reasons above stated the matter it contains
must necessarily be replete with errors and important omissions.
Nevertheless, I am not without strong hope that i may be of some
assistance to the thousands of descendants of the sturdy men
and women who settled the Counties of Bergen and Hudson. I have
prepared and inserted four maps: No. 1, showing Bergen County
as erected in 1693; No. 2, showing the greater part of the same
county as re-erected in 1709-10; No. 3, showing Hudson County
at the present time; and No. 4, showing the greater part of Bergen
County as erected in 1709-10, and, as far as possible, the locations
of the original land patents. In the test these are called and
on map No. 4 are numbered "Sections." The outlines
of these "sections" are, of course, only approximately
correct, but they will be found useful to the reader in locating
any particular settler. I have also set forth the counties into
townships, boroughs, and other municipalities, and, lastly, I
have given in tabulated form the surname of each of the principal
settlers, his nationality, and, as far as possible, the name
and domicile of his European ancestor. |
