Even though we do know some things about our European ancestors, which I'm saving for a chapter to be entitled "DeHarts -- Huguenot or Not?," I'm going to start with that first "American" DeHart, our guy Simon, Simon Aertzen to be exact, our very own Immigrant. In the meantime, here are a couple of maps of New Netherland, later to be renamed New York. Like it or not, we are originally New Yorkers, Long Islanders actually, and from Gowanus, more specifically. I have maps!
This is an early one based on Hudson's voyages. The map dates from about 1650; you can Google these for a better view -- this one is known as Novi Belgii by Visscher.
This is an interesting overlay that I found online. It apparently portrays modern-day New York City overlaid on the 1660 Castello Plan map -- a good visual of what 300 years of landfill does to the landscape.
I can't seem to get a very clear copy of this map of Brooklyn dated 1766. A good magnifying glass though reveals the spot where our Simon Aertzen put down roots in Gowanus, on Long Island (#3 - find Gowanus Bay at the bottom and follow the stream upward). In 1766, his property was known as "The Bergen House" because by that time, most of the DeHart clan had migrated to Somerset County, New Jersey, or South Carolina or other parts or had married into the Bergen family.
I just finished reading a very interesting and really readable history, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan by Russell Shorto. So good. I just need to quote the following from his Prologue because one, it's beautifully written, and two, it helps to set the stage for what occurred along the eastern shores of this continent after 1609. Here is Shorto:
"More than anything, then, this book invites you to do the impossible: to strip from your mental image of Manhattan Island all associations of power, concrete, and glass; to put time into full reverse, unfill the massive landfills, and undo the extensive leveling programs that flattened hills and filled gullies; to return streams from the underground sewers they were forced into, back to their original rushing or meandering course. To witness the return of waterfalls, to watch freshwater ponds form in place of asphalt intersections; to let buildings vanish and watch stands of pin oak, sweetgum, basswood, and hawthorne take their place. To imagine the return of salt marches, mudflats, grasslands, of leopard frogs, grebes, cormorants, and bitterns; to discover newly pure estuaries encrusting themselves with scallops, lamp mussels, oysters, quahogs, and clams. To see maple-ringed meadows become numbered with deer and the higher elevations ruled by wolves.
"And then to stop the time machine, let it hover a moment on the southmost tip of an island poised between the Atlantic Ocean and the civilization of Europe on one side and a virgin continent on the other; to let that moment swell, hearing the screech of gulls and the slap of waves and imagining these same sounds, waves and birds, waves and birds, with regular interruptions by wracking storms, unchanged for dozens of centuries.
"And then let time start forward once again as something comes into view on the horizon. Sails." -- cds
