PATRIOTS, PIRATES, AND PACIFISTS: WE HELPED FORGE AMERICA!

Patricia Whitacre has identified over a hundred of her grandmother's direct Dutch ancestors who immigrated to New Amsterdam a century before the Revolutionary War. Detailed family trees covering eleven generations connect Ackerman, Garrison, Goetschius, Hennion, Hopper, Myer, Shuart, Sip, Steynmetz, Straatmaker, Sutherland, VanDerLinde, VerPlank, Vigne, Voorhees, and Zabriskie who settled Bergen County, New Jersey. She includes vignettes of several colorful ancestors, and places individuals in the context of the periods of our history they were experiencing. Seeking the identities of the wives who shared those struggles with their husbands, while bearing as many as 14 children, she learned how they raised their children to be responsible, educated adults in this new nation they were founding. Over 100 illustrations include those from her 1985 visit to ancestral Dutch home towns to photograph buildings dating to their times. Part Two quotes the diary of Scottish immigrant Adam Valentine, who married Ada Henion in 1908.