A Huguenot on the Hackensack David Demarest and His Legacy [Hardcover]

A Huguenot on the Hackensack explores the life and legacy of David Demarest, a seventeenth-century French Protestant who, in middle age, emigrated to New Amsterdam and became one of the earliest settlers of the Hackensack Valley. There he founded a prosperous family that for nearly three centuries retained local influence and high status before being eclipsed by post–World War II economic and demographic changes. Transcending the narrow genealogical antiquarianism and filial pietism of traditional family history, the authors carefully set Demarest and his descendants in the context of their times.A Huguenot on the Hackensack is the first full-length study of David Demarest, an early European settler of northeastern New Jersey and progenitor of a large and locally influential family. The book examines Demarest's life, the legacy of his family, and the wider Jersey Dutch community in which the family played a prominent part. The book looks beneath accumulated layers of legend and older historical interpretations to formulate a new and more realistic (and more interesting) account of Demarest's life and legacy.Demarest, a Huguenot (French Protestant), was born about 1620 in the French province of Picardy. He first appears in history with the record of his marriage to Marie Sohier in Middleburg, the Netherlands, in 1643. After marriage and the start of a family, his life unfolded in four sojourns of about a decade or a bit more: Middleburg, 1643 to about 1651; Mannheim, Germany, from about 1651 to 1663; Staten Island and New Harlem, 1663-78, and finally the French Patent along the Hackensack River in New Jersey, 1678 to his death in 1693. New evidence and new interpretations provide a picture of Demarest as an ambitious and upwardly mobile entrepreneur with an unusual talent for balancing risk and opportunity, and a dedicated churchman and community leader under both Dutch and English rule.The book next considers the Demarests in the eighteenth century, whenl÷