Our 11th and 12th Great Grandfathers in America! Why Did They Come?

The Reformation started in a small area of Germany in the Holy Roman Empire but eventually engulfed the entire European continent and beyond. Martin Luther wrote and then, some say, tacked up on the Church door, his Ninety-five Theses. For the next hundred-fifty years or so, as a result of this document and its wide spread circulation, the tension between the Roman Church and its political supporters against the Protestants and their political supporters boiled over into assassination, war, torture, repression, intrigue, and conspiracy.[1] Northern France, Belgium, Luxemburg, and The Southern Netherlands were some of the more apparent areas of the conflict as they intersected many political as well as demographic boundaries. This area had an ever-changing boundary between France, Spain, and the Spanish Netherlands.[2] It was known as home to the Walloon people.

Another highly active area of the Reformation was the British Isles. We will discuss both areas in turn. Walloons suffered at the hands of the Gauls, the Cimbri, the Romans, and the Franks throughout the centuries and came through it all according to Major John W. De Forest, an author who has made an exhaustive study of early Walloon material, as “well-looking, strongly-built, brunet-skinned, and generally dark-haired people, industrious, fervid in temper, and always excellent soldiers.”[3] The English likewise had a long and varied history of conflict while some of the same cultures and additionally the Celts, Vikings, and Saxons all vied for control of this land. From these peoples the English evolved and became the robust civilization we see in the early modern period under discussion.[4]

This paper will set forth reasoned narrative to show that the Reformation compelled strong and determined Huguenots and Puritans from the lands described, and for reasons of faith, and in line with personal and cultural tendencies, to expatriate from their homelands to new and unknown lands to gain freedom of religion and political self-determination. Working backwards from the result gained by these people, it is obvious what they intended to accomplish over the course of their struggles. Our thesis is that the deep Reformed Christian religious belief of a great number of Walloon Huguenots and English Puritans was strong enough in the people, that they were willing to die for their religion and certainly willing to move to new and unknown lands to be able to practice it. Their culture was such that they were willing to fight wars to maintain the right to worship in their chosen faith. Some Walloon Huguenots and English Puritans regarded their faith so highly that they searched the world for a place where they could realize religious independence. A few of them found such places and became leading citizens of those new lands.[5]

The Reformation quickly took root with the Walloons in Hainaut. It also gained footing with Piccard’s to the South. This Reformed Tradition attributed to the Huguenots was eventually stamped out over a period of fifty years by various monarchs, principally Charles V and Philip II using tremendous resources and savagery.[6] Defenders of the Walloons included Prince Maurice of Orange[7] who late in the sixteenth century strung together a series of victories by siege that established a perimeter for the Southern provinces of the Dutch Republic and Low Countries, providing a basis for later peace accords. There was a 12-year peace agreement with Spain that lasted from 1609 to 1621. Maurice was Stadholder of the United Dutch Republic until his death in 1625. Maurice’s army and cavalry were staffed in part by Walloon Huguenots from Hainaut in the years 1590 to 1609. These soldiers were trained at a level not known to other armies as Maurice was recognized as the consummate General of the times. His regimen of training and discipline were the fundamental postulates of tactics.[8]

Huguenots were of the French Calvinist tradition. They primarily subscribed to the Geneva Confession. French Calvinism was earmarked by a belief in predestination as well as its refusal to acknowledge miracles performed after biblical times, other than those performed directly by God. This means that the system of “Saints” the Roman Church proffered, required miraculous performance by these people, thus being in violation of Calvinist doctrines. The miracle of nature is God’s work and has been planned by Him for the ages. Anyone who looks at nature with wonder should be aware there is no earthly power to motivate such natural wonders. Theodore Beza explained one of the Huguenots miracles in that “the fact that the same men who had burned reformers in previous years had taken up the faith, was in itself a new miracle sign that testified to the truth of Calvinism.”[9] Theodore Beza, Calvin’s friend and confidant was also one of French Calvinists most prolific writers and lecturers. In Hainaut, we see the first signs of Reformed Protestant Huguenots in the 1560’s. Bernard C. Weber, in the Journal of Modern History states, “Heretics in the borderland provinces of Hainault and Artois were sympathetic with the activities of their French and German brethren and this borderland region became the outpost of the Huguenots and banished Flemings.”[10] After this, many areas within fifty miles of Avesnes find strong support for French Calvinism and thousands become Huguenots.

The next paragraphs are an attempt to succinctly report the essence of the controversy that spawned the Reformation. One of the powers the Roman Church had over the people was the sacrament of confession. This was powerful, in that once sins are confessed there must be atonement in the form of penance proscribed by a Priest. Most often this atonement involved doing something that was of value to the church, its members, or its clergy. Many times, the penance for sins committed in everyday life piled up to an insurmountable level making the parishioner owe a debt that could not be repaid in this life. The Roman Church invented purgatory to ensure those in debt for penance left undone would continue to have a process to remit payment from the afterlife through relatives and friends left behind. Either by the penitent before death, or by relatives and friends after, indulgences could be purchased from the Church to magically erase some, or all, of the debt of penance owed by the penitent.[11] The Church and its prelates were abusing the parishioners for pecuniary reasons. This is a very simplified explanation of what started the Reformation in 1517.

Spain, or more specifically, Spanish Catholic Nobility, believed that their power was diminished without backing of the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope. If the lives of the people were controlled by the church, and the church was in league with the Monarchy, it follows that the Monarch can require anything of the people in the name of the church and expect obedience. The Roman Church had almost unlimited power. Land, money, social status, Kings, and Knights to fight its battles. All this translated into control over the people. The Roman Church had the power of salvation. If you do what the church demands, you go to Heaven, do not, and go to the fire of Hell, sometimes, after being burnt at the stake. The Spanish Nobility saw, year after year, the conversion of the people to the Protestant Reformed Church from the Catholic Church. Because the structure of the reformed theology eliminated the hierarchy and authority of the Bishops and Pope, the people no longer were governed by papal edict and therefore the Nobility had less and less control and authority over the population.

The Reformation thus became a life altering conversion for many, as the Roman Church. showed great internal resistance to reform, people began to adhere to the ideas of Luther and Calvin over the Pope. Some gained freedom of conscience through the Magisterial grant of Nobles and leaders who also converted. Some had to resort to underground meetings in areas where the local leaders did not sanction the Reformation. Once a person was convinced that he was saved by his belief in Jesus and the freely given grace of God, he many times was willing to fight to the death for that belief. In this Walloon area, during the wars of religion in 1577, 21 years before the Edict of Nantes, many were faced with the decision to renounce their beliefs and return to the Roman Church, suffer the fate of an accused heretic, or expatriate to another local more favorable to the Huguenot faith.[12] Faced with this decision, most reacquired their zeal for the Catholic faith, a small number were martyred, the rest chose to leave home and hearth, kith and kin, and strike out for places where the Reformation was welcomed. Those who left were starting over in whatever vocation or industry with which they were acquainted. Many from Avesnes were in the cloth business. This was a vocation in demand anywhere. One of the closest places of tolerance was the city of Sedan in Luxembourg. This is where we find many Avesnes refugees in the late 1590’s.

Edward VI, 1547 – 1553, succeeded the great Henry VIII. He was only 9 years old and sickly. The Country was ruled by Regents, mostly his uncle, Duke of Somerset.[13] Even though his reign was short, many men had a chance to make their mark. Cranmer authored the Book of Common Prayer helping to create uniform worship, turning England into a powerful Protestant state. Upon Edward’s death, Mary I, (Bloody Mary) 1553 – 1558, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, a devout Catholic, married Philip, King of Spain, and attempted an abrupt conversion of English Protestantism back to Catholicism. She was ruthless in the pursuit of this dream. The protestant Bishops along with the Archbishop Cranmer were burnt at the stake in the effort. Mary died in 1558 at Lambeth Palace in London to be succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth I, 1558 – 1603. With a selection of capable advisors Elizabeth was able to reign over the return to Anglican Protestantism in the realm.

In 1603, James I gained the throne of England through his mother Mary Queen of Scots. He allowed extremely limited toleration of the Reformed Church but was officially backing the Anglican Church of England. There was a substantial Reformed Christian population in England at the time. This was the era of the Puritans who in some instances were separatists (Brownists).[14] Among this group were those we recognize as the Pilgrims of Plymouth. Under James I, the Separatists were outlawed, hunted, and imprisoned. They plotted and executed an escape to Holland, with the first attempt being a failure ending in imprisonment for a few. Some escaped, however, and soon showed up in Amsterdam. Once the rest of the congregation were released from prison, they also made good their escape to Holland.[15] Once the entire group was beginning to get established in Amsterdam, they made a discovery that the congregation they were about to join was dysfunctional. Faced with this fact they removed once again to Leiden to establish their own Church. Here they met the Huguenots from Avesnes and Hainaut who had in the interim removed from Montcornet to Leiden.

The English Puritans were a product of the Reformation and in similar fashion to the Huguenots, suffered through many years of political and religious repression through many changes in Monarchs and political regimes. When their plight became untenable in England, they sought refuge in Holland. After some adjustment in Amsterdam, they finally settled in Leiden. Leiden was an industrial town where labor was short in the textile industry. Most of the pilgrims found back breaking labor in this sector. Leiden was also a town where the classes were separated by a wide margin with only 250 people owning more than half of all the property in the city.[16] Most lived hand-to-mouth existences but were employed and survived in a tolerable fashion. Peace with Spain in 1609 signaled increased competition for the Dutch wool merchants from weavers in Spanish held Flanders and Brabant. With increasing difficulty and limited upward mobility, coming political strife, and unsanitary city living spawning disease, the pilgrims and Huguenots grew increasingly restless in their Leiden accommodations. Both the Puritans and the Huguenots of Leiden began to make plans for a move to the shores of the Atlantic West indies.

Sir Dudley Carlton was at the time the British Ambassador to Holland. He was viewed as key to helping these groups of potential Colonists gain government recognition and conveyance to the Americas. Both the Puritans and Huguenots made separate but similar entreaties to the British Monarchy via Sir Dudley. The Puritans wanted to become part of the Colony of Virginia starting a sister city to Jamestown while the Huguenots wanted to also start their own city in Virginia being held totally separate from the rest by having a 12-mile square easement wherein no others would be allowed.[17] Both groups encountered issues and resistance from the authorities. The Puritans resorted to signing on to a commercial venture where their sponsors provided a layer of security to the government making their venture more acceptable to the authorities. This commercial association required the Pilgrims to work a substantial part of the week for the venturers to repay the investment made in their Plymouth Plantation and the transportation and supplies provided.[18]

The Huguenots received conditional approval from the English government but had restrictions attached that were unacceptable to them and subsequently turned down the opportunity presented by Sir Dudley.[19] It is fortunate that, just as they were losing hope the English would provide the means to start their Colony, the Dutch initiated a new entity that would manage the affairs of the Dutch in the New World called the Dutch West India Company (WIC). The WIC was looking for people exactly like the Huguenots, adventurers, and diligent workers to populate their designs of planting trade missions and colonies around Dutch discoveries on the Hudson River. In an extended idea they also wanted to have more people populate the Dutch Guyana area near the equator. The WIC asked the Huguenots to enroll families willing to undertake these missions.[20] the WIC tasked Jesse De Forest to undertake said enrollment due to his leadership role with the Huguenot population in Leiden. With the finalization of the capital of the WIC, and a promise to employ all the Walloons willing to go to the new world, on the 21^st of April 1623, the “Lords Gentlemen and Cities of Holland and West Friesland unanimously resolved and agreed that the aforesaid promise shall be made, the Magistracy being acquainted therewith.”[21] Like the Puritans, the Walloon Huguenots in Leiden were finally possessed of a sponsor for their migration to the West Indies. It took some time for the WIC to ready themselves to undertake all the intended missions from the Stats General. They were to mount many ships for the privation of the Spanish fleet to procure whatever they might from such an expedition. There was a fleet fitted out for the purpose of exploration of the Amazon River and Guyana, which left Amsterdam for the Texel on July 1, 1623.

Until now, we have been speaking in general terms about peoples from certain areas, their struggles with governments and Churches over matters of conscience related to the Reformation. These peoples showed their resolve for their religious belief through war, inquisition, displacement, injury, loss of property, and personal hardship. They were from the Walloon area of Hainaut as well as Scrooby in England. They belonged to Protestant Reformed Calvinist confessions with extreme prejudice to the Roman Catholic Church. These groups had been through many years of repression and unjust treatment in their home countries and cities. They had been maligned for years by others in the ‘official’ religions. Finally, they had been forced to expatriate from their ancestral homes. They struggled to reestablish themselves more than once in places where practicing their religion was allowed in some form, if not sanctioned officially. After having recited this, we will introduce some of the individual members of these groups and discuss their final solution to these struggles and how it all turned out for them and their relatives.

First, we will introduce two Walloon Huguenots who followed the same path with comparable results of their efforts and struggles. Secondly, we will introduce a Puritan Pilgrim and replay several years of his life in North America. Our belief is that this narrative will show how the Reformation changed people’s lives, religion, and politics, carrying forward to today in the contemporary United States. The Walloons are Jesse De Forest, the recognized founder of New York, and Dr. Johannes De La Montagne. The Puritan Pilgrim Father is Elder William Brewster. The stories of these men are an integral part of our American Colonial history and is well documented.

Our first subject is Jesse De Forest. Born around 1575, Jesse was married in Sedan in 1601 to Marie du Cloux.[22] His trek begins in Avesnes, continued through Sedan, to Montcornet, and on to Leiden, then to the jungles of Dutch Guyana. We know a lot about this man because of his vocation, his documented interactions with government, and a journal he left that was later found in London, in the British Museum, in the collection of Sir Hans Sloane. This important document lain for over one hundred fifty years unmolested before being discovered at the end of the nineteenth century. We also have the legacy and writings of his descendants.[23] This history will necessarily be short and only hit on the highlights as there are already several books written to chronicle his life. We will refer to them occasionally. We picked up with Jesse in his job as a cloth merchant in the family business in Avesnes. He traveled extensively in the Hainaut area as a salesperson for his family business. Jesse’s father Jean was the first to convert to Protestantism in the De Forest family. Jesse was a Captain in the army of Prince Maurice of Orange in his attempts to dislodge the Spanish from the Southern Low County. He moved to Sedan with His Parents in the late 1590’s. Later in Montcornet he became a merchant-dyer of wool in partnership with his Brother-in-law, Robert De Cloux. This is the vocation he continued in Leiden and may be one of the reasons for his emigration there. The cloth business in Leiden was on the upswing in the mid-teen years of the seventeenth century. Jesse belonged to the Guild in Leiden as a “Dyer of Wool in Colors.” This distinction between dying wool in black .vs. Colors were important in that it was much more difficult to gain facility in the art with colors. Wool cloth dyed in colors was more expensive and more difficult to produce.

In Leiden, he continued his search for a place where the Huguenot Walloons could set up a new life within their religion. Jesse recruited sixty or so Walloon families who pledged to start a new Colony in the West Indies.[24] He wrote a proposal to the English Crown for these families to receive sponsorship from the crown to emigrate and found a new city in Virginia. He received his answer from the from the Virginia Company on August 11^th, 1622 wherein they offered little in the way of material assistance and did not agree to allow them to “sett downe in one grosse bodie” but offered to place them in “convenient nombers in the principally citties.”[25] This offer, of course, was not acceptable to the Walloons. Although unsuccessful due to these adverse terms from England, he continued to pursue sponsorship for the group. Jesse refused to give up and was determined to find a place for his family as well as his compatriots of Huguenot faith to finally be free to worship and live as they wished. He was successful in securing said sponsorship. His prayers were answered when the Dutch Stats General in concert with the WIC agreed to convey the Walloons to the West indies in the employ of the WIC. This was happening at the end of the Twelve Years Peace in 1621 and the outset of a new war between Spain and the Dutch Netherlands. The Dutch felt some urgency to shore up their holdings in Dutch Guyana and to exploit their naval supremacy by attacking the Spanish merchant fleet. Jesse led a group of twelve ‘heads of families’ on a voyage to reconnoiter the Dutch Guyana area for the perfect place to plant their Colony. Although he died of sunstroke on this mission,[26] many of the colonists he enrolled for the WIC proceeded to the mouth of the Hudson for them to settle and became some of the first to establish homes in the area starting in 1623. Because of this fact, Jesse De Forest is recognized as the founder of New York on a monument in Battery Park in the financial district of the city.[27]

The next Walloon we would recognize is one Dr. Johannes De La Montagne. His beginnings are lightly documented but it is believed that he was born in the early 1590’s and was admitted to the University in Leiden Medical School around 1617. Johannes, it is believed, became acquainted with the De Forests through the Huguenot Church in Leiden. He also became involved as a signer of the original recruitment document of Jesse De Forest, intending to emigrate to the West Indies with the rest of the Huguenot Walloons.[28] He was one of the twelve heads of families to accompany Jesse De Forest on his journey to Dutch Guyana.[29] It is believed that De La Montagne continued the De Forest journal after the death of Jesse De Forest in Guyana. It was another year or more before the final group from the voyage of the twelve heads of families of the Walloons were picked up and returned to Holland. Once returned from this adventure he continued at the University of Leiden in his studies of Medicine and became a doctor. He also married Jesse De Forests 17-year-old daughter Maria. After trying to start a plantation in the Caribbean Islands, he was forced to sell out and return to Holland due to his wife’s illness. After another short stay in Holland with the De Forest family De La Montagne moved his family with some of the De Forests to New Amsterdam on the Hudson in 1637.[30] While there he became a trusted advisor to several Directors General of the Colony. He became a farmer and farm owner. He and his wife had several children before and after emigrating. He was a successful physician[31] and fought Native Americans as a leader of the militia. He later became the Vice Director of the Colony in charge of the Northern aspects of New Netherland around Fort Orange. His years in Fort Orange were some of the most active and consequential in terms of interaction with the native peoples and the fur trade. Although the Dutch Reformed Church was the ‘official Church in New Amsterdam, there was an official practice of tolerance of conscience while the Walloon Huguenots were allowed to meet in private homes for services and preaching. Little is known of his life after the takeover by the English in 1664.

The final person we will chronicle is William Brewster, the Ruling Elder of the Puritan Pilgrims of Plymouth. He was a member of the congregation of Puritans in Scrooby who fled to Holland in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Educated at Cambridge, Brewster had been part of the English State Department and spent time in Holland as part of this work. He had been an assistant to Mr. William Davidson, English Secretary of State and is described by William Bradford as having been “trusted above all others that were about him, and only employed him in all matters of greatest trust, and secrecy; he esteemed him rather as a son than a servant; and for his wisdom and Godliness…”[32] Upon their return to London from the Low Country, Davidson gifted Brewster a great gold chain to wear to court as a symbol of his value to the State Department efforts abroad. Davidson fell out with the administration over the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Brewster went back to his home and friends in Scrooby. Again, according to Bradford, Brewster busied himself with promoting and furthering religion thereabouts. He was particularly effective in obtaining new ministers for local Churches. Of course, as the Scrooby congregation was being pressed by the Bishops because of their Strict Puritan Separatist beliefs, Brewster sought to sustain the congregation and allowed them to illegally meet at his home and supported them in every way including financially.

He was one of the more well to do of the Scrooby parish. They met at his manor house, and he used his money to help provide ministers for the Puritan congregations in his area. In trying to leave secretly for holland, he was caught at Boston and sent to prison for a time.[33] He was one of the seven who were imprisoned the longest. Once out of prison, he tried again to leave and was successful. Brewster spent a total of twelve years in Holland before he was able to arrange to emigrate to the New World. While in Holland he made a living teaching English to many Danish and German University students who came to him especially, as he had a particular method that allowed them to learn English very quickly, starting with their understanding of Latin. Many of his students were the sons of great men and had money for such tutelage. While in Leiden, Elder Brewster also set up a printing operation to print books that were restricted or banned in England. Complaints from England about his printing operations got him investigated but he was not prosecuted. Leaving all he had built up in Holland, once again he was willing to be of service to the congregation and removed to Plimoth. He was one of the persons who came to the New World on the Mayflower.

Because the pilgrim Pastor Robinson did not accompany the first contingent, Elder Brewster had to withstand most of the Church Administration as well as the Preaching. He was not only the Ruling Elder but also Teacher of the congregation. While Bradford oversaw the secular government of the Plantation, Brewster was in charge of the religious administration including discipline. This lasted for about 9 years as Pastor Robinson died in Leiden before he could come to Plymouth Plantation. More than others, Elder Brewster and the Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation were responsible for bringing the ‘New England Way’ to the new world. The New England Way is the foundation of how goodness, kindness, Godliness, the covenant congregation, purity and sacrifice molds men and women into perfect neighbors and citizens. Elder Brewster was one of the signors of the Mayflower Compact as well as ruling Elder of the Church. He as much as anyone was responsible for the success of the Pilgrim plantation at Plymouth.[34]

Brewster, De Forest, and La Montagne are three examples of the people covered in this monograph. They are not ordinary examples, but examples of leaders that had an outsized effect on the religion, society, and polity of the early colonial period in the history of North America. They were all products of the Reformation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Their religious ideas and actions, formed and initiated by the Reformation, were in evidence and brought forward over 160 years later when enshrined in the Constitution of the United States. These Calvinistic ideas were imbedded in the culture of Colonial America. One of the most important religious ideas these people brought to early North America was a ‘singularization’ of faith and religion. Instead of being part of the ‘machine’ of state religions, they made religion personal, and the operation of religion based on oneself and inner heart. Protestantism allowed for an intense personal relationship with God to develop within or outside the Church. This is an idea akin to what Gregory termed “founding secularization.”[35]  

I am very partial to these great men who shaped the early days of our country because they are my literal Great Grandfathers. These men along with four others who came on the Mayflower and more than a dozen others who came before 1640 are all men and women I am proud to have documented as direct ancestor Grandfathers and Grandmothers. Visit my website at www.11thgenerationamerican.com  to enjoy historical and genealogical blog postings[36].

[1] Paul Ferdinand Willert, Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots in France (G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1893), 7-34.

[2] Emily Johnston De Forest, A Walloon Family in America: Lockwood de Forest and His Forbears 1500-1848, (Volume1), (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 4.

[3] John W Deforest, The De Forests of Avesnes (and of New Netherland), A Huguenot Thread in American Colonial History, 1494 to the Present Time (New Haven: The Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Company, 1900), 16.

[4] Jane Kershaw and Ellen C. Røyrvik, “The ‘People of the British Isles’ Project and Viking Settlement in England,” Antiquity 90, no. 354 (December 2016), 1670-1.

[5] Nick Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011). 275.

[6] De Forest, The De Forests of Avesnes (and of New Netherland). 16.

[7] Daniel Riches, “Early Modern Military Reform and the Connection Between Sweden and Brandenburg-Prussia,” Scandinavian Studies 77, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 347–8.

[8] Clifford J. Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on The Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2018). 14.

[9] Moshe Sluhovsky, “Calvinist Miracles and the Concept of the Miraculous in Sixteenth-Century Huguenot Thought,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 19, no. 2 (January 1, 1995): 5–11.

[10] Bernerd C. Weber, “The Conference of Bayonne, 1565: An Episode in Franco-Spanish Diplomacy,” The Journal of Modern History, October 21, 2015, 1.

[11] Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World (New York: HarperOne, 2017). 32.

[12] De Forest, The De Forests of Avesnes (and of New Netherland). 20.

[13] Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Penguin, 2005). 255.

[14] Tim Cooper, “Elizabethan Separatists, Puritan Conformists and the Bible,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 71, no. 4 (October 2020): 778–97.

[15] Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon. 194-7.

[16] Ibid., 216.

[17] Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon, 11.; De Forest, The De Forests of Avesnes (and of New Netherland). 59-61.

[18] William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation (Colonial Society of Massachusetts, New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2020), 217-21.

[19] De Forest, The De Forests of Avesnes (and of New Netherland). 59.

[20] Ibid., 64.

[21] De Forest, The De Forests of Avesnes (and of New Netherland), 63-4.

[22] De Forest, The De Forests of Avesnes (and of New Netherland). 51.

[23] Emily Johnston De Forest, “The Diary of Jesse De Forest,” A Walloon Family in America: Lockwood de Forest and His Forbears 1500-1848, (Volume II) (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 189-278.

[24] “London Has Round Robin Signed by New York’s Walloon Founders,” New York Times, 1924, sec. Special Features, http://www.proquest.com/central/docview/103339774/abstract/705F17F6EB5C43F4PQ/1.

[25] Emily Johnston De Forest, “The Diary of Jesse De Forest,” A Walloon Family in America: Lockwood de Forest and His Forbears 1500-1848, (Volume I) (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 21.

[26] Mrs. L. De Forest, “The Journal of Jesse De Forest”, 249

[27] De Forest, The De Forests of Avesnes (and of New Netherland). 51-79.

[28] Emily De Forest, A Walloon Family in America, 20.

[29] Ibid., 27.

[30] De Forest, The De Forests of Avesnes (and of New Netherland). 91-7.

[31] Claude Edwin Heaton, “Medicine in New Amsterdam,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 9, no. 2 (1941): 134.

[32] Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 507.

[33] Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon. 190.

[34] Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon. 127-9.

[35] Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks, 235.

[36] Dennis H. Rees, “Rees Family History,” http://www.11thgenerationamerican.com/ .