Gysbert UPDYKE

                   RESEARCH NOTE:
Gysbert came to America before 1638 to New Amsterdam. He remained among the Dutch in New Netherlands until the English captured the area in 1664. During that time, he was an officer of the Dutch West India Co., Commander of Fort Hope Commissary. He frequently sat in Council and assisted in many Indian treaties. He owned a residence on Stone Street, New York, all of Coney Island (then three separate sandy masses, of which the easternmost was called Gysbert's Island"), a farm at Hempstead and another at Cow Neck, Long Island.'Gysbert came from Wesel, a small city located on the lower Rhine, where it meets the Lippe. Wesel (which was all but demolished by air raids in World War II) is now part of western West Germany; in 1605; when Gysbert was born there, it was part of the duchy of Cleves, and though officially neutral in the Dutch-Spanish war, suffered incursions and hardship. A continuous line of Op den Dycks there went back to Henric, a Burgomaster and City Treasurer born late in the thirteenth century. For six generations after Henric, Op den Dycks occupied civic office in Wesel; in the seventh, Lodowick (b. 1565) became a brewer and an innkeeper. The genealogy assures us, "An explanation of his undertaking these somewhat humble occupations is to be found in the great decadence suffered by Wesel in this life-time." The war and the confusion arising from the death of the Duke of Cleves without male issue had curtailed commerce and finally resulted in the siege and occupation of the town by a Spanish army in 1614. The Spanish stayed in Wesel for fifteen years, until 1629. After 1615, Lodowick disappears from the Wesel town records, and itseems probably that he and his son Gysbert, then aged ten, joined the many refugees seeking asylum in Holland, which had already thrown off the Spanish yoke.'The colonists at Manhattan first worshipped in the loft of a horse-mill. In 1633 a plain wooden church was built and the first clergyman was sent out from Holland, Domine Everard Bogardus. Gysbert was very active in the government and church affairs but after the capture of New Amsterdam by the English in 1664, nothing further is found on the records there of him. Apparently he went with his children to Narragansett after his wife was bequeathed some lands around Wickford. Gysbert's eldest son, Lodowick, appears in the Kingston records as early as 1668 and others of his children later. The place was then thinly settled and the early records have been almost totally destroyed by fire.Source: Our Wait-Waite Heritage."Self-Consciousness" by John Updike, p. 186 and 187.