 | Part #2 of 12 (so far): NYCHS presents excerpts from The Rikers: Their Island, Homes, Cemetery and Early Genealogy in Queens County, NY by permission of its author, an 11th generation Abraham Rijcken vanLent descendant, Edgar Alan Nutt. |  |
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Modern descendants of Abraham Rycken, the progenitor of the family that by
the end of the eighteenth century had spread from New Netherland to New Jersey
down to Kentucky and out to Indiana, spell the name as either Riker or Ryker, but
prior to the nineteenth century there had been close to twenty different spellings
with no consistency even by individual family members themselves. In addition, two
of Abraham’s sons and their descendants abandoned the name completely in favor of
Lent or vanLent.
Whether or not the early generations were aware of the name of
Abraham’s father or of any particular significance of the Rycken surname is not
now known, but by the middle of the nineteenth century there was strong
disagreement as to Abraham’s father, so much so that one interested party had her
opinion in the matter carved into a cemetery memorial stone.
Further disagreement
has existed as to whether the surname, in the case of Abraham and before, was in fact
a surname or whether it was a patronym in conformance with the Dutch naming
convention under which a son bore his father’s given name with an appropriate
suffix identifying it as such. These matters need to be addressed although it must be
admitted that proof positive in their regards is not presently available.
Abraham’s apparent surname appears variously in documents, including as
Rycken, deRycke, Ryken, Reycke, and Rijcken; and in his own March 9, 1688, (Old
Style) will his name occurs as both Abraham Rick and Abram Rick. One might
suppose that he should have known his own name, which of course he did, but in
place of executing the document with his signature he placed his mark, indicating
that he was illiterate and therefor that spelling, and doubtless the others as well,
were simply phonetic with no real knowledge of the correct spelling, whatever that
may have been. . . .
Indeed, it appears likely, as will be discussed below
and as entered on the title page, that the spelling in the Netherlands when Abraham
emigrated was Rijcken. . . by the middle 1700s the Riker spelling began to be used
among the Queens County members of the family while the Ryker spelling started to
be in use by the Tarrytown area branch of the family, and these two versions of the
name have continued among the descendants of the two branches such that neither
spelling is more authentic or correct than the other.
The identity of Abraham’s father has been a matter of some dispute since the middle of the nineteenth century. Abraham doubtless passed the information to his
progeny but somehow that certain knowledge was lost in the interval.
Benjamin F.
Thompson [History of Long Island, E. French, N. Y.] wrote in 1839 that Gysbert Rycken was Abraham’s father. He cited no
proof, and although the name was not given by Abraham to his first son, as would
have been expected by the Dutch naming convention, and although in fact no known
descendant whosoever of Abraham has been given that name, the claim has been
repeated many times including on the memorial stone referred to above and which
itself may have been the source for subsequent reports claiming authority [such as Francis B. Lee’s Genealogical and Memorial History of New Jersey, Lewis Historical Publishing Company, N. Y., 1910].
Opposing
that claim is the version held by James Riker identifying Capt. Jacob Simonsze
deRycke as the father. However this theory may finally be put to rest by any of the
several Dutch genealogies . . .
It was theorized by Harold H. Lent, Jr., [ in his article The Lent Surname: A Mystery Solved, NY Genealogical & Biographical Society Record, Vol. 125, Issue 3, p. 148] that James
Riker’s basis was his desire to tie the family to the prominent Dutch lineage of Capt.
deRycke and thereby not to disappoint his own prominent relative to whom his
The Annals of Newtown was dedicated. James Riker would no doubtless have held
some other view and written otherwise had he known that deRycke had had as
offspring only the three daughters and the two sons Simon and Willem, neither of
whom had a son Abraham.
The contribution of James Riker, Jr., in his 1852 earlier
referenced The Annals of Newtown, was of great importance to the then early
American interest in genealogy, to the genealogy of many families of New
Amsterdam and early New York City, and certainly to the history of Newtown itself. In
particular his gathering and presentation of vital data and related information
belonging to his own family was of incalculable value to his relatives in his own day
and in all subsequent generations. In spite of this, his reputation has been
challenged by some modern genealogists for his having included what they identify
as errors in his writing. . . .
There is no question but that Abraham went by one variation or another of the
name that is now either Riker or Ryker and that his sons used the same name, again
in one or another of its variations, or Abrahamszen in one of its forms, or Lent.
Lent
is another matter, and Abrahamszen obviously is a patronymic form, but the
significance of Rycken, or more properly Rijcken. remains an open question despite
the insistence of various writers that it also is a patronym and nothing else. It cannot
be denied that Rycken can be, and possibly is in most of the immigrant families, a
patronym. . . But that is quite different from maintaining that Rycken always is
patronymic.
The evidence for Rycken to be other than patronymic is in the occurrence of
the vanRycken and deRycke surnames, as such and as in their several spelling
variations. Ample instances of the vanRycken (of Rycken) name in Holland suggest
the existence of a Rycken place or location although none has been found; but until
proven otherwise the possibility has to remain that Rycken may indeed refer to a place, whether in the Netherlands or even in Germany as vonRycken. . . .
Ryck and Hendrick, the eldest and the youngest respectively of Abraham’s
sons. started using Lent as their surname some years after their father's 1688/89
death: Ryck in connection with a grandson’s baptism in 1709 and Hendrick ten years
earlier for the baptism of a daughter. These and the other sons inconsistently used
Abrahantszen in one or another of its variations, or Rycken, or Rycke, or in one
recorded instance de Rycke, but only Ryck and Hendrick eventually used Lent.
James Riker reported a theory that the Lent name derived from a Brunswick
noble family, or in another theory current in the family in around 1800 that the
family had lived in a place by that name and in accord with the latter that Hendrick
Harmenson, Abraham’s supposed father-in-law, had come from that place.
In support
of this possibility he further reported that in a 1654 official letter to Gov. Stuyvesant
his superiors had referred to a soldier by the name of HendrIck Harmenson vanLent.
William J. Hoffman states that Abraham Rijcken mar. Grietie Hendricks (dau. of
Hendrick Harmenson) although he does not refer to the latter as being the vanLent
soldier. . . . even if Ryck’s and Hendrick’s maternal
grandfather was designated as vanLent, no explanation has been proposed to explain the reason for their adopting that which was his surname.
Although the two sons moved away from Newtown, there does not appear to
have been a general family rupture. Ryck’s grandson was the donor of the grave
yard adjoining the Lent-Rapalye farm house in Newtown, and his provision that
established it for the use of the family and friends did not exclude the Rikers and
indeed it is overwhelmingly filled with Rikers, not Lents.
There is evidence of strong
feelings by Ryck against his brother Abraham in that Abraham received as his
inheritance from his father the homestead farm plus Riker’s Island while Ryck
only received thirty shillings. No doubt Ryck thought that as the eldest son he should
have been his father’s main heir, and this is reflected in his 1720 will in which he
spoke of himself as wrongfully deprived of those properties and in which he left
them to his own oldest son if the latter could recover them,
If this were the reason
for in effect renouncing the family by taking another surname. it does not explain
why Hendrick also took the Lent name. If an explanation is needed as to why the
elder Abraham left his real estate to Abraham the younger rather than to Ryck, the
reason appears to be that Ryck moved away while the younger Abraham remained
behind in Newtown and worked his fathers holdings.
A contrary explanation was
recorded by the unidentified British author of a travelogue who attributed it to a
sister of New York’s Recorder, i.e., Richard Riker. That sister, Jane Macneven,
apparently claimed, in a reversal of the primogeniture principle, that the property
uniformly was left to the youngest son.
However in this instance Hendrick, not
Abraham, was the youngest, and it is a matter of fact that in succeeding generations
the youngest sons were definitely not regularly the heirs to the property.
The fact remains that Ryck the eldest and Hendrick the youngest did take Lent
as their surname, and in recent years the basis has been found. Harold H. Lent, Jr
reported the discovery of a will in Made jointly by Steven Rijcken van Lent and Elisabet his wife on April
23, 1661, in their 's-Hertogenbosch home, they left half their estate to the unnamed
children of his deceased brother, Jan Rijcken van Lent, and the other half to
Abraham Rijcken van Lent, also his, the testator’s brother, now living in New
Netherland. . . .
The identification of Abraham is positive. Rijcken was an authentic spelling at
that time in Holland. and he is further identified as vanLent. The latter obviously is
the basis for the name having been taken by Abraham’s sons Ryck and Hendrick. . . . .
. . .The vanLent designation indicates that the family at some point came from
Lent, whether that the brothers [Abraham and Steven] themselves had come from Lent such that it was a
descriptive differentiating them from others with the same given names. or whether
some male forebear had come from Lent and the term was no longer an accurate
description and had become a surname.
Lent is now a virtual suburb of Nijmegen in
the province of Gelderland, separated from it by the Waal River, while in the seventeenth century and earlier it was a town in its own right from which a person
might be described as from or of..
No archive, whether of Nijmegen or of
Arnhem, the provincial capital, either of which might contain the records of Lent
is at present accessible other than in those cities themselves, such that further
research must wait until either the archive itself is visited or its data becomes
accessible otherwise.
The question therefore remains open.
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Correction History Society |
Queens Historical Society |
Island was 'Camp Astor' |
Astoria Historical Society |
Ridgewood Historical Society |
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Rikers Island's role in NY correction history warrants our providing material on its "pre-Correction" background that is so bound up with Rikers family history. Bishop Nutt's book serves as an excellent vehicle for doing that. His approach is not exclusively or narrowly genealogical. More than simply tracing lineage, he places his family history in wider chronological and geographic contexts through which his exhaustive research tracked it, thus reflecting much other history -- of the island, county, city and country. Strictly genealogical citations, notes, and codes in the printed book have been reduced or dropped in these excerpts. This presentation includes a book print copy information page. NYCHS retains and reserves all rights to images of photos it took during the June 5, 2005 homestead tour and the September 1998 Samuel Perry Center dedication and their captions as well as captions of inserted images not taken from the printed book. | ||||
