I must say there is something very peculiar about this man’s name. At first, I simply could not believe that his name was Gerret Hendricks Dewees because there was another early settler of Germantown named Gerret Hendricks. Were there really those two men or was it just one man sometimes referred to without a surname? Or, was this man named Gerret Dewees and he was erroneously referred to as Gerret Hendricks Dewees, the confusion caused by the name of that other man? And if they were two different men, were they related, was one the namesake of the other?

I can’t answer that last question, no one suggests any relationship, nor for that matter does anyone, anyplace, even comment on the coincidence, but it does seem proven that there were two different men, important to the early founding of Germantown. One was Gerret Hendricks Dewees and the other Gerret Hendricks.

Both Gerret Hendricks Dewees and Zytian Dewees were named in Germantown land records -- he in 1698 when he purchased 50 acres there and she and he when in 1701, Zytian widow of Gerret Hendrick Dewees, represented by her appointed attorney, Nicholas Rittenhouse, sold half of that lot and then later sold the other half.

I have seen the names of three of the children of Gerret and Zytian mentioned several times in the records of the Germantown area in the early 1700’s -- Wilhelmina, Cornelius and William.

We know that Wilhelmina Dewees married Nicholas Rittenhouse in New York in 1689 and moved with him to Germantown shortly thereafter. And also by the later 1690’s and early 1700’s, several other Dewees names began to appear in Germantown including Garret and Zytian who seem to have been the parents and Cornelius and William who seem to have been brothers of Wilhelmina.

It was the next generation of Dewees who were more prominently mentioned in the records of Germantown.