17th-century immigrants

The Staten Island Years: Gideon’s Family in the New World, 1663–1685

Gideon Merlet and his family landed at New Amsterdam in February 1663, owing the West India Company for their passage. Over the next twenty years the colony changed hands three times, and the family took up land on the south side of Staten Island, and raised a new generation there, before the family moved on to New Jersey. This is what the surviving records say about those years.

Map-style illustration titled Staten Eylandt, Nieuw Nederlandt, 1663, showing a wooded island with scattered farms and fields, the salt marshes of the Fresh Kill, ships in the surrounding waters and New Amsterdam in the distance — Staten Island in the style of a 1663 Dutch map, with the salt meadows of the Fresh Kill where Gideon and his sons later held land. Artistic creation made with a generative AI image tool; it is not a historical picture. It gives a feel for the island’s woods, farms and marshes, but the shape of the island and the names and positions of the waters around it are not accurate.

The first year

A month after landing, on 19 March 1663, Gideon and six men from the same ship asked the colony’s council for land, seed grain and six months’ provisions, and the council gave its order the same day. On 1 April Gideon joined the Dutch Reformed Church in New Amsterdam with about nineteen others. (How the family got here, and what they owed for it, is told in The Company’s Offer.)

Where the family lived at first is not recorded. Staten Island had only just been settled for good: in 1661 a French-speaking Walloon, Pierre Billiou, and his companions had founded a village near the Narrows, later called Oude Dorp, the Old Town. The Merles, French-speaking Protestants like the Billious, were on the island within a few years, and the two families stayed close for a generation.

A change of flag, 1664

The family had been in the colony only eighteen months when, in late August 1664, English warships appeared off New Amsterdam and Director General Stuyvesant surrendered without a fight. New Netherland became New York, the property of the king’s brother, James, Duke of York. The terms of surrender let the Dutch-speaking settlers keep their land, their trade and their own Reformed church, and most, like the Merles, simply stayed.

Painting-style image of four English warships at anchor off New Amsterdam on a calm late-summer afternoon, with a rowboat under a white flag of truce heading for the town, and Fort Amsterdam, its church, a windmill and gabled houses on the shore beneath an orange, white and blue Dutch flag, where townspeople crowd the wharf — An artist’s conception of the English squadron arriving off New Amsterdam in late August 1664, with a boat carrying terms to the town under a flag of truce. Artistic creation made with a generative AI image tool; it is not a historical picture. One inaccuracy to note: the English ships fly the modern Union Jack, with the red diagonal cross of St Patrick that was only added in 1801. In 1664 the Union flag showed just the crosses of St George and St Andrew.

Painting-style image of Peter Stuyvesant, gray-haired in a black cloak and white collar, with a silver-banded wooden leg and a walking stick, standing on the grassy rampart of Fort Amsterdam beside a cannon, a torn letter at his feet, while citizens and a minister hold up a petition and plead with him, and English warships lie at anchor in the harbor — An artist’s conception of Director General Peter Stuyvesant on the walls of Fort Amsterdam, as New Amsterdam’s leading citizens urge him to surrender. Stuyvesant, who had lost his right leg in 1644, is said to have torn up the English commander’s letter offering terms, and nearly a hundred townspeople, his own son among them, signed a petition asking him to give up. Artistic creation made with a generative AI image tool; it is not a historical picture. The likeness, the setting and the details are artistic license. One inaccuracy to note: the English ships fly the modern Union Jack, with the red diagonal cross of St Patrick that was only added in 1801. In 1664 the Union flag showed just the crosses of St George and St Andrew.

Gideon and Marie’s last child, Anne, was born on Staten Island in 1666, the only one of their children born in America.

Constable of Staten Island

By 1671 Gideon was the island’s constable under the English governor, Francis Lovelace. A constable kept the peace, served the governor’s orders and warrants, and acted for the authorities in local business, and two records show Gideon doing exactly that:

26 April 1671. At a council in the fort in New York, with the governor present, “the Busynesse of Staten Island” was heard: the inhabitants’ petition was presented by Thomas Carle and Nathan Whitmore. The council ordered the Surveyor General to attend the next morning, and the order was “sent by Gideon Marlette.” The next day the council decided on new lots to be added to the Old Town and a road for driving cattle.
16 January 1671/72. On the death of Walraven Letin of Dover, a settlement just below the Narrows, the inventory of his estate was “taken by Gideon Marlett, Constable, in presence of Peter Belew, Simeon Corne, Tys Barenson, and many others then present.” Peter Belew is almost certainly Pierre Billiou. See the printed record.

Family research says Gideon was appointed constable at Dover on 20 April 1671. That appointment hasn’t yet been found in a published record, but these two entries show he was in office that spring and the following winter.

The Dutch come back, 1673–74

In August 1673, during a new war between England and the Dutch Republic, a Dutch fleet retook New York without much resistance and renamed it New Orange. On 13 August the people of Staten Island formally submitted to the Dutch. The new governor, Anthony Colve, needed local men he could trust, and on 14 February 1674 he appointed Gideon Marlet and Nathan Whiteman as additional magistrates for Staten Island.

A patent of that spring gives a glimpse of how well known Gideon had become. On 22 May 1674 Paulus Regrinar was granted 70 morgens on Staten Island, “on the bay, about 1 Dutch mile from Gideon Marlet’s point.” A point of land on the bay was known by Gideon’s name.

The Dutch interlude was short. The Treaty of Westminster, signed in February 1674, gave the colony back to England, and English rule returned that November. Gideon had now lived under the Dutch, the English, the Dutch again and the English again, all in eleven years.

The land at Fresh Kill

Under the new English governor, Edmund Andros, the island’s farms were surveyed and patented. The land papers in Albany record the family’s share:

Date	Record
18 October 1675	Survey of about 256 acres “on the south side of Staten Island, for Gideon Marlett and sons,” by Jacques Cortelyou. The same day Cortelyou surveyed 270 acres for “Pierre Billeau and sons.”
1 November 1675	Patent to “Gideon Marlett and his two sons, Joshua and Paulus,” for 243 acres on the south side of Staten Island, “also 30 acres of salt meadow, lying at the mouth of Fresh kill.”
31 March 1676	A second survey of the 256 acres “laid out for Gideon Marlett and others,” again beside a survey of 270 acres for “Peter Biliau and others.”

The patent was made to Gideon with his two eldest sons, Josias (written Joshua) and Paulus, then about 30 and 22. Salt meadow was valuable: its marsh hay fed cattle through the winter. The Billiou and Merlet surveys, made the same days by the same surveyor, suggest the two families may have been neighbors, though the surveys themselves would have to be read to be sure.

The next generation

By the late 1670s the boys who had crossed the Atlantic were grown men with families of their own:

Abraham married Pierre Billiou’s daughter Christance in 1678, joining the two French-speaking families. Land papers of the 1690s and early 1700s still name Abraham Marlett as a landholder on Staten Island.
Paulus was in trouble in January 1678, when a warrant went to the island’s constable to arrest him and five other young men, Daniel Stillwell among them, “for abducting a servant girl of Christopher Billop.” Five days later they were released from prison on bail; how the case ended is not known. In 1679 he married Lysbeth Burwyck, and their daughter Jannetje was born that year.
Josias, the eldest, shared the patent with his father and brother; later land records name his wife as Jane or Jean.
Jean Pierre, the youngest son, grew up on the island and later settled in Middlesex County, New Jersey, where the Mellott and Malott spellings began with him.

1681: a hard year

In 1681 “Gidion Marlett” was listed among the first settlers of Staten Island in the Richmond County records. It was also a year of loss:

In late August 1681, Mary Marshall and Ann Marlett drowned when their canoe overturned. The record doesn’t name Ann’s parents. She may have been Gideon’s daughter Anne, who would have been about 15, but she could also have been a granddaughter.
Marie, Gideon’s wife of 37 years, died in 1681. Family records place her death at Piscataway, New Jersey, on 25 August, the same date given for the drowning, which suggests the two events may have been confused somewhere along the way. Her death date needs a record of its own.
On 5 December 1681 a Staten Island court ordered Gideon to pay a debt of 150 guilders to Peter Nowe.

To New Jersey

By 1684 “Marlet (Marlett-Marlott-Merlett), Gideon” was listed among the first settlers of Piscataway, across the Arthur Kill in New Jersey, where many Staten Island families were taking up land. He did not live long there. On 20 March 1684 the governor’s council granted a petition of Josias and Paulus for a survey and division of the land they had inherited, so Gideon had died by then, at about sixty. No record of his death or burial has been found.

A widow named Mary Murlet married John Tailler at Woodbridge, New Jersey, on 7 December 1685. She is thought to have been Gideon’s second wife, recorded on this site as Mary Taylor.

The family’s Staten Island meadow passed out of their hands. In July 1694 Paul Richards petitioned for a survey of thirty acres of meadow “near the mouth of Fresh Kill, on Staten island, formerly owned by Gideon, Joshua and Paul Marlet.” By then Gideon’s sons were raising families of their own in New Jersey and on Staten Island, and the spellings Marlatt, Marlett, Mellott and Malott were beginning to part ways.

Records still to find

Gideon’s appointment as constable, said to be at Dover on 20 April 1671; Charlotte Megill Hix’s Staten Island Wills and Letters of Administration, p. 109, is the likely source.
The 1675–76 surveys and patent, whose bounds would show exactly where the family’s land lay and who their neighbors were (New York State Archives, Indorsed Land Papers).
The 1681 drowning record (Abstracts of Wills, Liber 19 B, p. 427) and any record of Marie’s death, to settle whether the drowned Ann was Gideon’s daughter and when Marie died.
Gideon’s death and burial, between December 1681 and March 1684.

Every record behind this story, in date order, is in the Timeline of Gedeon Merlet.