Ramapough Mountain Genealogy

Profile manager: J Grohsmeyer [send private message]

The goal of this project is to collect and make sense of genealogical information about the families living in the Ramapo Mountain area in Bergen County on the border of NY/NJ and relatives who've moved elsewhere. Four common family names are Mann, DeGroot (De Groat), DeFreese (de Vries, Defrease, etc.), and Van Dunk. Suffern is another common name.

The families intermarry a lot and re-use first names, so connections can be confusing. Some areas that would help to get started:

• Figure out lines of descent from Samuel Mann (1762-1813) to his grandchildren
• Info about the three earliest Manns: Phillip, Peter, Samuel
• Origins of the four families.
• adding more profiles (or finding existing ones) so we have more information to work with

Have an interest in this? Please post a comment here on this page, in G2G using the project tag, or send me a private message. Thanks!

MANN family

Ramapough Lenape History^[1] says that the progenitor of the Mann family name was Philip Mann Sr, a son of of Maanis (c. 1700) of the Lenape Tribe, and that Samuel Mann (b 1762) was Peter's son.

In his book The Ramapo Mountain People ^[2], David Steven Cohen posits that the Mann surname began with Philip Mann, who was the son of Nicholas Manuel (b. 1737) and Elizabeth Dey, and that Nicholas is the great-grandson of Manuel van Angola and Phizithiaen D'Angool, who were married 16 Feb 1642, according to the records of the Dutch Reformed Church of New Amsterdam in New York.

1830 Census
From Cohen's book^[3]: "The 1830 federal census, the earliest available for New Jersey and the first census to list race, provides a good overview of the population distribution. Most of the Mountain People lived in what was then Franklin Township in the New Jersey section of the mountains southwest of the Ramapo Pass. Among them were the following free "negro" heads of families (the size of their families in parentheses):

• Richard DeGroot (4)
• Joseph Degroot (7)
• William Degroot (5)
• Ellen Degroot (3)
• James Degroot (9)
• Elias Mann (9)
• Peter Mann (7)
• Juliana Mann (7) [possibly widow of Samuel Mann]
• Peter Debruse (probably De Frise) (4).

Residing at the Ramapo Pass in the Town of Ramapo, New York state, were

• John Man (3)
• Philip Mayne (probably Mann) (11)."

Some Mountain People were already living in Pompton Township, New Jersey, in the Wanaque River Valley on the northwest side of the Ramapo Mountains:

• Samuel Vandonk (3)
• John Vandonk (3)
• Morgan Lewis (probably Lewis .Morgan) (3).

Still in the Hackensack River Valley in Harrington Township, New Jersey, was a colored James De Groot with a family of six.

References

Wikipedia article is at [1] Book: [2]