A while ago I realized that I might be able to use deeds to more closely locate where my Mohican-Wappinger ancestor John Van Gilder lived. There's a court document from 1762 with testimony from his son Joseph, his son-in-law's brother Samuel Winchell Jr and others about whether a large split rock with a sapling in it was the same as a pile of rocks called Wawanaquasick that marked a boundary between the Mohicans and the Wappingers. There's a lot of discussion about what people lived near the rock and how far. Most tantalizing is this statement about John Van Gilder's home site: "his
Fathers Land was near the flat Rock, the Rock fifty or sixty Rods to the East
of his Fathers Land."
I just grasped the meaning of another phrase: "His
father lived there better than fifty Years as his Mother and father told Schnapk." John died in 1758. That means he was living in the Egremont area about 1708, when he was about ten, eleven years before he married his wife. I hadn't realized that before.
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