My wife's eighth great-grandfather was Gijsbert Op Ten Dijck (Gilbert Updyke), who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1635. So before we uncover the life of this first ancestor to America next month, let's take a step back in history to look at his German ancestry and how he ended up in a Dutch settlement. Originally, German surnames indicated where the family lived. In this case, the Updike family originally lived near a dike. But after the 1100s, German families began to retain their surname as they moved from place to place.
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