Talk:Wyck House

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Documentation[edit]

Most of the history of the house probably comes from the HABS HAER documentation for the building. (See notes image notes on WikiCommons for photograph accompanying this article.) The date of arrival of Hans Millam is questionable. He appears in the annotations to the map as a Lot owner in the Pastorius Map shown in Pennypacker, q899: between pp. 278 and 279; https://archive.org/details/settlementofgerm01penn ). Duffin 1992 (Germantown Crier 1992 44(2): beginning p 4) dates this map to between December 1686 and January 1687. The annotations are believed to have been added by an anonymous clerk of the Frankfort Company, for whom Pastorius was an agent for their land dealings in America. Pastorius presumably prepared the map for them, and the annotations probably came from an accompanying letter that has not survived. So we can say that Hans Millem probably arrived by about 1686, but I'm not sure that we can't say he didn't arrive until 1690 as the article currently says. Most likely he was here before that.

We can conclusively say that he was here by 7May of 1691 as he was naturalized by William Penn (along with many other early arrivals) on that date Original Source: Pastorius Grund and Lager Buch, p. 235. Intermediate Source: http://mv.ancestry.com/viewer/de987663-5397-4863-83f5-14881aa9db88/17399558/757003784

In other colonies (specifically Virginia) naturalization required an immigrant to be "in country" for at least seven years before they could be naturalized (See Orange County VA Naturalization records.) That would suggest he was here by 1684, but that's probably not correct (some on the list of those naturalized are known to have been here after that date. (Notably Hans Peter Umstead, who is known to have arrived in 1685 on the Francis and Dorothy. TwelveGreat (talk) 14:06, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

See:[HABS-Hare Documentation] Which states

In 1689 Hans Millan, [sic] a Swiss Quaker, claimed ownership of lot seventeen in the "German Township." Little is known about Millan, who died in 1698, but it is assumed that about 1690 he built a small house on the property that was perhaps absorbed into the present building. DirkJansen(c.1680-1760),whohadmarried Millan's daughter Margaret by 1702, was the next owner of the property, and it is likely that he built the two-and-one-half-story house that now forms the western endofWyck. Witha plan of 36'by 29', Jansen's house would have been quite large in comparison to other houses in the neighborhood at the time, but it shared fundamental qualities with them: it was built of stone, the favored construction material in Germantown from its settlement in the seventeenth century until the middle of the twentieth century; the gable end of the building faced the main road, an orientation found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German and Dutch houses; and it originally had a three-room plan dominated by a massive central chimney ...

While the HABS HAER Documentation does not tell us specifically how they know that "Millan claimed ownership of Lot 17 in 1689" we can probably accept that 1689 is most likely the latest date at which he could have arrived. Correspondingly I've changed the date of arrival in the main article to 1689. TwelveGreat (talk) 14:43, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've also looked through the HABS Hare documentation to verify that the history text is consistent with it. Most of the early portions of the house history seem to be drawn from it, or are at least consistent with it. Later portions of the history (after the initial reference to Reuben Haines III and wife Jane Bowne Haines) are not considered in the HABS HAER Documentation. They may have been drawn from the preservations societies web site, but I've not checked that source. TwelveGreat (talk) 15:20, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]