Gajus ScheltemaExploring Historic Dutch New York: New York City * Hudson Valley * New Jersey * Delaware

This is a beautifully produced little book with great photographic reproduction and good design. The chapters on history and culture are excellent and nicely illustrated. As a guide it is less satisfactory. I know New York City very well and found its guide section to lower Manhattan very confusing, causing me to look at other guides for reference. Captions are not well-connected to the photos of houses - it is often not clear which house the caption refers to on a page (doesn't say "below" or "right" or "above"). There was an error in numbering the last maps, so that there were 2 Number 10 maps, instead of 10, 11, 12. However, it is a nice way to find some of these obscure areas and their often-forgotten Dutch culture and history. I grew up in New Jersey where local Dutch history was taught in schools and where we took field trips to see both New Jersey and New York landmarks of this culture. It was fun to revisit it.

This is a scholarly overview of the remaining Dutch heritage in the NY-NJ-DE area. The aim is to document rather than to provide a tour guide. However, with the web, it would be easy to put together a tour and the information about opening times and so on is constantly changing, so including it here wouldn't fit with the emphasis on documentation for the long haul.I enjoyed reading the short essays on the history of New Netherland, Holland Mania (the 19th century craze for Dutch colonial architecture and art), the first Jews in New Netherland, slavery in New Netherland, among others. These are well-written, scholarly overviews conveying in a concise and accessible manner what we know now about these topics. Note the essays are on New Netherland and not just New Amsterdam. This shows the wide geographical focus, not just on Lower Manhattan, but on other areas too. I read the book as part of my family history research, and was pleased to see material on Demarests in Bergen Co., NJ.In addition to the historical essays there are overviews of Dutch materials found in local museums. (Although it sounds strange to refer to the Met at a local museum.) For anyone interested in this topic, this is a great place to start. An up-to-date bibliography gives suggestions for further reading at the end.

Roger Panetta, Editor of "Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture", has done a great service to the descendants of Dutch immigrants to America with this book. It's not as if there were no books on the Dutch during the founding and settling of New Netherlands, it is that they were hard to find, were in Dutch, and didn't come up in a Google search online. Descended from one of those early Dutch immigrants, the cultural and social signs were evident although neither I nor other members of my extended family knew we were ancestrally Dutch until I took up genealogy about 2009, which was the quadricentennial of the Dutch in New Netherlands. This book can be read from front to back or used as a reference; its' index is quite detailed. Every page provides a "new" viewpoint or vision of early New York and rearranges the actual history of New York as we learned it in school - for me that is six decades ago. Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture

Great book but wished there were more inclusions of the historical places in NJ and Rockland county NY

This is a great book for anyone who has Dutch ancestors from Colonial New York or anyone who is interested in the early history New York, New Jersey, and Delaware. It gives you historical background of the times and the places you can visit. It has very good maps on how to find these places. It is loaded with photos. I'm doing genealogy research on my family so this books helps me see the location of significant places I need to visit.

OK but there are better books out there for guiding you around the area--and web sites.

This book offers a helpful overview of sites related to New York's Dutch history. The range is impressive, covering the metropolitan area broadly defined; the format is compact and conveniently portable; and the design is handsome, with lots of gorgeous full-color photos. The descriptions are accurate and up-to-date but necessarily brief; references to more detailed sources would be welcome. It's a great place to start planning a heritage tour, but you will need more to track down all the details.

Well written and informative!