An excerpt from the beginning of the PREFACE: It has been well said in the preface to the "Lives of the Lindsays" that 'Every family should have a record of its own. Each has its peculiar spirit running through the whole line, and in more or less development, perceptible in every generation. We do not love our kindred for their glory or their genius, but for their domestic affections and private virtues. An affectionate regard to their memory is natural to the heart; it is an emotion totally distinct from pride-an ideal love. Our ancestors, it is true, are denied to our personal acquaintance, but the light they shed during their lives survives within their tombs, and will reward our search if we explore them' Encouraged by these wise words, I am emboldened to lay before the public the results of my researches into the lives of the women who, by their industry, their courage, and their piety, helped to create a colony in the New World, and I have followed out the history (as far as was possible) to their descendants of the third and fourth generation. The information contained in this volume was culled from various sources, many of them not open to the public, such as private family papers to which I have fortunately had access, and some of which I had inherited, they having been lain aside by an older member of the family with the view of compiling a family history, which was never accomplished. Family traditions have been used which have always been given for what they are worth and always noted, histories were consulted that have been long out of print, and are now to be found only on the back shelves of some old-fashioned library, as well as those that are commonly known and often consulted by the public. All of these I have woven into a web. If the pattern is not clear, or the colors are not properly assorted, it must be excused, as being the work of a woman, done in a womanly way, from a woman's point of view. History is generally written by men, who dwell on politics, wars, and the exploits of their sex. Household affairs, women's influence, social customs and manners, are seldom chronicled, and are only to be discovered underlying what are deemed the important events of life, more by inference than from anything that is actually written about them. This conglomerate history of the lives of the dames of Mana-ha-ta has been compiled with infinite difficulty, owing to the scanty data that have been preserved concerning them. It was customary to destroy all letters that dealt with family life, particularly anything concerning the women of the family, as if in their lives and daily occupations there was something to be ashamed of. Volumes of letters and trunks full of bundles of old papers have been preserved in many families, tut in all these that I have laboriously studied, I have not found more than about a dozen written by women; but those mere fifed with interesting details, and mere far more valuable to the historian than those of the men of the day. which were on dry business affairs that might have been of importance at the time, but are of no value now, and mate one wonder why they were preserved Among them are sometimes prozvking references to family affairs that excite the curiosity without gratifying it, although there must have been as much to say of the women of the past as there is of the women of the present or of the future. The life of the "Goede Vrouw of Mana-ha-ta" was written between the lines of contemporaneous history; I have merely taken the liberty of placing her in the foreground with the men of the day in shadow as her background thereby throwing her into strong relief, instead of (as is usually done) reversing the process....