A Huguenot on the Hackensackis genealogical work at its best. David C. Major and John S. Major provide a well-contextualized history of a Huguenot family who moved from a small town in Picardy to New Jersey by way of Middleburg, Mannheim, and New Amsterdam. Although understandably written in honor of an ancestor, David Demarest (1620-1693), the book does not fall into the typical pitfalls of the genealogical genre. As the authors state, Demarest was not an aristocrat, a religious refugee, or a pioneer (pp. 159-60). He was simply an enterprising man who moved from place to place in seventeenth-century northern European and across the Atlantic following economic opportunities.

The book can be divided into three sections. The first is acontextual biography of Demarest (pp. 23-104); the second chronicles the family from generation to generation up to World War I (pp. 105-78); the third consistsof useful appendices on the origin of the name Demarest and the birthplace of David Demarest, and contains various excerpts from church records in Mannheim (pp. 179-205).The Demarest family story is both typical and atypical of the Huguenot transatlantic experience. David Demarest, a carpenter, left France for the Netherlands, where he married Marie Sohier, in 1643. He therefore does not belong to the better-known later generation that suffered persecution and the loss of religious and civil rights through the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and clandestinely fled France in the mid-1680s. He also relocated eastward to Mannheim in the Palatinate, where he was in 1649, before eventually crossing the Atlantic in 1663 at age forty-three. He settled in New Netherland, a year before the English took control ofthe colony, and therefore, unlike most Huguenot emigres, he did not move to an English province directly. Once in New Netherland, Demarest and his family settled on Staten Island (Oude Dorp), then in New Harlem before he eventually purchased land in 1677, later known as the French Patent, from Tappan Indians acrossthe Hudson in Bergen County, New Jersey. At some point the Demarest family owned some five thousand acres and an uncertain--but mostly likely large number--of slaves. The rest of the story is more typical. Like all successful first-generation "American Huguenots," Demarest founded a large family who, through successive generations became prominent locally and then nationally. The family was so well-integrated into the northern New Jersey-New York area and all traces of French identity so fully erased that David Demarest's descendents believed that they were Americans of Dutch ancestry! Then, one of them, the theologian David D.Demarest (1819-1898), unearthed their Huguenot roots in the second half of the nineteenth century and published the results of his genealogical investigations in an essay entitled The Huguenots on the Hackensack (1886). The 1880s were a period of Huguenot ethnic renaissance with Huguenot societies founded in New York, Charleston, London, and Berlin along with the publication of Charles W. Bairds seminal study, History of the Huguenot Emigration to America (1885). A Huguenot on the Hackensack is a well-researched and well-written book that meets the canons of the genre yet offers much more than just the story of a family as it illustrates many aspects of the rich Huguenot diasporic experience.