Mary Webster's Germantown Founders Ancestry

John Miller of New Garden married in 1798, before a magistrate, Mary
Webster of Middletown, Delaware County, the daughter of Joseph Webster
and Rebecca Kester. John Miller and Mary Webster had among others Mary 
Webster Miller, who married Ezra Thompson about 1832 in London Britain,
Chester Co, PA.  Joseph Webster came from New Jersey Quaker families.
Rebecca Kester came from founding families of Germantown, including the
Mennonite Quaker Op den Graeff and Doors/Thiesson/Tyson families from 
Krefeld, Germany.

 Webster line  This Webster family, like John
Miller's line of the Millers, seem to have had a reputation for being
extremely quiet, instrospective people, inclined at times to be studious.  

 Kester and associated lines (ie, Cassell) 

 The Doors/ Thiesson/ Tyson clan from Krefeld and
Kaldenkirchen, Germany 

 The Op den graeff clan from Krefeld, Germany 

I belong to a mailing list for people researching the Original
13 (and other early) families of Germantown. Their main
web site, with research information and links, is at 
 Original13 site .  

The founder of the Opdengraeff line, Herman, was a wealthy weaver and 
merchant and a Mennonite
leader and bishop, one of the signers of the 1632 Mennonite Confession of
Faith.  He appears to have been an extreme mystic with more than a touch
of egomania.  Both he and his wife were born to Mennonite families as yet
few in number in a group of villages on the border between Germany and
Holland, these families were closely interrelated. Oddly for a 
prosperous and religiously ascetic merchant's family able to put stained 
glass windows in their house which stood for a very long time, almost half
of his eighteen children did not live long enough to see age two; most of  
those who died did not live to see age one. There was not just the pattern of 
children dying young but at any age that reflects some susceptibility to 
contagious disease, in people who ate poorly, took poor care of themselves 
or had allergies (it isn't hard to trace which lines my allergies and asthma 
came from) or the pattern of several people dying together that 
marks an epidemic when alot of people were dying, and it was a prosperous 
little village and not the ghetto of a city. 

HIs granddaughter Gertrude 
Doors, who is my direct ancestor, had a very serious bout of mental illness 
that coincided with the birth of one of her children recorded in the child's 
baptismal records; her parents had had to take responsibility for caring for 
the child. 

Three other grandchildren by another son of the bishop migrated
to Germantown (with a number of immediate descendants of Gertrude's parents,
she and her husband went a little later). Abraham, Herman and Derek 
Op den graeff, and particularly Abraham and Herman, were intense and
cranky people who consistently followed the most intense religious sect
around, though being Quaker was intense enough for their brother, took
prominent roles both in the government of Germantown andin all of its
controversies, more often than not on the unpopular side, and frequently
got into trouble with neighbors and with government and court officials
for being cranky, difficult, and hard to get along with. When I was 
exploring the intense, high-strung and volatile temperament with a tendency
to mental health problems and family trouble that plagues all of the 
Dehaven lines (another of the Germantown families),  the almost half of the
Dehaven descendants who are descended from Abraham Op den Graeff were
telling me that they thought this set of problems came from the Op den 
Graeff's because they're notoriously like that!  




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