LL-L "Language survival" 2002.10.16 (07) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 17.OCT.2002 (07) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Szelog, Mike <Mike.Szelog at CITIZENSBANK.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language survival" 2002.10.16 (05) [E]

Thomas and Robert, thanks for the information!
Thomas wrote:

> I lived in Ringwood in northern New Jersey for years.  I used to know many
> of the Jackson Whites personally.  Although family names like vanZutphen,
> Onderdonk, deGroat, vanDunk, etc. predominate, I never came across anyione
> who spoke other than English.  But their population ranges through some
> pretty wild areas, so who knows.  Many of the ones I knew made a living in
> questionable ways, such as "jacking" deer (I know a bar in Wanaque with an
> enormous meat locker where one can sell such meat).  They are universally
> proud of their ability to shoot and to hunt.

I already thought it would be very questionable
that these people would still speak a language
that had died out almost a century earlier in all
neighbouring valleys. Nevertheless there should
be a whole chapter about the language of the
Jackson Whites in a book called 'The Ramapo
Mountain People' by a David S. Cohen. That
should be worth checking out, since I found
some remarks on the internet as "In New
Jersey there is a language that is a version of
Flemish mixed with English, plus a few animal
& plant terms from Lenape-Delaware Indian,
called 'Jersey Dutch.' The variant spoken by the
Mountain People is called 'nêxer däuts,' that is,
'Negro Dutch' (see Cohen, "The Ramapo Moun-
tain People," Rutgers Univ Press, 1974, pp 142-
143)".
I take it that traces of this Jersey Dutch dialect
can still be found in the speech of the Jackson
Whites.

> I attended a lecture at Ringwood Manor, given by the local historical
> society years ago on the origin of the Jackson Whites. According to the
> lecturer, the name originated with a man named Jackson, who got as
contract
> to supply 200 prostitutes to the English army in New York during the
> revolutionary war.  He got some prostitutes to volunteer off the streets
of
> london but got nowhere the total that he needed.  So, he started
kidnapping
> women, and brought his total up to 100.  For the remainder, he bught 100
> slaves and set off for New York.
> The women were kept in a stockade and were abandoned when the English lost
> the war and had to break out.  Everywhere they went they were shooed off
by
> farmers with guns, so they made their way across the Hudson River to
> northern New Jersy, an area that was inhabbited by Dutch bandits who had
> intermarried with Indians.  They intermarried with these people and thus
> were born the Jackson Whites.

As far as I know, that is only one of the
theories. Another theory says that the
name 'Jackson Whites' actually stand for
''Jacks and Whites" ('jacks' referring to the
term 'freed blacks').

> My brother still lives in that area and he informed that that the Jackson
> Whites had recently been classified as the Ramapo Indian tribe.

According to their official website at
www.ramapoughmountainindians.com
they are not yet classified as Indians, but
have been trying to convince the Bureau
of Indian Affairs that they are Indians
since 1978.
Strange to see the name of their current
chief: Walter 'Silent Wolf' Van Dunk!

Finally, a question for Robert Bowman:
when did your paternal grandmother
die? I have already found that Jersey
Dutch was at least spoken fluently untill
about 1940 by a few last speakers. And as
late as 1964 a James Storms (born in 1888)
compiled "A Jersey Dutch Vocabulary"
(published by the Pascack Historical So-
ciety). He drew upon his own memory of
what he had heard as a child and that of
other elderly in Bergen County, NJ.

Regards,

Marco

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