Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/23

 were Dutch, English, Germans, Welsh, Swedes, Scotch-Irish and French Huguenots, though in the main my blood is English. The paternal line is Dutch, and the name which originated somewhere in the neighborhood of Gorcum, in Holland, is Pannebakker. It means a maker of tiles. The earliest trace of the family that I have found tells the tale of a man who was burned to death and a wife who was drowned for heresy at Utrecht in 1568. In those days they were more gentle with the women. The founder of the family in Pennsylvania, Hendrick Pannebecker, was born March 21, 1674. He was in Germantown in 1699, and from there moved out to Skippack in 1702 as the attorney for Matthias Van Bebber for the sale of the lands of the latter in Bebber's township. He later bought the township and became, as well as Van Bebber and Lodowick Christian Sprogell, one of the three Dutch patroons of Pennsylvania. He was a surveyor and laid out most of the early roads in upper Philadelphia, now Montgomery County. I have his bill to the Penns for surveying a number of their manors in 1733, with the order of Thomas Penn for its payment. He understood three languages—Dutch, German and English. He had a library of books. He owned seven thousand acres of land. He wrote a very pretty script, drew deeds and devised a seal much like that of Van Rensselaer in New York. There is a biography of him in print and when it turns up at a book sale it brings twenty-five dollars. His wife, Eva Umstat, came from the lower Rhine and neither the marriage of his son, Jacob, who was a miller on the Skippack, nor that of his grandson, Matthias, who moved to the Pickering Creek, in Chester County, effected any race modifications. This Matthias, born in 1742, had rather a broad country life. He owned a mill, still standing, and four or five farms. He was a commissioner appointed by act of assembly to provide for the navigation of the River Schuylkill. He was a bishop of the Mennonites, using the three languages Rh