Much of our knowledge concerning the Huguenots of New York has been obtained from the documentary papers at Albany. Some of the families, before the revocation, as early as the year 1625, reached the spot where the great metropolis now stands, then a Dutch settlement. The first birth in New Amsterdam, of European parents, was a daughter of George Jansen de Rapelje, of a Huguenot family which fled to Holland after the St. Bartholomew's massacre, and thence sailed for America. Her name was Sarah. Her father was a Walloon from the confines of France and Belgium, and settling on Long Island, at the _Waal-bogt_, or Walloon's Bay, became the father of that settlement. In 1639 his brother, Antonie Jansen de Rapelje, obtained a grant of one hundred 'morgens,' or nearly two hundred acres of land, opposite Coney Island, and commenced the settlement of Gravesend. Here most numerous and respectable descendants of this Walloon are met with to this day. Jansen de Rapelje, as he was called, was a man of gigantic strength and stature, and reputed to be a Moor by birth. This report, probably, arose from his adjunct of _De Salee_, the name under which his patent was granted; but it was a mistake; he was a native Walloon, and this suffix to his name, we doubt not, was derived from the river Saale, in France, and not Salee, or Fez, the old piratical town of Morocco. For many years after the Dutch dynasty, his farm at Gravesend continued to be known as Anthony Jansen's Bowery. The third brother of this family, William Jansen de Rapelje, was among the earliest settlers of Long Island and founders of Brooklyn. Singularly, the descendants of _Antonie_ have dropped the Rapelje, and retained the name of Jansen, or Johnson, as they are more commonly called. On the contrary, George's family have left off Jansen, and are now known as Rapelje or Rapelyea.