I am NOT an expert genealogical researcher. I may have this all wrong. However, if I understand the information I have gathered in my reading and my rambling at sites like ancestry.com, my tenth great grandfather was possibly the first Italian to settle in New York, or New Amsterdam as it was then, in 1635.

Pietro Caesare Alberti, aka Peter Albertus, Pietro Cicero Alberti, Peter the Italian, and many other names and nicknames, was a sailor on a Dutch ship, De Coninck David (the King David), who perhaps because of a dispute with the ship’s captain, De Vries, decided to jump ship, more or less, and settle in New Amsterdam. He arrived in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam on June 2, 1635, having sailed with DeVries from the Dutch island of Texel to Guiana in South America to Virginia and then finally to New Amsterdam where De Vries hoped to have repairs made to his leaky ship. For one reason or another Pietro Alberti decided to stay in America. He later sued De Vries in court for back pay that he said was owed to him for the part of the voyage he did complete. Alberti won a payment of ten guilders.

This Venetian thrown among the Dutch became a middle class farmer in a hard land. He acquired land for a tobacco plantation on Long Island in 1639, and in 1642 he married a Dutch Walloon girl, Judith Manje, in the Dutch Reformed Church in New Amsterdam. At first the couple lived on the Here Graft (Broad Canal, Manhattan), but they soon moved to their farm/plantation on the Long Island shore of the East River. This island was wild country at the time, disputed, settled, bought and sold between the English from Connecticut and Massachusetts colonies, the Dutch from New Netherlands, and the Native tribes who still lived on Long Island. And one Italian. Pietro Alberti and his wife Judith had six children over the course of twelve years of marriage: Jan, Marles, Aert, Marritje, Francyntie, and Willem, all baptized and recorded in the Dutch Reformed Church records.

Then, in about November 1655 both Pietro, age 47, and Judith, age 35, died, possibly in an Indian raid. They left five orphaned children (one child died as an infant), the oldest only eleven years old. That oldest child was my ninth great grandfather, Jan/John Albertus, and John’s daughter Elizabeth married a Stewart. My mother was a Stewart descended from these early inhabitants, Dutch and Italian and English, of New Amsterdam/New York.