Before the Melicks, the Egberts.

When Peter Melick married Susannah Egbert in 1783, two families with generations of New Jersey history came together. One had roots among German-speaking settlers near Oldwick. The other reached back to the Dutch-speaking world of New Amsterdam and Staten Island.

Names that changed with each generation

At the beginning of the family history stands Egbert Sanderszen, recorded in seventeenth-century New Netherland. The compilation admits that when he arrived from Holland is uncertain. In a Dutch naming convention, a son could be identified by his father's given name rather than by a fixed surname: the next generation included Tunis Egbertszen, and Tunis's son appears in records as James Tunison or Jacques Egbertsen. Eventually, the descendants adopted Egbert as a hereditary surname.

A New Amsterdam Dutch Church baptism dated July 9, 1662, records a son Theunis of Egbert Sandersen and his wife Harmentje Harmens. It is a strikingly early surviving trace of a family whose descendants would eventually make their lives in Hunterdon County.

A miller on Staten Island

Tunis Egbert grew into a Staten Island landowner and appears in local service as constable and supervisor. His son James, also called Jacques, was born around 1695 and worked as a miller at Fresh Kills. The compiled history follows deeds, a mill house and land transactions, including property acquired after his father's death in 1721.

It names James's second wife as Catherine Backer, and their son Nicholas Egbert was born in 1729. Nicholas moved inland to Readington in New Jersey, where the account again identifies an Egbert miller. A 1812 will, summarized by the genealogist, names his wife Mary and descendants, offering an especially useful avenue for verification.

Where the two milling families met

Nicholas and Mary (Maria) Biggs Egbert had a daughter Susannah, born in 1763 according to the family pedigree. Her marriage to Peter V. Melick connected the Staten Island–Readington Egberts with a second milling family: the Melicks, whose ancestor Tunis had operated mills in and around New Germantown.

The mills mattered to a farming community: a mill was where harvests became meal and flour, an everyday necessity requiring equipment, labor, water and a dependable route from nearby farms. Two lineages that eventually became a single household had been doing work of that kind in different parts of colonial New Jersey.

Susannah and Peter's descendants included John Vliet Melick, then John Vroom Melick, Walter Cameron Melick and finally Donald's father James Warren. Dutch-speaking roots, German-speaking roots and the region's intermarried families all form part of Donald's story.

What survives—and what is still uncertain

The Egbert Family History is a twentieth-century compilation by Charles P. Staubach, submitted by John E. Mellick. Its pages reproduce older baptismal references, deed and probate summaries, and documentary citations; the earlier sources have not all been individually re-examined for this site. In particular, the family's original immigration date and some precise seventeenth-century relationships should not be treated as settled merely because they appear in a later genealogy.

But the central link is consistent with the existing family pedigree: James (Jacques) Egbert → Nicholas Egbert → Susannah Egbert → the Melick family. This is the story of the ancestry Susannah brought to her marriage—and a reminder that the Melicks were never only one family from Germany.