Olof, now you've got me curious about the derivation of the island's name: Dutch is somewhat more likely, but before New York was New Amsterdam, it was New Sweden, so Swedish certainly isn't impossible.
Ah: Wikipedia's article on Rikers Island reports that the island was claimed in 1664 by a Dutchman named Abraham Rycken. A web search fo…
Olof, now you've got me curious about the derivation of the island's name: Dutch is somewhat more likely, but before New York was New Amsterdam, it was New Sweden, so Swedish certainly isn't impossible.
Ah: Wikipedia's article on Rikers Island reports that the island was claimed in 1664 by a Dutchman named Abraham Rycken. A web search for Abraham yields sources - a mix of genealogies and articles in the popular press - that suggest that the spelling of the last name wasn't very fixed: Abraham's father went by de Ryck, and Abraham himself seems to have used de Rycke and Rycker along with Rycken. The letter <y> represented, I think, the diphthong that modern Dutch renders as <ij>, which is pretty close to English long I - well, all right, it's closer to the vowel in a British Canadian pronunciation of "kite". The Online Etymology Dictionary helpfully corroborates my memory by tracing Old English "rice" 'powerful, mighty', Swedish "rik", modern Dutch "rijk", and German "reich" all back to a Proto-Germanic cognate having to do with power; see https://www.etymonline.com/word/rich. Since power and wealth live in each other's pockets (at least until the descendants start partying too hard to take care of business), it's pretty safe to translate "de Rycke" as 'the rich guy'.
Given that diphthong, "Riker" is a fairly plausible Anglicization,
but Abraham's grandson Abraham III, who was a militiaman in the Revolutionary War, was still using Rycken. A somewhat younger fellow who used "Riker", however, was an early congressman.
The most infamous Riker may be Richard Riker, who was either a magistrate or a prosecutor early in the 19th century - about when the importation of slaves was made illegal in the US, but after the first Fugitive Slave Act (https://www.essence.com/culture/rikers-island-slavery-ties/) - who made a pile of money with this side hustle: picking up free blacks in and around New York and selling them into slavery in the South.
Olof, now you've got me curious about the derivation of the island's name: Dutch is somewhat more likely, but before New York was New Amsterdam, it was New Sweden, so Swedish certainly isn't impossible.
Ah: Wikipedia's article on Rikers Island reports that the island was claimed in 1664 by a Dutchman named Abraham Rycken. A web search for Abraham yields sources - a mix of genealogies and articles in the popular press - that suggest that the spelling of the last name wasn't very fixed: Abraham's father went by de Ryck, and Abraham himself seems to have used de Rycke and Rycker along with Rycken. The letter <y> represented, I think, the diphthong that modern Dutch renders as <ij>, which is pretty close to English long I - well, all right, it's closer to the vowel in a British Canadian pronunciation of "kite". The Online Etymology Dictionary helpfully corroborates my memory by tracing Old English "rice" 'powerful, mighty', Swedish "rik", modern Dutch "rijk", and German "reich" all back to a Proto-Germanic cognate having to do with power; see https://www.etymonline.com/word/rich. Since power and wealth live in each other's pockets (at least until the descendants start partying too hard to take care of business), it's pretty safe to translate "de Rycke" as 'the rich guy'.
Given that diphthong, "Riker" is a fairly plausible Anglicization,
but Abraham's grandson Abraham III, who was a militiaman in the Revolutionary War, was still using Rycken. A somewhat younger fellow who used "Riker", however, was an early congressman.
The most infamous Riker may be Richard Riker, who was either a magistrate or a prosecutor early in the 19th century - about when the importation of slaves was made illegal in the US, but after the first Fugitive Slave Act (https://www.essence.com/culture/rikers-island-slavery-ties/) - who made a pile of money with this side hustle: picking up free blacks in and around New York and selling them into slavery in the South.