ZIELIE FAMILY

David Uzille and Marie Casier came to New Amsterdam on the ship DE VERGULDE OTTER (The Gilded Otter) which left the Texel on April 27,1660. They traveled here with her parents Phillipe Casier and Marie Taine Casier. These families arrived in what is now Harlem New York in June 1660. David was a farmer who was born near La Moussaye (south of St. Malo) in lower Brittany. The Uzille surname is also found as Ziele and Seely.

Philippe Casier of Calais France, is first mentioned in the Huguenot settlement of Martinique in the French West Indies. In 1635 a party of experienced settlers had gone to Martinique from the neighbouring island of St. Christopher, which had been settled by French Huguenots in 1627. Philippe and Marie (Taine) Casier's first two children, Jean and Marie, were born on Martinique. In 1645, Philippe Casier and others left the island and returned to Europe. Casier went first to Calais, then to Sluis, Flanders where his daughter Hester was born. Many French and Walloon exiles from England and from the Dutch seaboard were fleeing to Mannheim, drawn there by assurances of freedom and protection under the government of the Protestant Elector, Charles Lewis who held out strong inducements to the refugees to settle there. Some time after 1652, Philippe and his family moved to Mannheim in the Lower Palatinate of Germany, along with other Huguenots and Walloon Protestants.