DuBois Family Association - DBFA, New Paltz, NY (2026)

10/21/2026

Your DBFA Board of Directors met on October 14th — here’s a snapshot of what we’re working on for the family.

We’re happy to welcome Merlin as our newest Director on the Board! The board recapped our 60th Anniversary Celebration and our Annual Business Meeting and collaborated on ways to improve the next event. A couple of the suggestions we are looking at are livestreaming our in-person events and including our social media content on the website. Speaking of the website, the technology team gave us a tour of the new portions of the website that have been completed and took feedback. A reminder that the date is set for the 2027 Biennial Reunion and Business Meeting: September 18, 2027, in the Fireside Room at the Reformed Church of New Paltz. On the genealogy front, work continues on new forms that will let members submit corrections and add new generations to our family records.

And this page just passed 800 followers. Thank you, cousins!

DBFA is run entirely by volunteers, and we’re always looking for people interested in genealogy and history who want to get involved. Whether it’s joining a committee, helping with events, or considering a seat on the Board of Directors — there’s a place for you. Reach out to us anytime.

Not a member yet? Annual memberships start at just $25 and you can find more information on our website. You’ll get our quarterly newsletter, access to genealogy resources, a vote at the annual meeting, and a connection to a family story that stretches back to 1660.

What would you like to see DBFA working on? Drop your ideas in the comments.

10/19/2026

We’re halfway through Family History Month and we wanted to highlight a fascinating and free online tool from New York that just keeps getting better and better.

The New Paltz Historic Documents Project has digitized thousands of the town’s oldest records: deeds, wills, church records, Revolutionary War papers, account books, and family letters. Most are from the 1600s and 1700s, and you can search them all from your kitchen table. The collection is a joint effort of Historic Huguenot Street, the Elting Memorial Library's Haviland-Heidgerd Collection, the Reformed Church of New Paltz, and the Town of New Paltz. The project started back in 2018 with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. After federal funding ended, the Robert D.L. Gardiner Foundation – with matching support from the Hasbrouck Family Association – has stepped in and kept the work going. So far, the project has digitized 6,369 items and 34,000+ pages. Some DuBois-specific documents were recently added to the project – searching the DuBois name yields 2,060 results. Even beyond our family, the collection is a fascinating look at the history of New Paltz.

Here’s one example of what’s in there. This is the 1677 patent from Sir Edmund Andros, the English governor of New York, confirming the land the founders had bought from the Esopus people earlier that year (the deed with the Esopus is in the collection too!). Zoom in, and you’ll find “Lewis Du Bois and Partners” named again and again, along with all twelve founders, three of them DuBois men: Louis and his sons Abraham and Isaac. The rent the founders owed every year was five bushels of good winter wheat. Within a year, their families had settled New Paltz. Image courtesy of Historic Huguenot Street - all of the documents in the collection remain the holdings of the original institution.

The whole project is hosted online by the folks at New York Heritage Digital Collections – a collaborative project of eight of the nine Empire State Library Network library councils and includes items contributed by over 430 libraries, museums, archives, and cultural institutions. Items include photographs, letters, artifacts, maps, and more. The entire New York Heritage Digital Collection boasts over 400,000 items and growing. The link to the collection is in the comments.

Search tip: this is another good reminder to try every possible spelling when searching for historic documents. DuBois, Du Bois, Dubois, Debois, etc. The clerk who wrote the original deed with the Esopus spelled it “du Booys.”

Can you find Lewis Du Bois on the patent? What’s the oldest record you’ve found with an ancestor’s name on it?

10/16/2026

Before there were classrooms with desks and chalkboards, there were samplers. And if you were a girl in early 19th century America, a sampler wasn't a hobby. It was your education.

A sampler was how a young girl learned her letters, her numbers, and her stitches — all at the same time. They were called "marking samplers" because once you'd mastered yours, you could mark your family's linens with their initials. Every pillowcase, every tablecloth, every sheet — identified by hand, by you. It was one of the most practical skills a household needed, and it was a girl's job to learn it.

The samplers were signed and dated. They were your proof — proof that you'd been educated, that your family had invested in your future, that you were ready. Girls made them between the ages of about 8 and 14. By the mid-1800s, the tradition had mostly disappeared as education changed and machine-made textiles took over. The ones that survive come from a very specific window in American history.

During the 60th Birthday Celebration in New Paltz, the Collections Manager for Historic Huguenot Street selected a couple of samplers that are in their permanent collection and told us their story. The Collections team was also nice enough to provide us with the great sampler picture you see attached to this post.

Martha Ann DuBois made the pictured sampler when she was eleven years old. You can see her alphabet stitched across the linen — every letter, upper and lower case, plus numbers. A decorative border frames the whole piece. She was born in 1826 and lived to 1888. She's buried in Lloyd Cemetery.

And right next to the sampler on the table was something that made the display even more special. A hand-painted photograph of Martha Ann in her later years — sitting in a chair, hands folded, in a gilded oval frame. What fascinated me was the life that must have happened between those two objects. An eleven-year-old girl — full of hopes, dreams, and ambitions — stitching her letters into a piece of linen. And then an older woman with her life’s journey stitched on her face. Both of them right there on the same table.

Someone in our group joked that she didn't look too happy. We all laughed, and then somebody pointed out that people didn't smile in old photographs because they had to hold perfectly still for so long — it takes fewer muscles to keep a straight face than to hold a smile. But maybe she just didn’t have a lot to smile about – we won’t ever know.

My mom was in DAR and she once told me that the DAR Museum in Washington DC has more than 300 samplers in their permanent collection. They’ve built exhibitions around the same idea — pairing old samplers with the life stories of the girls who made them. Take the clues stitched into the piece — a name, a date — and discover what became of the woman. That's exactly what HHS has done with Martha Ann DuBois. That’s part of what we try to do with family trees and genealogy – tell the story between the sampler and the photograph.

Have you ever come across a sampler in your family? Do you know who made it — and what became of her?

10/14/2026

Look closely at this painting. A clock on the mantel. A chair. A tilt-top table. A fireplace with brass andirons. Rose wallpaper. It's a domestic interior — a scene painted exactly as it appeared in someone's home. You can even read the artist's signature in the lower left corner: E. Hoysradt. And this piece of art was one of the items that the Collections Manager at Historic Huguenot Street selected for display during our 60th Birthday Celebration a few weeks ago.

Emily DuBois Hoysradt painted this. And Emily was not a weekend hobbyist. She was an exhibiting member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors who showed her work in both Kingston and New York City. In 1924, the American Federation of Arts asked her to chair a committee in Kingston. When Emily sat down to paint this scene from her family's home, she knew what she was doing.

Now swipe through the photos.

The clock is a pillar-and-scroll shelf clock, made around 1830 by Eli Terry & Sons of Plymouth, Connecticut. Eli Terry essentially invented the mass-produced clock. Before Terry, a clock was a luxury item — handmade, expensive, out of reach for most families. Terry figured out how to use interchangeable parts to manufacture affordable clocks for ordinary households. The pillar-and-scroll was his signature design. Owning one in the 1830s meant you were part of the first generation of Americans who could have a precision timepiece on your mantel.

The original owner was Emily's great-grandfather, Josiah Bruyn DuBois. He ran a mercantile business in partnership with Josiah Hasbrouck — operating out of what we now call the Jean Hasbrouck House on Huguenot Street. In 1822, he built a Federal-style brick home in Libertyville, west of the Wallkill River. He was a merchant who could afford a Terry clock. And that clock stayed in the family for generations.

The chair is sitting in the Deyo House on Huguenot Street right now, steps from where we saw the painting. The tilt-top table is there as well. Emily painted everything in that scene, and then she donated the painting and the actual objects to HHS. All of it. Together.

She did the same thing with a melodeon — a small pump organ popular in the mid-19th century — painting it in her family home and donating both the painting and the instrument to HHS. This wasn't a one-time decision. Emily made a deliberate choice to document her family's belongings and make sure the originals and the artwork would never be separated.

Three generations in a handful of objects. Josiah Bruyn DuBois bought the clock for his new home around 1830. His son Josiah Jr. inherited it. His great-granddaughter Emily painted it. And then she gave it all to Huguenot Street so that her family's story — our family's story — would be preserved in a place where anyone could see it.

Every family has objects like these — a clock, a chair, a table that's been in the same spot for decades. What's the object in your family that tells the story? Is anyone making sure it's preserved?

10/12/2026

The story of New Paltz begins long before 1677, when the Esopus, a Lenape people, called this land home. We are grateful to Historic Huguenot Street for honoring the Lenape people, whose story is woven into our family’s history.

10/09/2026

One of my favorite moments from our 60th Anniversary Celebration was sitting in the Fireside Room listening to three women open our program who each brought something different to the day — and together reminded us why these family events are so important.

DBFA President Karen Jones kicked things off as our MC, welcoming everyone and setting the tone for the day. Karen shared memories of attending DBFA reunions with her parents and grandparents. She encouraged us to take the time to make connections with one another. She also made a point that stuck with me — she's found photos from DBFA gatherings in the 70s and 80s, and outside of her own parents and grandparents, she can't identify anyone in them. She wanted to make sure we don't let that happen again.

Liselle LaFrance, President & CEO of , gave us a behind-the-scenes look at what's happening with the DuBois Fort and Huguenot Street in general. The original 2003 architectural study is being updated right now — with modern timber dating and analysis that wasn't possible twenty years ago — and the final report is expected any day.

She also shared how DBFA's own board helped the effort behind the study. Karen personally took custody of family papers found in an abandoned storage unit in Texas, and those documents helped the architect fill in historical details that had been missing from the record. Even more exciting, HHS is planning a new education and visitor center that would move modern functions out of the Fort entirely and reimagine how the building tells its story. That project has already received a $2 million grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. The future of the Fort has never looked brighter.

In the emotional crescendo of the morning, former DBFA President Dina DuBois stepped up and read from her father's newspaper columns — collected in a little book called Places and People. Stories about summer boarders and home cooking, about wrestling with a lawnmower engine while the whole neighborhood watched, about the first snowfall and getting the horses sharp-shod. They were funny. They were personal. And they were exactly the kind of family memories that disappear when nobody writes them down. Dina's father wrote them down. And Dina brought them back to us. Memories like these are the reason many of us choose to be part of organizations like DBFA.

That's what this whole day was about — the people and institutions working to make sure our family's story doesn't just survive, it thrives.

Thank you, Karen. Thank you, Liselle. Thank you, Dina.

10/07/2026

The tours were wonderful. The speakers were fantastic. The cake was delicious.

But this is what we'll remember most - the people.

Cousins meeting cousins. Comparing family lines, swapping stories, finding out who descends from whom, and laughing like they've known each other forever. In a way, they have. Every person in this room traces back to Chrétien DuBois, a Huguenot refugee whose family put down roots in New Paltz more than 350 years ago.

No Zoom call or website can do this. Only being together can.

So save the date: September 18, 2027. Our family reunion returns to New Paltz every two years, and next year's falls during the town's 350th anniversary! 1677 to 2027.

Tell us your favorite "together" family memory.

10/05/2026

Fifteen cousins. One rainy Sunday. And a historian (and cousin!) who knew exactly where to look.

The day after our 60th Birthday Celebration in New Paltz, some of us weren't ready to go home yet. So we drove about 20 minutes to the little town of Hurley, where Erin Von Holdt - Gilbert of the Hurley Heritage Society opened the Hurley Heritage Museum for our group. Then she walked us through the old Hurley burying ground and then on to the Marbletown Cemetery, umbrellas and all.

Why Hurley? Because before there was a New Paltz, Louis and Catherine DuBois lived here. The Dutch called it Nieuwe Dorp, the "new village." In 1663, Catherine and their young children were taken captive from this town. Most of us are more familiar with the New Paltz chapter of the family story, but on this day we got to live the chapter that came before it - and the Hurley Heritage Society does an amazing job telling the story of all the settlers of Hurley.

The Dutch Room to the right as you enter the museum stopped me first. It's set up the way a Hurley home might have looked in the 1600s and 1700s, with a Dutch Bible, a baby cradle, a butter churn, and pewter on the shelves. It's the everyday world Louis and Catherine would have recognized.

Then there's this year's exhibit, "Hurley in the Revolution: History Happened Here." In the fall of 1777, after the British burned Kingston, Hurley became a military outpost and, briefly, the capital of New York State. The exhibit tells that story through the people who lived it: landowners and tenant farmers, women spinning and weaving for the war effort, enslaved and free people of color, loyalist neighbors, and spies. It also traces family histories, both of the families who built the stone houses still standing on Main Street and of those who had much less.

The museum has a library full of local history, where Erin spent time pulling books off the shelves for cousins tracing their own family lines and a charming little book store/gift shop with items for purchase.

All of it is run by volunteers who clearly love this town and are dedicated to preserving its history. Thank you to Erin and everyone at the Hurley Heritage Society for opening your doors to us on a rainy Sunday.

If you're in the Hudson Valley, the museum is still open for a few more weeks this season. It is currently open on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 4 PM through October 25, and admission is free. It will reopen again next Spring - this year they opened on May 2.

In the weeks ahead we'll share more of what we learned in Hurley and Marbletown, including the work Erin and Friends of the Marbletown Cemetery are doing to protect DuBois graves there.

Have you ever visited Hurley or Marbletown? Do you know if you have DuBois ancestors buried outside New Paltz?

10/04/2026

On October 3rd, members of the DuBois Family Association gathered via Zoom for our Annual Business Meeting. Here's a snapshot of the family business.

One of the Board's big accomplishments this year was standardizing our governance documents and reorganizing the Board's work into six Functional Areas, covering strategic direction, membership, genealogy, communications, records, and technology. The goal is to make it easier for volunteers to plug in and to help the association stay agile. Leadership still rests with the four officers outlined in our By-Laws, and each officer supports one or more Functional Areas. Members heard reports from every area.

DBFA President Karen Jones shared highlights from the past year: the 60th Anniversary Celebration in New Paltz, approval of our social media plan and the relaunch of this page, a redesigned website launching this month, enhanced newsletter content, early reorganization of our family genealogy volumes ahead of an online family tree, and our continued shared stewardship of the DuBois Fort on Historic Huguenot Street.

The theme of all that work was stronger engagement with our members, and that theme carries into 2027. Coming up: our Biennial Reunion on September 18 alongside New Paltz's 350th anniversary, telling the stories of the many descendants whose ancestors migrated beyond New Paltz in the 18th and 19th centuries, Phase II of the website relaunch, goal planning guided by the updated Historic Structure Report on the DuBois Fort, and standardized membership profiles.

DBFA is run entirely by volunteers, and there are ways to help at every level. Like and share our posts so more of the family can find us. Send us story or research ideas. Support the Fort Fund or our Endowment with a tax-deductible gift. Or lend a hand with an event, a newsletter article, a committee, or a seat on the Board. There's a place for you.

Not a member yet? Annual memberships start at just $25, and you can find more information on our website. You'll get our quarterly newsletter, access to genealogy resources, a vote at the annual meeting, and a connection to a family story that stretches back to the 17th century.

Which way would you most like to get involved? Tell us in the comments.

10/02/2026

October is Family History Month, and right now millions of Americans are opening old shoeboxes, logging into Ancestry, and asking the same question: where did we come from?

If you've found a DuBois in your family tree, you may have found more than a name. You may have found a story more than 350 years in the making, and the DuBois Family Association has spent 60 years helping to tell it.

Three of Chrétien DuBois's children, Louis, Jacques, and Françoise, were French-speaking Protestants who left Europe in search of religious freedom. In 1677, Louis helped found New Paltz, New York, and the stone houses the founding families built still stand on Huguenot Street today. Their descendants have spread across America and the world, and many of us are still finding each other. Through conversation, connections, and genealogy resources built by generations of family researchers, we help cousins connect the dots.

One of those moments happened a couple weeks ago during our 60th anniversary weekend. I loved this video of cousins gathered around a table at the Hurley Heritage Society turning pages and making discoveries together, so I had to share it. This is family history at its best. It isn't a lonely search on a laptop at midnight. It's people discovering they belong to each other.

Who first got you hooked on your family history, and who would you most want to sit down at a table like this with?

DuBois Family Association - DBFA

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