Wicres, France — The Family's Birthplace
The DuBois siblings who emigrated to America — Louis, Françoise, and Jacques — were born in or near Wicres (also recorded as Wiècres), a small village near Lille in what is now the Nord department of northern France. They were the children of Chrétien DuBois, a local official who served as bailli, lieutenant, and greffier of the Comté of Coupigny. The region sits close to the present-day Belgian border, in the heart of what was then the Spanish Netherlands — a contested territory whose shifting political and religious allegiances made life precarious for Protestant families.
Lille itself, the great city of the region, was and remains one of northern France's most significant cultural and commercial centers. For DuBois descendants interested in retracing the family's European roots, the area around Lille and the village of Wicres represents the earliest known origin of the American branches of the family.
The Huguenot Story — Faith Under Persecution
Louis, Françoise, and Jacques DuBois were Huguenots — French Protestants whose faith placed them in mortal danger in Catholic France. The Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted French Protestants a degree of religious toleration, but its protections were eroding throughout the 1600s under the reign of Louis XIV. In 1685, the Edict was revoked entirely, triggering a mass exodus of Huguenots from France.
All three siblings had already left France well before the revocation, driven out by the worsening climate for Protestants in the region. Like hundreds of thousands of fellow Huguenots, they became refugees — skilled, educated, and devout people who carried their faith, their crafts, and their family bonds across borders and oceans.
Mannheim, Germany — A Refuge in the Palatinate
From France, Louis DuBois made his way to Mannheim, in the Palatinate region of what is now Germany — a city that had become a center of Huguenot refugee settlement under the tolerant rulers of the Palatinate. It was in Mannheim that Louis met and married Catherine Blanchan in 1655, and where their first two sons, Abraham and Isaac, were born. Many of the families who would later found New Paltz first came to know one another in Mannheim and the wider Palatinate: the DuBois family, the Hasbroucks, the Deyos, the Crispells were not strangers who happened to cross the Atlantic together. They were neighbors and fellow refugees who had already built relationships and trust in Germany before embarking for the New World.
His sister Françoise took a different route. She married Pierre Billiou, also from the Flanders region, in the Walloon Church in Leiden in the Protestant Netherlands, in 1649. Their brother Jacques also spent time in Leiden, where he worked as a lace maker and where he met and married Pieronne Bentyn before eventually following Louis to America.
Three Paths to the New World
Each of the three DuBois siblings emigrated separately, and each story is distinct:
Louis DuBois arrived first. In 1660–1661, he and Catherine crossed the Atlantic with their two young sons and settled in the Kingston–Hurley area of the Hudson Valley, joining a growing community of Huguenot and Dutch settlers along the river. It was from Hurley that he and his neighbors organized what would become the New Paltz settlement.
Françoise DuBois Billiou emigrated in 1661, the same year as Louis, sailing from Amsterdam aboard the ship De St. Jan Baptist with her husband Pierre and their children. Their path led south to Staten Island, where Pierre became one of the founders of Old Town — one of the first permanent European settlements on the island. Françoise is memorialized today on a pillar at the Church of the Huguenots in Huguenot Park, Staten Island.
Jacques DuBois came last. In 1675, fourteen years after Louis, he emigrated from Leiden with his wife Pieronne and their seven children, settling in the Kingston–Esopus area to be near his elder brother. Jacques died not long after his arrival, but his descendants spread widely across the Hudson Valley, contributing to the founding of communities at Fishkill and Poughkeepsie.
A Family That Built America's Hudson Valley
The journey from a village near Lille to the founding of new communities in the New World took nearly two generations and crossed multiple countries. It was driven at every stage by the same force: a refusal to abandon their faith, and a determination to build lives where they could worship freely and raise their families in peace. That all three of Chrétien DuBois's emigrating children made the crossing — separately, at different times, to different places — speaks to how deeply that determination ran through the family.