Dear Elizabeth, Thank you so much for filling me in with details about the DuBois family. It is good news to find that some of them were wealthy businessmen and merchants. I know so little about the family and am anxious to learn all I can about it. It is very possible that mine were DuBois before they came to Salem by way of Barbados. There must be some reason that they changed from Boyce to DuBois. At this point all I have is the Joseph Boyce b1609 Burford Oxfordshire England but am hoping to learn info about earlier generations. My records show that he was a tanner and his family thereafter were Quakers. Where did your family come from in England? Any idea of professions? A few generations down they were counterfeiting Rhode Island money in NY and later a ship builder, 2 doctors, and the Treasurer of VT. Thank you for sending my querie to the other list which I had thought was only for one DuBois line. Rachel Bell (Rosenberg) "Check out my pages to see if we're related- my files have 4000 names plus links" "New England Genes" -- http://www.angelfire.com/ny/newenglandgenes/index.html <<Elizabeth Russo <elizabethrusso@home.com> wrote: Something to keep in mind about going from England to Babados to SC to Boston and NY. Several DUBOIS men between 1500 and 1700 were known as sailors and merchants. Some were close to the French crown and were among the first explorers of America with Coligny. I've also seen records of a DuBois or two with various trading companies such as the East India Trading Company, and a company trading in the West Indies. So certainly those folks did not need to be exiled nor going anywhere for religious reasons to be found on a ship. They were rice and indigo merchants in SC and Barbados. And in the mid-1800s, my own gggrandfather was traveling from Alabama to Connecticut just to confer with his patent attorney on his cotton gin improvements. Suffice it to say that DUBOIS men of business had the means and desire to travel the world for hundreds of years. And in researching our ancestors, we sometimes need to look beyond the idea that people only got on a boat to leave one country just to permanently settle in another. In cases other than perhaps New England and New York, the reason for travel was possibly more often economic than religious... Elizabeth DuBois Russo>>