This is a 100 year old family history book. I have published this review on a couple of family history sites.

I have been hesitating to admit on this message board that I have a copy of a very rare family history book on my shelf. It is "The Huguenot Bartholomew Dupuy and His Descendants." by Rev. B. H. Dupuy, Courier-Journal Job Printing Co. Louisville, KY, 1908." This Dupuy came to Virginia in 1700. The book contains an impressive number of family trees of his descendants down to about 1900. My concern was that its format is very convoluted, so it is difficult to trace a tree through its length, and I wasn't sure I would have the time to do it for multiple requests.

Innocently, it occured to me there is a chance some major libraries could have copies. I am lucky to live near UC Berkeley and Stanford. Both of them have provided me with loans of amazing, old family history books and articles in the past.

I also have been following casually the progress of the Google books project and others like it. I had noticed that even the New York Library now actually loans books online. In that spirit, I googled the book title to see if anyone had heard of it. I struck paydirt first try! The book is available online to read there or download for free. Typing into a Google search "Huguenot Bartholmew Dupuy" should get you there.

Now the book. It is a flawed masterpiece at best. In my family line, tracing it down to the later 19th century where I have other sources to verify names and dates, I find the majority of the dates contain errors and the names misspellings.

The first 170 pages or so of the 400 page book are devoted to history rather than a listing of trees. Here, too, I find problems among the treasures. The first section is an 85 page history of Huguenots in France. The language is florid to todays tastes, and I found a major misconception that led me astray for years. Near the end of this history, it states as many as 400,000 citizens fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685. He gave the heretics six months to leave or face prosecution, confiscation of lands, etc. It gives the impression that after the six months, there were no more Huguenots in France.

It was only years later when I met online some internet cousins who provided me with the details of another branch of my ancestors I had previously be unable to trace back before the Civil War. Though their surname was Rogers, it turns our in France it was Roger, pronounced like the name of the thesaurus. They were Huguenots who fled France in 1762. They too, made their way to England, joined a larger group of Huguenots who had petitioned the English government for a grant of land in America, and settled on that land in SE South Carolina with their fellow Huguenots.

Reading about the Huguenots in my 1915 Encyclopedia Britannica confirmed the Dupuy book's view of the end of Huguenots in France. But reading modern sources states that perhaps as many Huguenots as fled stayed behind, merely hiding their religious preferences to whatever degree necessary to avoid arrest. This was easier than it might appear, as most Huguenots lived in the same neighborhoods, villages, and regions.

You might be well advised to brush up your knowledge of Huguenots in Wikipedia, rather than the Dupuy book (For those who can't get enough, there is an amazing novel with the Huguenot tragedy as its background published in 1988. Lempriere's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk. An insider's tip is try to get the English edition rather than the American, as it has a better ending. Try Barnes & Noble in London). Also, a great source for the history of this first major Huguenot settlement in America is the website for the society of descendants under Manikan.

The next section of the book is a review of the historic Bartholomew Dupuy in France, and it gives a dozen generation or more pedigree for him going back to a Crusader named DuPuy who was the military governor of Jerusalem. I consider all this horsefeathers, though my relative I inherited the book from believed in it with all his heart and soul.

His middle name was Dupuy, given him in honor of his great grandmother, Olympia Dupuy, through which his family could claim their French Protestant heirtage. However, back in the late 19th century, it also gave a much valued cache of being able to claim one was descended from European nobility, as the Dupuy book claims it was Count Bartholomew and Countess Susan. I would have to see considerable verifiable documentation of these claims to accept them. Rather, I remember reading some years ago that the profession of genealogist came into vogue in New York around 1900 as large numbers of nouveau riche industrialists and robber barons who lived like royalty wanted to justify their social position with pedigrees. Some of these genealogists were scam artists, only too willing to provide an appropriate tree for a fee. I suspect the European side of the Dupuy tree is one such fraudulent document.

There is one final document in this Dupuy history section for those in love with the romance of it. A short story is reprinted here. It was first published in 1857 in Harper's New Monthly Magazine as "The Story of a Huguenot's Sword." This is a melodrama detailing the escape from France of Bartholomew and his young bride Susanne. There are facts in the historic section of the book contradicting details of the story, for instance, the couple are depicted as childless newlyweds in their escape, yet the historic section suggests multiple children were born to the couple before they left France.

Of course, all Dupuys in America aren't descendants of Bartholomew and Susanne. We must assume many made their way from France to America in more recent times. The litmus test to decide if further research is needed is were your French immigrant ancestors Protestant? Still, I must remember the mechanic who took care of my father's car for many years was a French speaking man born and raised in Switzerland. I never asked Jean Pierre Dupuy if he was Protestant. Perhaps we are very distant cousins.

Have I gone on too long? Sorry about that.