"About the year of our Lord Jesus Christ 1680, his Royal Majesty of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the faith and crown, was pleased to agree by perogative, consent, and license to grant to the Honorable Lord Fredrick Philipse, to purchase without restriction at a real estate sale, a certain stretch of land and valley lying in Westchester County in America..."

During the 1600 the situation politically and religiously had become so oppressive as to offer no toleration for religions other than Catholic, to the extent that Huguenots families were brutally murdered, plundered, imprisioned, tortured, burned at the stake, and beheaded so that masses of French Calvinist, called Huguenots, fled France for their lives.

In the year following Louis XIV revocation or the Edict of Nantes which proptected Huguenots life and property more than 100,000 French fled to neighboring European countries. Within three years more than 400,000 had escaped. The Netherlands was a Protestant country and offered easy access and religious protection. The Dutch Reformed church of was the official state religion so that many French families found it easy to begin rebuilding their lives in this amiable country.

About this time expansion in the New World was reaching a cresendo. Pamphlets advertising the wonders of this new land in the west was appealing and fortuitously timely for the French. Many of them took the opportunity to immigrate with the Dutch to the Dutch Colonies in New York, New Jersey, and New England areas. Who could resist such an inticing invitation to freedom and prosperity.

"You poor, who know not how your living to obtain; You affluent, who seek in mind to be content; Choose you New Netherland, which no one shall disdain; Before you time and stregth here fruitlessly are spent.

The birds obscure the sky, so numerous in their flight; The animals roam wild, and flatten down the ground; The fish swarm in the waters and exclude the light; The oysters there, than which none better can be found; Are piled up, heap on heap, till islands they attain; And vegetation clothes the forest, mean and plain.

...a living view does always meet your eye, Of Eden, and the promised land of Jacob's seed; Who would not, then, in such a formed community, Desire to be a Freeman; and the rights decreed, To each and every one, by Amstel's burgher lords, T'enjoy? and treat with honor what their rule awards?" ---- From Jacob Steendam's verse composed for Plockhoy's Pamphlet advertising his colony. 1662

Descriptions that circulated at the time were no less aluring to the man without a country:

"...the country is very like that of France...the country falls behind none in Europe both as to excellence and cleaness of furits and seeds....the country is for the most part covered with trees, except a few valleys and some large flats, seven or eight leagues and less in extent; the trees consist as in Europe, of oak, hickory, chestnut, vines. The animals also are of the same species as ours, except lions and some other strange beasts; many bears, abundance of wolves, which harm nothing but small cattle. Elks and deer in vast numbers, foxes, beavers, otters, minx, and such like. the fowles which are natural to the country, are turkeys, like ours, swans, geese of three sorts, ducks, teals, cranes, herons, bittern; tow sorts fo partriges, four sorts of heath fowl or pheasants. the river fish is like that of Europe, namel: carp, sturgeon, salmon, pike, perch, roach, eel, etc. In the salt waters are found cod, shellfish, herring, and so forth; also abundance of oysters and muscles..."

By the 1680's the Dutch Colonies had been turned over to England. The colonies continued to be composed of predominently Dutch settlers. Small agricultural settlements peppered the Hudson River Valley from Virginia to New England. The population numbered somewhere around 10,000 and consisted of Dutch, English, French, and Germans. The hub of the settlements was the growing city of New Amsterdam, which was to become New York City which numbered about 1500.

Rich Dutch land barons cornered the agricultural market with huge land holding, some as large as 160,000 acres. The succeeded in cultivating them using a system of feudal tenants whereby the poorer farmers were leased properties in parcels of approximately 200 acres. The Roosevelts and Van Cortlandts remained the biggest sugar refiners in the region north of New York City and among the wealthest land barons of the New World.

The Fredrick Philipse, who come to America from Holland in 1653 as a carpenter, became one of the wealthiest men in the colonies.

Pierre Van Cortlandt was influencial in State and local politics and became the state's first Lieutenant Governor. His son Philip served as an officer under General Washington and later as a United States Congressman.

The Philipse Manor and the Van Cortlandt Manor were noble estates in colonial Westchester County on the eastern shores of the picturesque Hudson River near the present village of Tarrytown, New York. The valley is known as Sleepy Hollow.

The Old Dutch Reformed Church, one of the oldest in the States is just across the street from the old Philipse Manor and was the center for religious and social activities. It served as the bearer of all records at the time recording marriages, births, christenings, and deaths. It is from this old Registry that we assertain the names and lineage of the Belyea clan.

Records were sparsely kept during the first 19 years of its existence until Dirck Storm, a prominent member of the congregation, (A relative of Engeltje Storm, later Mrs. Hendrick Belyea) began to mentally reconstruct the history of births, marriages and baptisms. From that time on records were carefully kept and preserved to this day.

It is there that we pick up the trail of Henrick Belyea and his family. Belyea was spelled in a variety of ways depending on the whim of the archivist at the time. Here are a few of the spellings:

In the year of 1720 and the senior Belyeas just gave birth to Henri Belyea, who because of the Dutch influence would be known as Henrick Bolje. They were members of the Historic Old Dutch Reformed Church of Sleepy Hollow, which was founded around 1680.