Alternate Spellings of the same name.
These are some of the spellings of the Belyea name in early historical documents.
Balje, Beljee, Belyee, Bilje, Bolye, Bolje, Boljea, Bolyee, Boljea, Boulje, Bolyee, Belyee, Bulje, Bulye, Bulyea, Buliers

The Original Belyea Name
The Belyea name has it roots in ancient France. The original name most certainly was Boulier, a well recognized French name, and not "Bie" as other Belyea researchers and a genealogist of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) speculate.1 Another published Belyea genealogy claims the name originally was Beaulieu and the first Belyeas to come to America in 1592 (very unlikely!), and settled on a small island named 'Orleans'.2 Both of these previously published genealogies trace the Belyea line backward to Tarrytown (Sleepy Hollow), NY, but fail to document any research before 1700. We have diligently attempted to find solid evidence of all the family connections using original sources. We speculate only when absolutely necessary and to keep those speculations within the confines of reasonable and documentary evidence.

Problem of Names
Doing research into names is problematic in that often we are left to the orthography of the scribe who records the name. French names, living among the Dutch, with English scribes presents a significant problem. In some cases the scribes wrote and spelled the name as the owner spelled it (if the owner knew how to read and write which was not often the case). Most often however it was left to the disgression of the scribe. Thus in the same record book of the same church registering the same family name there are at least 9 different spellings, as you can see above.

In the case of tracking ship passenger lists one must be especially careful not to overlook a possible spelling deviation. For instance, Belyea or Boule, or Balye, could be mistaken for Bailey. It is possible that a Bailey name is not Bailey but Bouley or Boule or Boulier.

Ship Passenger Lists
We know that all who came to the New World had to come by way of a ship, and all ships had passenger lists. Fortunately activists have preserved the lists of names of those traveling to the New World from the early 1600s and onward. We have not found the name Louis Belyea (or any close match) which however may have several plausible explanations. 1) Louis Boulier was not the orginal ancestor who traveled to America. He may be a second generation immigrant or have been very young at the time. Often the children's names are ommited on ship manifests.

Through these passenger logs we find a number of suspicious characters that could be matches for our lost relative(s). Note that we know our earliest traces of Louis Boulier was on Long Island.

I have poured over thousands of names of immigrants to the New World from the Carolinas to New England but cannot find any exact name matching the names of Belyea. Note however that the name is not easily pronounced or spelled by Dutch orthographers, so it is spelled any of the above listed ways, and perhaps in some ways we have not yet recognized. Huguenots began arriving in the Americas as early as 1562 in Port Royal, South Carolina, Boston in 1685, and Rhode Island in 1686.3

We do know the approximate years that came over, but who, when, where and how, and on what ship we have not been able to discover. In the appendix I have provided a list of possible names of settlers coming to the New World between 1650 and 1700 that might be our ancestor.

French Huguenots
The Belyeas came from the southwestern wine-producing country of Saint Onge, France and were French Protestants, called Huguenots. Persecution arose against Protestants in France during the 1500 and 1600s and masses of French people fled France for safe Protestant nations like Netherlands. The Belyeas allegedly were among those who fled to the Netherlands, that is to Holland, where the Protestant faith was legal. Nearly one third of France's middle class fled to other countries during the atrocities of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.