Person:Manuel Consalus-Duc (1)

Excerpts from 'Who Was Emmanuel Gonsalus??' (from The Sullivan County Historical Society Observer, Monticello, NY, Vol. I, November 9, 1964)

A large crowd of interested persons attended the regular September meeting at the Bloomingburg Grange Hall, to hear Ulster County Historian Kenneth E. Hasbrouck speak on the peregrinations of Emmanuel Gonsalus, whose grave at Wurtsboro is the oldest non-Indian interment in Sullivan county. While no hard and fast answers were supplied, much food for thought was thoroughly digested by the audience...

...Mr. Hasbrouck traced the movements of Emmanuel Gonsalus from Schenectady, to Kingston, to Dutchess county and thence to Sullivan county. Very little is known of the man himself, particularly his antecedents. Clues and hints show that he, Gonsalus, might have been Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish, or even a Moor. His progeny seemed to have married into the line of most of the old families in Sullivan and Ulster counties.

Records do show that a son of this early colonist, Emmanuel, Junior, did settle in the Wurtsboro region in the middle of the eighteen century. In his ninety-second year, the elder Gonsalus left his home in Dutchess county and came to visit his son in what is now Sullivan county. Here he died and here he is buried. While the grave of the patriarch of the Gonsalus' is clearly marked, the site of the grave of his son and namesake is as unknown as the burial on Mt. Nebo