Elias "Elie" Boudinot I

Elias Boudinot was a Huguenot (French Protestant) refugee who fled France for colonial New York in 1687, following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had protected Protestants' right to worship in France in 1685.

Elias Boudinot was a prosperous merchant. He was of the town of Marans, eleven miles to the north-east of La Rochelle, famous in the wars of the League at France. The family to which he belonged had been identified for several generations with the Huguenot cause. He was an earnest adherent of the Protestant faith and was compelled to abandon his country in order to avoid the continual persecution to which he was subjected because of his profession of the Gospel in 1687.