The hotel for our 2024 annual meeting is the Hampton Inn and Suites 160 Corporate Blvd, Yonkers, NY  Make your hotel reservations directly with hotel at 1-914-377-1144 and ask for the Fontaine-Maury Society group rate or book your room with this link.: https://www.hilton.com/en/attend-my-event/fontainemaurysociety/ 

The rate is good until August 18, 2024. Standard double queen or king rooms $149.00 per night plus 14.88% for occupancy fee and state tax, breakfast included. Parking is $12.00 per night plus tax.

Our annual meeting dates and planned activities as announced in the recent winter newsletter will remain the same, September 20-22. This is one full month earlier than we usually meet. Our business meeting will be held Friday, September 20 at the hotel. Our Saturday activities will include a group visit to the Hastings on Hudson Historical Society and Draper Museum, lunch at and site visit to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church of the Highlands in Cold Spring, NY and a Hudson River cruise before returning to our hotel for our annual banquet. The registration form for the weekend will be available in early May. Optional activities are planned for Friday, September 20th, if you arrive by Thursday, September 19th. The registration form will have all of the details.

Our focus family is the family of the Reverend Mytton Maury and his children. The links between the Maury, Draper and Ludlow families will be explored. If you are not receiving the newsletters which provides more detailed information, please consider submitting your contact information so that one can be emailed to you. Click on “forms” at the top of the page, follow the instruction on the form and become a member.

Mary Borjon, FMS President

Our annual meeting weekend will soon be here, so please get your completed registration form submitted. We have updated the form to reflect the revised deadline – of by August 29, 2023 – to sign up for the Montpelier tour.

We must be in receipt of your completed registration by September 5, 2023.

Looking forward to seeing everyone!

The Society is recruiting a new librarian to join our team of volunteers. The position is to process purchase orders for the small collection of items that we sell. It involves maintaining inventory, processing orders (shipping them and then submitting records to the Society’s treasurer), and attending our annual meeting weekends where our attendees can review and purchase items. There are no out-of-pocket expenses as the librarian will use a Society debit card.

About the Position

The position is one of two of librarians. Brian Nilsson will continue his long-time role as librarian to handle research questions.

Please Seriously Consider Volunteering

The physical maintenance of the library requires some space for storage of materials, the replenishment of materials that can be copied or made available electronically, the fulfillment of orders as they come in and the fiscal reporting for incurred expenses (copying, postage, purchases) to the treasurer. It will not incur any personal expenses.

Because research and response and maintenance of the physical library are equally important, we have decided to label both positions as Librarian and each has its own position description.

Please contact Mary Borjon at mlborjon@hotmail.com or 707-279-1050 if you would consider this position. It takes all of us to do some part in making our society function. This Library is unique and an important component of our society.

We are pleased to announce that registration is now open for the Society’s annual meeting weekend October 13-15, 2023, in Charlottesville, Virginia. The keystone event of the weekend is the donation of the 254-year-old Bible of Consul General James Maury (1746-1840) to Monticello. Maury and Thomas Jefferson were lifelong friends.

Please print the registration form, complete it, and send it to the address provided as soon as practical but to be received no later than September 5, 2023, the date by which we must finalize our bus contract.

There are several activities that have separate deadlines. These are all listed on the registration form. These other deadlines are:

– August 29, 2023 to attend presentation and tour at President James Madison’s home, Montpelier;
– September 10, 2023, to attend the lunch at Michie Tavern; and
– September 11, 2023, hotel reservation at he Holiday Inn Express in Ruckersville, Virginia, to receive our special group rate.

There are only a few rooms left so recommend making your reservation as soon as possible.

We look forward to seeing you all in Charlottesville! We’re told that Thomas Jefferson may visit us there!

As announced earlier in the year on our website, our Facebook page and in our winter newsletter, blocking hotel rooms anywhere in the Charlottesville area in October presented us with significant challenges. To date we have booked 20 of the 20 blocked rooms which allows us to block another ten only. After these last ten rooms are booked by members attending our annual meeting, there will be no other blocked rooms available at this hotel for our negotiated rate and our dates. The Holiday Inn Express in Ruckersville is fully booked as predicted. If you are planning on staying at the Holiday Inn Express in Ruckersville, please make your reservations now. The phone number is 1-434-985-1854 and the on line link is https://www.hiexpress.com/redirect?path=rates…

You will note that initially we could only have double queens at this rate. The ten recently blocked rooms available to us now contain 5 Kings and 5 double queens.
If you have any challenges with booking a room, please contact me at 707-279-1050 California time.

Charlottesville, VA is the destination for our annual meeting for October 13-15, 2023. We are pleased to announce that we have identified our lodging and transportation resources for the weekend.

Due to high demand for lodging in this tourist area during the month of October, we are unable to block more than 10 hotel rooms at a time due to a non-refundable fee if the rooms are not utilized. Many of the hotels and bus companies that we contacted in the fall of 2022 were already sold out for October 2023. For this reason, we are letting our members know how important it will be to plan and reserve your room months in advance. Our lodging, our annual meeting on Friday and our banquet on Saturday will be held at the Holiday Inn Express in Ruckersville, VA about 15 minutes from the Monticello Campus where our Saturday activities will take place.

We have secured a rate of $159 per king or double room, double or single occupancy plus local taxes and hotel fees (10.5%). The rate will include a hot breakfast and a courtesy shuttle to and from the local airport. Reservations are made by calling the hotel directly at 434-985-1855 and asking to book within the Fontaine-Maury Society block. You can also use the link below to book on line. Reservations can be made now. Be sure to review the cancellation policy.

Link to Book Online

Reduced rates are available for October 12 through 15, but you can reserve less nights than that.

IMPORTANT: IF YOU ATTEMPT TO BOOK YOUR ROOM AND ARE TOLD THERE ARE NO MORE ROOMS IN THE BLOCK AND ARE OFFERED A ROOM AT A HIGHER RATE, PLEASE CALL OR TEXT MARY BORJON IMMEDIATELY SO THAT SHE CAN BLOCK THE NEXT TEN ROOMS AT THE REDUCED RATE. THIS IS HOW THEIR SYSTEM WORKS. 707-279-1050 landline 707-349-1034 cell

Each time that ten rooms are booked by our members, the hotel will allow us to block another ten rooms without risking the loss of a $1,000 room block fee. As time goes on, the hotel has cautioned us that there is no guarantee that there will be another ten rooms to block due to high demand in the fall. It seems that most Charlottesville and surrounding area hotels anticipate full houses so we encourage you to take advantage of this rate and location sooner than later. Our low hotel utilization in Louisville in 2022 has made our board cautious about risking room block fees.

A brief sketch of the weekend begins with our business meeting on Friday night with members sharing treasured family artifacts. On Saturday there will be an organized visit to the Jefferson Library to view artifacts that reflect the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Consul James Maury. There will be a presentation or discussion followed by a ceremony to present the Maury Bible to the Jefferson Library. A group lunch on the Monticello campus will be followed by the highlights tour of Monticello. After returning to our hotel on Saturday, we will enjoy our banquet followed by a guest speaker. The FMS library will be open at various times during the weekend.

For your enjoyment, several team members are identifying “on your own activities” in the Charlottesville area. This information will be shared at a later date. We look forward to seeing you in Charlottesville and we hope that you will take to heart our message to reserve your room sooner than later.

https://laxart.org/monuments
To provide our members with an update on the status of the Matthew Fontaine Maury monument that was removed from Richmond’s Monument Avenue several years ago, this link is being shared with our membership. Before and after the removal of the monument, comprehensive information regarding the life and accomplishments of our ancestor was provided to each entity having decision making authority over the placement of the monument. Most recently, Brian Nilsson provided this same packet of information to those who would be developing the context for the display in Las Angeles. For the very first time, a response was received from museum personnel. This has opened the door for Russell Hooper to share his years of research and collection of Matthew Fontaine Maury papers which will provide a wealth of information to the museum and provide a broader context for those developing the narrative for our family member.

Our 2023 annual meeting and gathering is confirmed for the second weekend in October and will be held in Charlottesville, VA. Our Saturday activities will take place at the Jefferson Library and the Monticello campus. Please mark these dates on your calendar, October 13-15, 2023 and make a committed plan to attend this special occasion. We will be donating the 250 year old Maury Bible to the Jefferson Library in a special ceremony and learning about the relationship between the Maury and Jefferson families. More information will be published as we continue with our planning efforts.

For decades our dues have been $15.00 per year per household or per agency. At our 2022 annual meeting in Louisville, the membership voted to increase our dues to $20.00 per household or agency. The new amount will begin on Jan.1, 2023. If you fill out your member form now in the remaining months of 2022 and submit your $15.00, it will cover the remainder of 2022 and the full year of 2023. Either way it is a bargain. The form is found under “files” on our Facebook Page or under forms on our website. Completing the form gives us up to date contact information to ensure we are staying in touch.