William Provost

Who is William Provost?

William Provost was a Protestant and a merchant who lived in Antwerp, then a city in the Netherlands. William's descendants settled in New Amsterdam in the early 1600s; he had famous descendants and relatives in North American history; and many North Americans can trace their lineage back to William. William and his family appear to have survived the murderous rampage of the Spanish Fury in 1576. A romanticized version of William's life tells that he was a Huguenot that fled Paris on the day before the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572.