Officers
Susan Ingalls Lewis, President
Susan Ingalls Lewis is Professor Emerita of History at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she specialized in courses in New York State History and American Women’s History. She is the author of Unexceptional Women: Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Albany, New York, 1830-1885 (Ohio State University Press, 2009, winner of the Hagley Prize in Business History) and co-editor of Suffrage and Its Limits: The New York Story (SUNY Press, 2020). Her article, “A Year in the Life: The 1870 Diary of Emma Waite,” based on the daybook of an African American domestic servant and hotel cook, appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of the Hudson River Valley Review. Professor Lewis has also published in the fields of twentieth-century girls’ literature and is co-author of the college art appreciation textbook, The Power of Art (Cengage, revised 3rd edition, 2018). Most recently, her chapter, “How New York Women Won the Vote, 1917,” has been included in Revolutionary New York: 250 Years of Social Change from SUNY Press (2026). Dr. Lewis is a Fellow of the New York Academy of History, and a member of the Editorial Board of The Hudson River Valley Review (Marist University).
Georgette Grier-Key, 1st Vice-President
Dr. Grier-Key currently serves on the board of the Museum Association of New York and the board of the Preservation League of New York State. Additionally, Dr. Grier-Key dedicates herself to her community by leading and serving on local and regional boards such as the NAACP Brookhaven Town Branch where she is the duly-elected president. Dr. Grier-Key is an adjunct assistant professor at CUNY Medgar Evers College and the director of the Long Island History Institute at SUNY Nassau Community College. Dr. Georgette Lovette Grier-Key is the executive director and chief curator of Eastville Community Historical Society of Sag Harbor and has worked in various museums, historical societies, and service organizations with a focus on organizational sustainability. Dr. Grier-Key is a historian, preservationist, and curator, using her skills and experience as an organizer and activist to further the agenda of inclusion in traditional frameworks that have practiced institutional and structural exclusion. She is a not-for-profit management specialist and practitioner with more than 20 years of experience in both business and non-profit organizations. She provides consultant services from small to mid-sized organizations including several municipalities.
Dr. Georgette Grier-Key
Eastville Community Historical Society, Executive Director and Curator
Twitter: Eastville CHS
Phone: 631.725.4711
Mail: PO Box 2036, Sag Harbor, NY 11963
Heritage House: 139 Hampton Street, Sag Harbor NY 11963
For all media inquiries, contact TJM & Co. Media Boutique (e) pr@tjmandco.com (o) 347-620-4569.
Long Island Historical Societies, Board President
https://lihsocieties.org
Preservation League of New York State, Board Trustee
https://www.preservenys.org
Museum Association of New York, Board Trustee
http://manyonline.org
Helen Nerska, 2nd Vice-President
After graduating from SUNY Plattsburgh, Helen worked in Canada for 35 years in senior marketing and administrative positions before returning in 2005 to live as the seventh generation on the family farm in Peru, New York. She was museum manager for the North Star Underground Railroad Museum from January 2010 to April 2014 and is on the boards of the Saranac Chapter of the DAR (treasurer), Greater Hudson Heritage Network, Northern New York American Canadian Genealogical Society, Women’s Rights Alliance of New York (2nd vice-president), Town of Peru Historian, and the League of Women Voters of the North Country (co-president). In January 2012 she was elected president of the Clinton County Historical Association and Museum and took over as director in March 2017. She currently serves as the full-time director for the association on a volunteer basis. Her personal commitment is preserving and sharing the long, inspiring, and significant history of Clinton County and New York State. She is the editor and author of the Clinton County Suffrage Story and speaks regularly on Clinton County history. She is also the editor of the “Heritage Corner” published monthly in the Sun Community News and “Looking Back” published monthly in the Plattsburgh Press Republican.
Susan Goodier, Co-Secretary
Susan Goodier, PhD, recently held a long-term fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society. She is a member of the New York Academy of History, a lecturer for the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer Series, and she is on the board of directors for the New York History journal. Her first book, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement appeared in 2013, and her second book, coauthored with Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (2017) won an Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History. She is currently preparing a biography of Louisa Matilda Jacobs, the daughter of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Karen Pastorello, Co-Secretary
Until 2020 Karen served as the Chair of the Women and Gender Studies Program and Professor of History at Tompkins Cortland Community College (SUNY). Her books include: A Power Among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (University of Illinois Press, 2008) and Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Cornell University Press, 2017, co-authored with Susan Goodier). Recently she has helped document local sites on the National Votes for Women Trail. She is currently working on several projects concerning women’s labor and political activism related to the life of Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon, former suffragist, longtime Director of Research at the United States Women’s Bureau, and an advocate in the fight for the minimum wage and women’s full equality in the workplace.
Dare Thompson, Treasurer
Dare Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and earned a BA from Swarthmore College and MAT from Oberlin College. After teaching English and social studies for several years, she spent a quarter century as executive director of three arts organizations: Kirkland Art Center (Clinton, NY), Ohio Citizens for the Arts (Columbus), and The Hudson Valley Writers Center (Sleepy Hollow). Her primary volunteer activity since 1972 has been with the League of Women Voters, including service as the state president in Rhode Island, first vice-president in Ohio, and two stints on the New York State board—including as state president 2015–2019. She is an active Quaker, both locally and statewide, and gained new pride in their large role in the history of women’s suffrage when she served on the NYS Women’s Suffrage Commission headed by now-Governor Hochul. Since 1998 she has lived in Marlboro in southern Ulster County.
Board of Directors
Jacqueline Madison
Jacqueline Madison is the President of the North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association (NCUGRHA) which oversees the North Star Underground Railroad Museum. She is on the boards of the Northern New York Library Network and the Women’s Rights Alliance of New York State. She is the chair of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Committee, the Colors of Freedom Juneteenth Committee and a member of Rotary. Jackie retired from Pfizer/Wyeth in 2010 as a Principal Toxicology Information Specialist for Drug Safety and has degrees in Chemistry and Library and Information Management. She is a Vietnam Veteran. Her biggest contribution to the NCUGRHA as the president was acquiring the building that houses the North Star Underground Railroad Museum in June 2019. Jackie is an avid reader, grows grapes, makes wine, and recently started restoring old trunks. In October 2019, she had a once in a lifetime opportunity to visit a site that was an African American community composed of slaves and fugitives escaping slavery in St. Armand, Quebec. In September 2021, Jackie, with the assistance of interns from SUNY Plattsburgh, produced a video on the Quaker Union in Peru, New York, that focused on the root cellar in the barn of a former abolitionist, Stephen Keese Smith. She is currently working on collecting stories of People of Color in the Lake Champlain area of New York and has a website about them at https://jaqcalinfo.com/. On April 25, she received New York State 2022 Outstanding Librarian Award for the North Country and the New York State Assembly Citation. She received the 2023 Women of Distinction Military Service Award from Assemblyman Billy Jones in May 2023, and in July 2025, the Rotary Paul Harris Fellow Award: Honoring Service and Leadership. Her husband is retired from the military and they have two daughters, Jaquenette and Calexandria.
Advisory Board
Jennifer Lemak, Advisory Committee Chair
Jennifer Lemak is the chief curator of history at the New York State Museum. Prior to this appointment she served there as senior historian/curator of social history. Major exhibition and publication projects include “Votes for Women: Celebrating New York’s Suffrage Centennial” (2017) and “An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War” (2012). Lemak is the author of Southern Life, Northern City: The History of Albany’s Rapp Road (SUNY Press, 2008) and several articles on the Great Migration to Upstate New York.
Lemak serves the history field as a member of the New York State Preservation Board, the New York State Suffrage Centennial Commission, and as co-editor of the New York History journal. She earned her MA in Public History and PhD in American History, both from the University at Albany. She is also a fellow of the New York Academy of History.
Judith Wellman
Judith Wellman, PhD, is principal investigator, Historical New York Research Associates, and professor emerita, State University of New York at Oswego. She has more than 40 years of award-winning experience in research, teaching, cultural resource surveys, and grants administration in US history, women’s history, Underground Railroad history, African-American communities, and historic preservation.
Dr. Wellman is a founding board member of the Underground Railroad Consortium of New York State, the Women’s Rights Alliance of New York State, and the 1816 Farmington Quaker Meetinghouse Museum. She is vice-president of the National Collaborative of Women’s History Sites and chair of the Advisory Committee, National Votes for Women Trail.
She is the author of several books, including Brooklyn’s Promised Land: Weeksville, a Free Black Community, and The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Beginning of the Women’s Rights Movement.
She lives in an old house by a mill-pond in upstate New York, surrounded by big maple trees, unruly gardens, and good neighbors.