For the last eight years, retired first grade teacher Nancy Chando has been taking groups of people around Kingston, showing them the rich history of New York State's first capital.

Chando has a personal connection to the area, too.

“I was able to go on ancestry.com, and also to the Ulster County Genealogical Society, trace my own roots back, and found out that my family came here when it was a Dutch village in 1661,” says Chando.

Her family was among some of the first settlers in the state, living in what is now known as the Stockade District of uptown Kingston. For Chando, guiding these tours is truly like walking in the footsteps of her ancestors.

“One grandfather on my mother's side, his family came in, my grandmother on my father's side came and lived in the stockade within those walls in 1661, and I didn't know that until I did my genealogy,” says Chando.

She enjoys taking visitors on tours because she says it keeps the history of Kingston alive and helps people appreciate the buildings and landmarks they walk by each day.

“I've had people on a walking tour with me that walk through the ancient burial ground and said ‘I never really paid any attention to it, but I walked through here every day when I'm on my lunch break from work, and now I look at the people's names and now I feel some sense of history,’ ” says Chando.

Tour guides tell the story of the burning of Kingston by the British, and takes visitors to “The Four Corners,” an intersection that is thought to be one of the only places in the United States that has pre-Revolutionary buildings on each corner. The tour also includes a stop by the Ulster County courthouse, where abolitionist and women's rights activist Sojourner Truth fought to win her son’s freedom, and takes them through the heart of the largest intact early Dutch settlement in the state, established in 1777.

“It’s so interesting to think that we go back that far here, and fun to be able to share that information with other people as well,” Chando says.

After the tour, visitors are welcome to step into the museum to look at artifacts and pictures from the Friends of Historic Kingston's archives.

Friends of Historic Kingston has a large archive of the city’s history, but Chando says they are continually finding new items from the past as people find papers and old pictures in their attics and barns and bring them to the museum.