Yousef Ali Bey was born in the village of Buqei'a, located in the Upper Galilee in the north of Palestine, and joined the Gendarmerie in 1921 as part of the Transjordan Frontier Force. He was awarded the George Cross in 1938 after rising to the rank of "Major" and was given the title of "Bey" by Prince Abdullah bin al-Hussein, Emir of the Emirate of Transjordan, in the 1940s. He was appointed as the first head of the Local Buqei'a Village Council in 1958.

The Yousef Ali Bey Collection contains different photographs and documents, which show part of his life and work between the 1920s and the 1970s. The photographs are divided into portraits of him working in the Transjordan Frontier Force, others during his tenure as chairman of the Local Buqei'a Council, and family photographs. As for the documents, they include a special notebook of the Transjordan Frontier Force, that was issued in 1941, notebooks for the Local Buqei'a Committee, such as one for the minutes of the Committee's meetings from 1949 until 1951 and another for the Committee's export and income from 1943 until 1949. They also include several personal documents such as marriage contracts and birth certificates, in addition to papers related to the "George Cross" awarded to him by the United Kingdom in 1938.