Uh oh. We’ve been saying “Lewis” wrong since 1872

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about the Lewis brick wall – the frustrating phenomenon that happens when you run out of clues about a particular lineage, and you’re stuck at a place that leaves you baffled about where your family came from. It’s particularly frustrating when it’s your own last name you are investigating. Lewis is a common family name. It has deep roots in Scotland (we’ve got a whole island named after us up there), Wales, Ireland, and England. But it is also quite common throughout the rest of Western Europe.

My working hypothesis has always been that our Lewises were Scots (Clan MacLeod!) or Welsh (Cymru am byth!) But the Internet gives us tools today that genealogists even twenty years ago could only dream of. Searchable databases going back hundreds of years are being made available at an astonishing clip. Just as important, the Internet has made it possible for cousins to find each other and share information. Finding even one more family member from a century or two ago opens a dozen new ways to look for information.

We already knew that William Thomas Lewis, b. 1848, (my 2nd great-grandfather) owned and operated a general store in Frederic, Michigan in the late 1800s. He and his wife Sarah were pioneers to the town. They had eight children, two of whom died in infancy. The oldest, Emmett, b. 1874, was my great-grandfather; his oldest son, Russell Emmett, b. 1900, was my grandfather. (An aside: Grandpa Lewis worked in the family store in Frederic as a young man. I remember him telling me that he discovered while working at the store that he was color blind – a customer asked for some red ribbon, and he gave her blue – something like that. His colorblindness may have saved his life – and the Lewis name - as it probably disqualified him from most types of military service during the First World War. Grandpa Lewis enlisted in the U.S. Army on October 1, 1918, and was released on October 23, 1918. This was long before my own dad was even a twinkle in Grandpa’s eye.)

Beyond the Begats

Anyone setting out to tell a part of his family’s history quickly faces difficult decisions. There are just so many stories to tell. Trying to sort them all out is daunting.

The Begats

One way of starting to sort things out is what I call the Begats: Who begat whom, and when and where were they born? We start with names, dates and places. This provides us broad contours of our history. Mom and Dad were born on such and such a date in Detroit, Michigan; their parents were born about 25 years earlier in Detroit and other towns in Michigan; the grandparents’ parents were born about 25 years earlier in Michigan and a couple other states of the Union; and pretty soon before that there wasn’t even a Michigan, and our people come from other states, and before that, colonies, and before that, European countries. Those are the Begats – names, dates, places of birth and death, names of spouses and children.

There is no built-in stopping point for researching the Begats. Some of our family lines can be traced deep into the first millennium, like the year 600ish. I find this an essentially meaningless exercise in a genealogical sense (though it has significance in some cultures and some religions, notably the LDS church.) We’re all descended from Charlemagne.

Suddenly, my pedigree looked classier: I am a descendant of Charlemagne. Of course, so is every other European. By the way, I’m also a descendant of Nefertiti. And so are you, and everyone else on Earth today. Chang figured that out by expanding his model from living Europeans to living humans, and getting an estimate of 3400 years instead of a thousand for the all-ancestor generation.

Other than an evanescent pedigree classiness, there is no purpose in teasing out my relationship to Charlemagne and other ancient royalty and bigwigs. So I haven’t set out to do that, nor do I plan to.

A Natural Stopping Point: The Shores of North America

America is a young country, and the European presence on the continent is also manageably recent. So American genealogists have a fairly natural stopping point: When did our family make it to this continent?


Despite America’s youth, tracing this out is quite an undertaking. A lot of our family has been here for around ten generations. That’s a thousand people. That’s a lot of people to research.
In addition to sheer numbers, the paper trail goes cold on a lot of our family. The Lewis name in particular remains enigmatic. So far, genetic testing on the male DNA gene places our Lewises in a broad group called “Ibero-Celtic.” That means our Lewis ancestors perhaps migrated to the British Isles or France from the Iberian peninsula sometime after the last glaciation, and were out howling at the moon while Druidic sacrifices were carried out with bronze knives. The documentation leaves much to be desired, and perhaps we will never know when this branch first made it to America.

The Autobiography of Thorn Smith

My great-grandfather, Thorn Smith, was a chemist by profession. He was born and grew up in a small town called Portland, Michigan. His father was George Rogers Smith; his mother’s given name was Katerina Elizabetha Shaefer. She was the daughter of German immigrants.

Among the gifts he left his family was an autobiography. When I say he left this as a gift, I mean it quite literally. He was himself an ardent genealogist by avocation (it is upon his work that Aunt Dianne and I are building), and he recognized the importance of leaving behind his story so that later generations could understand a bit of what life looked like for him.

He writes:

This is not written in the spirit of the usual autobiography in which the writer is so inordinately proud of his record that he feels the world is waiting, with bated breath, for what he has to say. Sometimes [his] descendants are interested in learning the customs, the accommodations, conveniences and general habits of living of a bygone era. No attempt is made to erect a monument or set up a standard of living, for it is realized that every generation has a right to live its own life, knowing that its following generation will be still different. [Vol 2., p 9.]

Thorn was born in 1871. Thorn was a family name, coming from his great-grandmother, Sally Thorn (Smith), and long before her, our English ancestor, William Thorne, Sr., one of the signers of the 1657 Flushing Remonstrance. The latter sought an end to the persecution of Quakers in New Netherland, and was one of the precursors of the U.S. Constitutional protection of free exercise of religion.

Definitely an ancestor

I just discovered this photo today (thanks to my cousin Lewis) and thought my family might enjoy it.
This is my 3rd great-grandmother on the Lewis side, Catherine (Wilson) Bishop. She was born 1828 in Lincolnshire, England. She came to Michigan in 1840, when the State of Michigan was only three years old. She died 1914 in Freeland, Michigan (which is near Saginaw.)

She and her husband, Samuel Bishop, also an immigrant Englishman, had eleven children together. Six of Catherine's children survived her. Her oldest daughter, Sarah, was the wife of my 2d great-grandfather, William Thomas Lewis.

She looks very much like Grandpa Lewis and Dad, I think.

Robert K. Smith and the Great War - A Veterans Day Remembrance

Veterans Day used to be called Armistice Day, after the Armistice which ended the First World War. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. This did not happen until the Great War had claimed the life of my great-uncle, Robert Kedzie Smith.

Robert was born 23 May 1898 to Thorn and Mertie Belle Smith. He was the oldest child in the family. (Our Pompo, Rossman, was not born until 1907. Pompo was the fifth child, preceded by Robert, Millard b. 1900, Thorn Jr. b. 1903, and Katherine b. 1905.)

Robert was the namesake of my Uncle Bob, and through him, my brother and cousin.

Robert's first and middle names came from Robert Kedzie, who was GGrandpa Thorn's professor and mentor at the school now known as Michigan State University. Prof. Kedzie was unusually lettered (both an MD and an LLD) and accomplished.

Robert Kedzie Smith

Robert was a Bugler (which was an Army rank during WW I) with the U.S. 32nd Infantry Div., 3rd Battalion. The division fought with great valor, and was given the nickname Les Terrible.

Our Robert was killed in action on 4 Aug 1917, during the Argonne offensive. On the day he was killed,

[t]he authorized strength of the 3rd battalion was 20 officers and 1,000 men, but by 4 August it had only 12 officers and 350 men on the line. As they advanced over 2,100 yards (1,900 m) of mostly open ground, the Germans targeted them with intense artillery and machine gun fire.

The division later penetrated the Hindenburg Line, and became the first Allied unit to reach German soil during the war.

Robert was nineteen when he was killed. His remains are interred at Fere-en-Tardenois, Departement de l'Aisne, Picardie, France. It is a beautiful, green place, born of great tragedy and sadness.

The American Cemetery, Picardie, France

RIP, Uncle Robert.

The Pump-house Project

Photo courtesy Tom Lewis

The Freeland property at Omena - called "Freeland's" during its days as a summer resort - was a property that bound together five generations of my family on my mother's side. The first Omena property owned by our family was several dozen acres acquired by Thomas Edward Hart McLean, who was the uncle of Mary (McLean) Frazier. This Mary was the mother of Mary (Frazier) Freeland, who was the mother of my Nana, Mary (Freeland) Smith.

Embracing My Inner Jew: A Brief History of the Friedlanders

Mary (Frazier) Freeland and Albert Luke Freeland

I got back my DNA results from ancestry.com a few months ago. Ancestry performs a type of test called autosomal DNA. I'll be writing about DNA testing in another post. DNA testing for genealogy is really very new and exciting.

One of the things autosomal testing does pretty well is figure out your ancestral roots. My results were not too surprising. I'm more than 50% "Western European," and another 28% British/Irish. No Native American, but a dash of Greek/Italian and Middle Eastern, leavened with Caucasian (the region, not the race) and Scandinavian.

One fraction that came in right where I expected it: I am 1/8th Ashkenazi Jew. (Ashkenazi is the name of the Jews of Europe.) Both of my law partners have tested, and both were surprised to find that they too have some Ashkenazi Jewish blood. We now refer to one another as "our people" in the firm, unlike the goyim in the outfit. One of my partners found he also has a smidgen of Gypsy blood. He says, "I may steal your wallet, but I will invest the money wisely." We get to make jokes like that because we are Yiddishe.

But I digress.