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.)