Lewis is a common name in Wales and the US, with many different Lewises immigrating to the colonies in the 1600s and 1700s.  A lot of well-intended but highly contradictory information has been published about various branches of the family, and unless you go to source data, the task of tracing our Lewis roots becomes quickly tangled.  Our Samuel Howell Lewis family is fortunate to be among a small minority of families that have surviving records that we can be used to trace our ancestry – we can go back 500 years using those source documents.  Many records survived the ravages of  the English Civil War, US Revolutionary War and US Civil War.  We can read church records from St Teilo parish in Wales, Abingdon Parish in Gloucester County, VA and St Peter’s Parish in New Kent County, VA.  We are also most fortunate that our emigrant ancestor’s grave was discovered, and that Grace McLean Moses had the knowledge, desire and resources available to sponsor an exhaustive examination of historical records in Wales to uncover all surviving records of our ancestors.

Here is the family crest of our immigrant ancestor, John Lewis, the key to unlocking the history of our family.