You will have to blame the book “Piece By Piece – a Genealogical Jigsaw” for this study. The book was published in 2015 by Irene (Lewis) Ward as a historical account of her multi-decade search to identify the origins of her paternal Grandmother, Elizabeth (Wynn) Lewis of Montgomeryshire, Wales. Previously she had published a novel “the Price of Peace – A Conspiracy of Silence” that told a fictionalized version of the same story. Her tale is extraordinary, and, if true, is another case where genealogical research has uncovered some possibly not otherwise documented history.
As a genealogist, I could not help myself. The book told a family history with a tantalizing amount of genealogical detail, yet the genealogy was done in the era before the internet. I began to try to put the history she told into an Ancestry tree, complete with sources to back up the story. None of the points of her immediate lineage was recorded incorrectly, but as I tried to make the families more complete, I ran into a plethora of existing research, mainly Lewis genealogies, that had obviously incorrect data. The more I looked at other people’s published work, even from members of Irene’s extended family, I just found errors based on how really difficult it is to do Lewis genealogy in Wales and elsewhere based on how huge the surname is.
As I shared my story both with other Guild members and members of the Facebook Group “Genealogical Crime Mystery Book Club” that introduced me to the book, I saw an enthusiasm to expand on the little that I had done with the Lewis family. The result is the study described here. And because Lewis is a large surname, we created a project to organize a study that will give Lewis descendants worldwide a resource for researching their family history.
I encourage any genealogist reading this to consider reading this book, and, if it intrigues you to help with the Lewis Study, to contact us.
John B. Lisle,
Nashua, New Hampshire USA
Member, Guild of One Name Studies
