As we are doing with the 1851 UK census, we are also creating a County by County summary of where the 48272 Lewis surname bearers were as recorded in the 1850 census.

The 1850 census in the US is different from the 1851 UK census in that no family relationships are mentioned; therefore, you cannot identify true census designated Heads of Household. Further research is always required to make those designations.

Another serious difference is that the birth place for a person is usually only provided to the state or country level, unlike the 1851 UK census attempts to give the actual locality where a person was born. However, on occasion, the 1850 census enumerator has attempted to be more precise and often has caused problems for Ancestry when trying to identify birth place. Between misspellings, inconsistent abbreviations, etc. some error comes in with birth places. In general, in my analysis, I only made adjustments to totals when there was an obvious gross error.

1850 was a time of significant Western expansion. Several of the current states were enumerated as Territories. Several of the Territories either did not have a census done, it was lost, or their territory was counted as part of some other state or territory. West Virginia as a State did not exist in 1850 as its counties were part of Virginia until about 1862 when they broke off during to Civil War.

The 1850 census cannot be used as complete checklist of all Lewis bearers who have been in the US. Besides the immigrants who came later (and should be picked up from other country research… ), we also have large number of slaves who only adopted the Lewis surname after emancipation.

My methodology was to do hundreds of searches using the Ancestry.com 1850 census database which includes many submitted corrections which is why these numbers may vary slightly from those that might be acquired from FamilySearch or FindMyPast.

That list is being prepared to allow contributors to “sign up” to create Lewis family Gedcoms for various counties for the Lewis TNG site.

As I was preparing this county spreadsheet, I could see that the Lewis study in the United States was much more a migration study than what the UK side of the project is.

Once you started looking at the states beyond the early states on the east coast of the United States, you would see that most of what might be assumed to be Lewis Heads of Household were born in some other state with only children as Lewis’s who were born in the state they were resident of.

I decided to build another spreadsheet based on the 1850 census. This would look at each 1850 census “state” to see where the 1850 residents came from. The top seven states by Lewis resident count were:

  • State # Lewis Residents # born in state Total of state
  • New York 7933 5734 7449
  • Pennsylvania 4951 3602 4441
  • Ohio 3953 2219 2921
  • Virginia 2929 2347 3556
  • Kentucky 2445 1966 2712
  • Indiana 2357 1379 1599
  • Massachusetts 2169 1704 2202

I was also able to identify immigrants from several countries; here are the top eight. The state by far with the most immigrants from other countries was New York.

  • Canada 267
  • England 672
  • Wales 701
  • Scotland 47
  • Ireland 388
  • Germany 367
  • France 80
  • Portugal 12

Important observations about the migrations Include:

  • Few migrations to the Northeast states from the Southern States.
  • Few migrations from the Northeast states to the Southern States.
  • The Southern States Lewis’s migrated further south and west.
  • The Northeastern states migrated west.
  • The families that migrated seemed like they migrated several times.
  • Missouri seems to have been at least a waypoint on migrations.
  • California migration seems to be mostly motivated by Gold Rush.
  • Utah migration is all about the LDS families moving there in the late 1840s.

The 1850 census can give us some measure of the racial mix. However, we would need to examine more of the census records to validate these numbers as Ancestry’s indexing of the data is often inaccurate. However, a preliminary review appears to show that much of the trickle of migration from the South to the north was either freed or escaped slaves.

  • Black 1551
  • Mulatto 784

This data does not suggest a change to the Phase 1 of the Lewis Study project that entails building trees for the Lewis’s in the 1850 census and their ancestors. However, I think it will show that many of the trees will go back to immigrant ancestors from the 1600s either in New England or Virginia.

I invite your comments on this data.

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