Researching the Lewis and Washington Families

Everyone has a story to tell…but what makes it worth the time for someone else to read? If genealogy is void of details surrounding events it becomes sterile. Family history is lost unless someone makes the commitment to share the history with existing and future generations.

A resource often used as a starting point for persons with possible ties to the Lewis and Washington families is a book by Merrow Egerton Sorley entitled Lewis of Warner Hall: The History of a Family Including the Genealogy of Descendants in Both the Male and Female Lines, Biographical Sketches of Its Members, and Their Descent from Other Early Virginia Families, published by Genealogical Publishing Company. Merrow Egerton Sorley’s research is respected within the genealogical community. His research provides a foundation to verify genealogical information.

In our electronic age, reliable resources including birth, marriage, and death records as well as census and military records are just a few items available on the web site Ancestry.com for a fee. However, the fee is worth the investment to discover more about one’s family heritage. Caution should be used to insure the information obtained from the internet is verified with supporting primary documentation.

Most family genealogists are willing to share and especially exchange information regarding family lines as often the motivation is to keep the family members connected.

As Merrow Egerton Sorley states in the introduction to his book “…many migrating branches of the family lost all contact with their original home and their relatives; and not only did the later generations of these relatives grow up in ignorance of their distant cousins, but in many cases the migratory group which had settled in Texas or Missouri lost all knowledge of its early ancestry; there are today, no doubt scores of Lewis descendants who do not know that they are connected with the family.” This was the case with part of the Texas branch and thus resulted in my conducting detailed research on the various branches of the family directly descended from Betty Washington Lewis. Every effort was made to link original and supporting documentation to the correct individual. Should you be interested in exchanging information, contact can be established by clicking this link.