Well, I guess to begin we have to go to the end. Which is me. My name is Sarah Lewis and I was born in 1985 in Washington, DC. I was the third in my father's immediate family to be born at the Columbia Hospital for Women. Both his mother and his older sister were born there, and my younger sister would later be born there in 1987. Columbia Hospital for Women, coincidentally, is now a luxury condo building I could never afford to live in.
My sister and I were the 9th generation born in Washington, DC. My father's family through either his father or mother had lived in the District for at least the past 149 years.
By the time he took the test only a few years ago now, he'd already been documenting our family tree for almost a decade.
There were a few things we knew for sure when he began the journey I am finishing:
Our last name was Lewis. According to Wikipedia, "Lewis is "the 6th most common surname in Wales, 22nd most common in England, 24th most common in the United States, and 129th most common in Scotland".
That's a lot of land to cover. Through his digging, my father would discover that his line of Lewis is very Welsh.
"In the United Kingdom Lewis is most commonly associated with Wales, and is a common Welsh Patronym. The name developed as an Anglicized or diminutive form of native Welsh names such as Llywelyn. Among the earliest examples being the Lewis family of Glamorgan in the 1540s."
I'll get more to them in another post.
But what about his mother?
My father's mothers family arrived in the colony of Maryland from England on the Ark and the Dove in 1634. They were a well connected family who were part of the governing of the Colony, with my 9th Great-Grandfather, Thomas Greene, serving as the 2nd Proprietary Governor of Maryland. His father, also Thomas Greene, was a Knight Batchelor of the Realm under King James I.
Through my father's detective work, he was able to follow his strict paternal line all the way back to the start. Over 1000 years and countless generations. Some of these distant ancestors even have their own Wikipedia page! But who were they? That's what I will explore in Prosiect Cymraeg. Starting with myself and this post, I will move backwards, exploring who they were and why (hopefully) they decided to leave Wales to journey to the Colonies of America in the 1600's.
If you are a Lewis and happen upon my little project, feel free to message me with any info or insight you may have about one of them!
