Lewis: A Surname History

Description

Lewis: A Surname History — Volume 33 of The Surname Histories Series. The famous battle — Germanic hlūt (famous) + wīg (battle), the Norman Lowis and French Louis, fused in Wales with the native Llywelyn and frozen into hereditary surnames in the Tudor era. LEWIS stands No. 29 in the 2010 U.S. Census with 531,781 bearers — up from No. 26 in 2000 (509,930), a steady +4.3% on one of America’s most evenly shared names (58.23% White, 34.84% Black) — sitting directly behind Ramírez at #28 and completing the series’ nine-book running echo (Lee #21 → Pérez #22 → Thompson #23 → White #24 → Harris #25 → Sánchez #26 → Clark #27 → Ramírez #28 → Lewis #29). The signature story is Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) — the pathfinder of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, from Jefferson’s commission to the Pacific and back, told honestly with its debts to Sacagawea, York, and the Native nations — honored with one verified portrait plate: Charles Willson Peale’s 1807 oil portrait (public domain); a gallery of bearers runs from Sinclair Lewis and John Lewis to Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Lewis; three heraldic plates — the black shield and silver lion of the Van, the Bristol spear-heads, and the blank honest shield, drawn programmatically from published blazons — show why no single coat of arms belongs to a surname; and a gazetteer of Lewis places maps the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, Lewiston in Idaho, and Lewisburg in West Virginia.