I like the way Martha Abbey handles the subject of family legends so I have OCR'ed her articles on the subject and because they deal with the Lewellens found in Loudoun County, Virginia in the late eighteenth century.
It is with some risk that we attempt this column called Traditions. Historians and genealogists emphasize that there is no assurance that the stories a family hands down from one generation to the next are accurate. Still, these traditions do provide clues for our family research. If a tale told in one family is similar to one told in another family, the two families could be a related.
The "traditions" we plan to introduce in this column generally will come from published sources, mainly from biographical articles from the county histories that were popular from about 1880 until the early 1900's. Please remember that such traditions may have not been factual the first time they were told. They probably changed with the telling over the years. And they may not have been recorded correctly where we found them (or as they were related to us).
Despite common belief, just because something has been published it is not necessarily true! Even when documented material is at hand, errors are bound to creep into print. Therefore, never consider what you read to be gospel until the source has been researched and the story proven.
Having made these disclaimers about the reliability of any tradition, we boldly initiate this column as a regular feature of Llewellyn Traces. If you have a "tradition" within your family, won't you please share it with us? Perhaps someone else has the same story to tell, or a similar one; perhaps two (or more) of you can trace your lines back to a common ancestor!
It's possible to put similar traditions together logically to link families together, and perhaps work our way back to the immigrant ancestor(s). With this possibility in mind, we'll follow each Tradition with a discussion entitled In Pursuit of Tradition, in which we'll place the individual involved in each tradition within the context of material in our files. Doing so
may help sort out these traditions. Each Tradition, as well as each Pursuit, will be numbered for future reference. All opinions and conclusions are the editor's.
In the next few issues, we'll present several versions of a "three brothers" tradition. (Almost
every surname has a "three brothers" story-many, many of which have been proved to be false.) The "three Llewellyn brothers" tradition has been widely publicized among seemingly unrelated Llewellyn families. The account we present in this issue links a set of "original three brothers" with a line of Lewellens who in the 1830's settled in Delaware and Henry Counties, Indiana. Some of them migrated into other Indiana counties later and moved on into Missouri about 1855.
Tradition 1:
The three brothers
"The [Lewellen) family is of Welsh origin and was founded in America by three brothers who came from England to New York early in the eighteenth century, one of them settling in the old Dominion, Virginia, and to him this branch of the family trace their ancestry...." (Biographical Memoirs of Jay County, Indiana; Chicago,B. F. Bowen Co., 1901, p. 509, in a biographical article about Josephus Asbury Lewellen, D.D. [1848-?).)
Next issue, we'll publish an elaboration on this "three brothers" tradition. Now, some comment on this issue's tradition.
The Reverend Josephus Asbury Lewellen, subject of the biographical sketch of Tradition 1, wrote and published a small booklet with a long title, A Condensed History of the Lewellen Family in Wales and the United States,[1] in 1910. In it he traces his line (with no hint of documentation) from Thomas2 Lewellen, born in Loudoun County, Virginia, a son of Samuel1 and "the widow Jones" Llewellyn. (The Reverend Mr. Lewellen states he knew of "no other, if any, of Samuel's children.")
Supposedly, Thomas2 married twice, and the line of J. A.5 Lewellen descends through Phillip3 Lewellen, who was born in Virginia in 1794, supposedly the eldest son of Thomas's second marriage. Phillip3 Lewellen married Mary Ann Osborn, daughter of Zerah Osborn. The Reverend Mr. Lewellen, born 1848, Delaware County, Indiana, was a son of Thomas Osborn4 Lewellen, a son of Phillip' and Mary Ann Osborn Lewellen.
According to the Reverend Mr. Lewellen's booklet, his great grandfather, Thomas2 Lewellen, married first "a Tabitha (maiden name unknown)," and the Reverend Mr. Lewellen implies that this Thomas2 had a son Thomas3 by this first marriage.
It is the opinion of the editor of Llewellyn Traces that the Reverend Mr. Lewellen, in the discussion in his book, confused his Thomases, and the marriage of Thomas Lewellen to a Tabitha that he attributed to his great grandfather Thomas2 actually was that of a younger Thomas, possibly Thomas (Jr. )3?, the probable son of Thomas2 and a half-brother of the Reverend Mr. Lewellen's grandfather, Phillip3.
A Thomas Lewellen married Tabitha Beck in 1801 in Hampshire County, Virginia, and we feel that this Thomas was Thomas (Jr.)3? son (?) of Thomas2, although we have no proof of this relationship. It is possible that Tabitha Beck Lewellen died shortly after her marriage to Thomas3, and that he is the same Thomas3 who married Mary "Polly" Gough, daughter of Joshua and Charity Lunsford (Lunceford) Gough (Goff), 1804, in Monongalia County, Virginia (a sister of Elizabeth Gough, who, also in Monongalia County, married Samuel3, son of Thomas', also by Thomas's first marriage).
Nothing more is known of Thomas3, such as whether or not he was the son of Thomas2 and whether or not he married either or both Tabitha Beck and Polly Gough. (Do any of our readers have information on this Thomas Lewellen, who may have been the Thomas who was in Delaware County, Indiana?)
The Reverend Mr. Lewellen's great grandfather, Thomas2 Lewellen, evidently did marry twice; his children, according to the Reverend Mr. Lewellen, included "two daughters "-one, whose name he did not know, who “married a Swick" and Rache3, who married Samuel Jones, son of Jacob Jones and "two sons" Samuel3, who married Elizabeth Gough, and the implied Thomas3 by his first marriage; and "two sons" Phillip3 and David3 and "a daughter "Mary' born of his (Thomas2's) second marriage to an unknown Jennings, supposedly the daughter of a Benjamin Jennings.
Despite a so-far-fruitless search for the identity of Thomas2 Lewellen's "Jennings" wife, we have found some evidence of connections between Jenningses and Lewellens in North Carolina and we'll discuss them in a future issue. Thomas's wife may have been a Susannah Jennings.
If Thomas2, son of Samuel1, was born in Loudoun County, Virginia, as stated by the Reverend Mr. Lewellen, he may have been one of the three Thomas Lewellens on the 1781 tithable lists of Loudoun County, and perhaps one of the unidentifiable Thomas Lewellens who executed deeds in Loudoun County between 1759 and 1782. To date, no wills have been found for any of these Thomases.
There is the possibility that the Thomas2 discussed in the Reverend Mr. Lewellen's booklet as the son of Samuel1 actually was the grandson of Samuel1 (and possibly the son of an older Thomas). Several dates associated with Thomas2 Lewellen's children (as discussed in the Reverend Mr. Lewellen's booklet, as well as in other references) would suggest this. However, for the sake of our discussion here, we'll follow the Reverend Mr. Lewellen's narration, keeping in mind all the while that our numbering of the generations following Samuel1 may be incorrect. And that his work is entirely undocumented. An abbreviated ancestral chart of the Reverend Josephus Asbury Lewellen5, subject of the "tradition" gleaned from the biographical sketch in the Jay County (Indiana) History, follows:
Samuel Llewellyn
“Widow” Jones
Phillip Lewellen
Mary Ann Osborn
Thomas Osborn Lewellen
Eliza”Nancy” Langfit
Josephus Asbury Lewellen
Louisa Davis
Source: Llewellyn Traces, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1989
1n his 21-page booklet, the Reverend Mr. Lewellen follows the traditional 19th Century practice of preceding his account of his family line by describing the geological, geographical, a political history of the area in which his discussion begins-in this case, Wales. This, of course, leads him into a discussion of the royal Llewellyns. Although in no way does he connect the royal Lewellyns to his Lewellens of later-day America, the inference that they are connected is, unfortunately, there. Citing this preliminary material as "authentic history," he continues with his own version of the family "three brothers" tradition: ''The rise and progress of the family in America, especially in its earlier establishment, is not so clear and certain, but is involved in the inaccuracies and uncertainties of tradition. But later in the progress of the family, we have authentic facts. It is related in the traditions that three brothers by the name of Llewellyn came from England, and landed at New York sometime between the middle and close of the 17th Century, and that after a brief abode there, became separated, and scattered in different directions, and never met afterward. It is supposed, and we think correctly too, that our family as known now, are descendants of one of these brothers . . . In the state of Delaware, in the early part of the 18th Century appears the first tangible and certain history ↩︎