Excerpt from Genealogies of the Lewis and Kindred Families The fact that one family chooses, for reasons satisfactory to itself, not to write its history, or that another family has no history to write, is no reason why family history should not be written. Families make up nations and a history is as im portant to one as the other. A nation of families who have no histories is without material for a national history. It is not national history that makes great names. But names who have performed great deeds and thus established historic families make a nation great and give it a history. The names which go to make up this history are so closely interwoven with the his tory of the country that it is impossible to trace their genealogy without interspersing many historical events of national interest. Several of the families date back to a very early period in English history, and some were quite well established in France before coming to England, but only such reference will be made to these families prior to their coming to America as will be necessary to trace their line of descent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.