Lewis, George A.
George A. Lewis (b.1850)
Stoddard, NH
Written by Keene State College student Julia Slight and Historical Society of Cheshire County director of education Jennifer Carroll, 2024
George A. Lewis was a person of color born in July 1850 in Pepperell, Massachusetts. He appeared on the U.S. census in 1870 as a nineteen-year-old mulatto male. While a resident of Massachusetts, Hale worked as a farm laborer at the Reed family farm in Stoddard, New Hampshire. By 1875, George had moved to Washington, NH.
George A. Lewis was first married a white woman named Abbie L. Smith who was born in Peterborough, NH and living in Swanzey, NH at the time. The couple was married in 1875 in the small town of West Swanzey, New Hampshire. He was twenty-four years old and she was sixteen. Together, they had two children: a daughter named Myrtle “Lillian” Lewis (1876) and a son named Elmer (1879).
In 1876, the Lewis family moved from New Hampshire to Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where George worked as a farmer. They soon relocated to Littleton, Massachusetts, where George continued to work in agriculture as a laborer. The 1880 census records 29-year old George Lewis as the head of household and mulatto. Wife Abbie is 21 years old and also listed as mulatto. Daughter Lillian was 4 years old at the time and Elmer was 8 months old.
Daughter Lillian M. Lewis entered the workforce as a domestic servant by her mid-to-late teens. In 1891, at the age of 18-years old she married John Smith, a Black laborer from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Six years later Lillian’s mother, Abbie (Smith) Lewis died in October 1897 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts at the age of 38.
George A. Lewis, upon losing his wife, remarried quickly. By 1900, he and his 2nd wife Ella J. Lewis resided with her parents, Marshall and Harriet Thompson in Lowell, Massachusetts. George worked as a carpenter at the time and Ella as a housekeeper. That same year, George’s grandson Elmer Smith (son of Lillian and John Smith) died of cholera at the age of two months in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Son Elmer Gray Lewis married at the age of thirty-one to twenty-eight-year-old Jennie May Thompson in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 8, 1911. In Cambridge, Elmer worked as a machinist and Jennie as a seamstress.
By 1910, daughter Lillian (Lewis) Smith had given birth to six children but only three were still living. The strain of losing their children may have caused Lillian and John to divorce sometime in the 1910s. The 1920 census reveals that Lillian (Lewis) Smith was divorced and was renting a home at 38 Windsor Street in Boston with her children. At the age of forty, Lillian worked as a maid at a doctor’s office. Her twenty-two-year-old daughter Marion (Smith) Mendon worked as a factory machinist and her twenty-six-year-old son John Smith worked in Boston as a police officer.
Lillian (Lewis) Smith would later remarry for another fifteen years. In 1930, she worked as a housekeeper in a welfare house, while her daughter Marion worked in a private home as a domestic servant. How long she continued to work is unclear. Lillian (Lewis) Smith died in 1962 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and is buried beside her father, George Lewis, in the New Hope Cemetery in Boston.
GENEALOGICAL SUMMARY
GEORGE A. LEWIS was born in Pepperell, MA, in July 1850. He married 1st ABBIE L. SMITH in West Swanzey, NH, in 1875. They had: Myrtle “Lillian” (1876-1962) and Elmer Gary (b.1879). He married 2nd ELLA J. LEWIS.
MYRTLE “LILLIAN” LEWIS was born in MA in 1876. She married 1st JOHN SMITH in Boston in 1891. They had six children including Elmer Smith (1900-1900), John E. (1894-), and Marion Mendon (1898-).
ELMER GARY LEWIS was born in 1879 in MA. He married 1st JENNIE MAY THOMPSON in Cambridge, MA, in 1911.
SOURCE MATERIALS
Find-a-Grave
Massachusetts Vital Records, Births, Fitchburg, 1876- Ancestry.com
Massachusetts Vital Records, Deaths, Cambridge, 1900- Ancestry.com
Massachusetts Vital Records, Marriages, Cambridge, 1911- Ancestry.com
Massachusetts Vital Records, Marriages, Boston, 1891- Ancestry.com
New Hampshire Vital Records, Marriages, Seabrook, 1958- Ancestry.com
New Hampshire Vital Records, Marriages, Swanzey, 1875- Ancestry.com
U.S. Federal Census Records, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1950- Ancestry.com