Who Was Harry Lewis? - Lewis | Arrington | Moore

Updated: Mar 30, 2023
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The question of the full identity of the father of Elizabeth Ann Lewis (1855-1923) has been a mystery to her descendants since her death 100 years ago. Family notes contained his name, Harry Lewis, and his burial location of Rosita Cemetery, Rosita, Colorado.

Most of the difficulty in tracing Harry has been with the lack of finding him in Census records. Even when he was still alive, he seemed to be away from his family during the time of the census enumeration in his later years, and so far, I’ve been unable to locate any census records where he and his wife appear together.

To complicate matters further, none of Harry’s decedents seemed to know exactly where Harry was born. Most of his children said he was born in Arkansas, but Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio and Illinois also appeared on some records.

Previous generations of family researchers were seemingly unable to locate marriage records for a Harry Lewis and Martha A. and this work was difficult before the Internet and without a clear place to look. There was a last name noted for Martha in some family records, but there didn’t seem to be much documentation for it – Arrington.

When I began the research, I think I had only the census from Pueblo, Colorado in 1870 in which Martha was listed as “married” but Harry was not listed at all, and the 1880 census from the same place and Martha was listed as “widowed.”

To find out more, I started with a timeline utilizing the information from those censuses.
Harry Lewis and Martha Arrington had at least 5 children – perhaps 6, but I have yet to find more than family notes for one child.

1854 ARKANSAS – daughter Elizabeth Ann Lewis born
1859, Dec 25 NEBRASKA – son William T. Lewis born
1862, May NEBRASKA – son James H. Lewis born
1865, April NEBRASKA – son John W. Lewis born
1867, April NEBRASKA – son Frank Lewis born
1870, Jun 30 – Pueblo, Colorado – Lewis family is listed except for Harry. Martha
1880 – Pueblo, Colorado – Martha is listed as “widowed.” Living with sons William, James, John, and Frank.
1885 – Pueblo, Colorado – “Mary” A. Lewis, “widowed,” listed on the Colorado State Census living with sons William, John W., and Frank


Given the above information, the Lewis family must have moved to Colorado sometime between April 1867 and 30 Jun 1870. Also, according to this timeline, Harry must have died between 30 Jun 1870 and 1880. Unfortunately, as I’ll soon share with you, even the timeline isn’t quite a straight line.

According to the family histories, Martha lived with Harry for a time in the mining town of Rosita, Colorado. She cooked meals and took in laundry. But eventually she moved (back?) to Pueblo and rented out rooms, as well as probably continuing to cook and take in laundry.

But I have not yet found any documentation to link Martha or any of the Lewis family to Rosita. Nor have I been able to located Harry’s gravesite. I realized too that I didn’t actually have documentation for Harry’s name. Maybe it was a nickname?

Knowing that William T. Lewis was born in 1859 or 1860 – a census year – somewhere in Nebraska, I started my search there. I scoured the state for the Lewis family, but could not find them in the census records there that year. Nor could I find them anywhere in Arkansas that year.

Next, I looked for newspaper articles. This task would have been nearly impossible with such a broad range when my grandfather had searched before me. But with the internet, it’s been one of my best resources in teasing out stories. But again, I found nothing. I searched in Nebraska for all the known years that the family was there, but there was no mention of Harry or Martha.

Frustrated, I decided to focus on Martha. At least I had a clue to her last name. Her birthplace was just as questionable as her husband’s. Arkansas or Tennessee or Illinois. I found Martha Marzee Arrington who married HENRY Lewis in Washington County, Arkansas in 1851. (Thank you to the few cousins who had this little hint in their tree!)

Marriage record for Henry Lewis and Martha Arrington, certified by George Lewis.

With that information, I was able to really dig in. But it wasn’t an easy bread crumb trail!

In Washington County, Arkansas circa 1830, there were several Lewis families. The largest of them consisted of two brothers, Bracken and George, and their sister Lydia who married John Van Hoose. These Lewis siblings came originally from Orange County, North Carolina but stopped over in Kentucky and Illinois before settling finally in Arkansas.

The Lewis brothers both had very large families and they seemed to like to name the children the same names at around the same time. They lived just a few houses away from each other with the Arrington household right next to or perhaps even in between them. So, there is a Henry Lewis born in 1830 in one house and another born in 1832. And two girls named Lydia Lewis also born just two years apart. “Twin cousins,” as my daughter likes to call them.

Finding the correct Henry Lewis is a matter of closely examining the marriage record which is admittedly very difficult to read. Near the bottom, Henry’s father also certifies the union – George Lewis. The marriage record also gives Henry’s age as 18 which would make his birth year 1832 or 1833. This also aligns with the 1850 Census of George Lewis’s household.

In regards to Bracken Lewis’s son with the same name, there was an account written in Goodspeed’s History of Northwest Arkansas in 1889 about Brackin [Bracken] Lewis’s life. In it, it is said that of Bracken’s sixteen children, seven were still alive at the time. It lists Henry as well as his sister Lydia as two of the deceased children. So we know that Bracken’s Henry was deceased by the year 1889.

Distinguishing between the two Henry’s throughout their years is mostly difficult due to the lack of documentation for either man. After the 1850 Census in Arkansas, there is almost nothing that I could find until the 1910 Census in Barron, Jackson County, Oregon. Here we find Lydia (Lewis) Powell, widowed, living with her brother, Henry Lewis who is also widowed and said to be 76 (birth year about 1834) and born in Illinois. This Lydia Lewis has a much better paper trail than her brother so I am quite confident in saying that she is the daughter of George Lewis. In fact, in his later years, George moved to Oregon to live with Lydia and her husband, Philander Powell and appears on the 1880 Census with them.

Of course, we now also have DNA evidence to consider. I can confidently confirm that I share a common ancestor on the Martha Arrington’s line – I can link to 6th cousins who also trace their ancestry to her parents. And, I can do the same with the Lewis line. However, since we are looking at various Lewis brothers, it is less clear on which specific Lewis brother, George or Bracken, I can trace my ancestry to using autosomal DNA. However, I think I can safely say that their father, Zachariah Lewis is a DNA link for me. It may be more clear if I examined my mother’s DNA test since she is one generation closer, which I have not yet done.

With the evidence I have found then, I must conclude that my original timeline was incorrect. At some point, perhaps as early as 1867, for reasons yet unknown to me, it seems like Henry “Harry” Lewis and his wife, Martha (Arrington) Lewis split. The children stayed with Martha and Henry went back to Arkansas.

I do not know if Henry actually ever even made it to Colorado. I do not have any records of him in the state. His daughter, Elizabeth (Lewis) Moore’s obituary says that she came to Pueblo, CO on an oxen-led wagon with her parents, but obituaries are not always the most reliable sources of information. Martha’s obituary, for instance, says that her husband died. More likely, it was easier for her to say that she was a widow than to bear the stigma of a divorced woman. She did not ever remarry.

Henry, however, did remarry. In 1870 he married Delila Haddix. Delila was born in Kentucky and lived in an area populated by many of the same families that seemed to moving around with the Lewis and Arrington families. She had been married twice before, but both husbands had died – one of them while serving in the Kentucky cavalry on the Union side in the Civil War. I’m not sure how many children she had with her first two husbands – there are nine or ten listed in the censuses, but some may have been from her husbands’ previous marriages. She did not have any children with Henry.

By 1900, Henry and Delila moved to Shasta County, California. She had purchased a contract to buy some land for $150 early in 1902, but then on September 2, 1902, she died in her sleep. There was some question about whether or not her estate was actually hers as she’d only just purchased the contract. The court decided that she had, in fact, paid enough money toward it. However, by the time her burial expenses and administration fees were accounted for, the estate was left penniless. ​

Front page story about Delila's death. Weekly Searchlight, Redding, CA. September 2, 1902.

Based on the newspaper reports of the story, Henry had moved to Oregon shortly after Delila had died. He appears in the 1910 Census living just outside Ashland, OR with his sister, Lydia, so I assume this is where he went after Delila’s death.

Lydia had done fairly well for herself. She’d married Philander Powell when they were both still living in Arkansas. Her father must have liked Philander very much because he was even allowed to live with them before he and Lydia ever tied the knot. I believe Philander’s father actually came to Arkansas with Lydia’s father from North Carolina, so the families probably went way back. Good ol’ Phil and Lydia went west during the gold boom days (he was a farmer, not a miner though) and were apparently quite the pioneers. They had three daughters and they stayed close to their mother.

In 1880 Lydia’s father, George Washington Lewis appears on the Census with them in Oregon, which was quite the trip for an 84 year old man from Arkansas at the time!

Philander died in 1893 and Lydia managed their estate after that point. Based on her final accounts, it looks like she often loaned out money, so even though he had been “only” a farmer, he’d done quite well for himself. Lydia’s son-in-law leased out part of the farm and equipment. Strangely, in 1912, at the age of 78, Lydia married 85-year-old James Sexton Boyd of Dinuba, California. In her will, she left him $10 – which would be just under $300 today. And even that seemed perhaps only to be because she held a promissory note on James Boyd’s account for someone to pay Lydia $10. She may have just been ensuring that would get paid back to her husband so she wouldn’t owe him anything. Everything else was split equally between her three daughters.

What about Henry, you ask?

Obituary for Henry Lewis - Ashland Tidings, Ashland, OR. February 22, 1915.

Henry Lewis died a few months before his sister. He spent the last year and a half of his life at the Jackson County Poor Farm in Talent, Oregon. He died on February 18, 1915 at about 83 years old. He was buried at Hill Dunn Cemetery in Ashland, Jackson County, Oregon. He had four children from Martha that were still living at the time. Martha preceded him in death in 1900.

Jackson County Poor Farm circa 1930 near Talent, OR. All records from the farm were destroyed in a fire. This picture survived in a time capsule.

As far as I know, he never saw his children, but that could just be because I don’t have the documents to show it. After they moved from Nebraska, his children seemed to stay in either Colorado or New Mexico and as far as I can tell, Henry never went to either of those states. I wonder if Martha told them that their father had died, too.


There is still so much more to research in the Lewis and Arrington family. I’ve already uncovered some fun stories I’m excited to share, in fact. I hope that along the way I can learn more about Henry. And more about his wife, Martha who had the difficult job of raising 5 children in a pioneer town as a single woman posing as a widow. ​