It's worth checking the Chester list archives for Enoch Lewis as there were 6 or more references in old list posts to that name. To search the old list posts I recommend a www.Google.com search like this: "Enoch Lewis" PA-OLD-CHESTER-L That has the advantage of finding the Chester List archives without having to use the clumsy Rootsweb archive search service <http://listsearches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl?list=PA-OLD-CHESTER> that only allows you to search one year of posts at a time. It also returns some other pages that may not be list archives, but it's easier than searching the list archives 7 times, once in each year archived. The summaries Google shows also make it easier to weed out bad results. While I'm at it I'd like to offer some other tips on useful Google search tricks to help get better results without wading through pages of useless links. I won't presume to tell people something they may know, but using a few tricks can make Google offer much better results when you're looking for needles in haystacks. I find varying strategies tends to find new ways for me to find useful info online. First of all, Google's Advanced search, <http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en> has a lot of useful options. I tend to just add terms to the simple search window on Google, and I use the Google Toolbar so I rarely go directly to Google's site to start a search. I've also raved before about how Google Desktop will index files on your PC and all web sites you browse. This makes it gradually more useful for genealogy searches once you've browsed lots of genealogy sites, especially with lists of names like tax lists and will lists. You can probably tell I love Google. Advanced Search offers useful things like phrases (you can just add a name in quotes in a basic search for the same result), searching specific sites (I'll show a simple way to do that with basic searches below), and excluding specific web sites. It is also possible to add number range to a search. For example, you can only include results with a number between 1741-1775 appears on the page. As a friend of mine says, how cool is that? Very cool when looking for results with specific date ranges where you don't know an exact year to include. For genealogy searches you should be able to restrict results to pages with a certain date range, assuming the page you want has dates. I suspect this would help a lot with the more common names that tend to bring up many references to living persons. Adding a specific site or term can help limit results to useful sites. For example, the search above uses the term PA-OLD-CHESTER-L. Another useful term is USGENWEB to find references in the GENWEB archives. "Will abstracts" also is a good one for finding wills. You can add specific sites to search using the Advanced search form at Google or simple add the site domain to your search. You can also just add site:rootsweb.com (example: "Lewis Enoch" site:rootsweb.com) to any search and have it give only results found on rootsweb.com, which will include list archives, USGENWEB and a large number of other genealogy pages on rootsweb. I find best results from putting names in quotes, though this will only help with exact spellings and won't find variants such as abbreviations or alternate spellings. Also, it's worth trying the name in a "SURNAME, NAME" format as this is what we usually find used for wills and many tax records. The comma doesn't really even matter because Google ignores it. So this can result in finding results for "Lewis, Enoch" such as the person Lewis Enoch, or false results where lists of other names combine with commas. More common names are less likely to find unique results so adding other terms can help. For example "Enoch Lewis" Chester site:rootsweb.com will find more specific results referencing Chester. In this case it finds us a marriage record in the first result. And that gives us a marriage record in 1772: http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/pa/chester/church/stgabriels.txt Records of Chester Co. Residents at St. Gabriels Church Berks Co. (1753-1777) 1772 - 8-17 Enoch Lewis Ema Lauder Searching for wills is tricky because of the common use of the word will. I usually try a few different terms such as: wills Will abstract Will abstracts Will book Will witness I haven't found a consistent way to get good results because wills and abstracts tend to not be consistent and the various GENWEB files that list abstracts tend to not use consistent words. Adding the term will 'will abstracts', i.e. "Lewis, Enoch" will abstracts brings up one in Swarthmore in a finding aid of George family papers that I had mentioned recently. A George was a lawyer for some for the Welsh settlers and this cites a will on file there from 1763 - possibly exactly what you are looking for to prove if a Philip was son of Enoch. In this case I can't find the will in Chester Will extracts so he may have died elsewhere. See: <http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/friends/ead/5170gefa.htm> for the will reference. Other useful terms to add to searches include dates if you have a specific reference. For example, some of the Worldconnect site GEDCOM files reference a marriage of Philip Lewis to Elizabeth Wasson as in 1775. There is some debate over whether this is the correct Elizabeth Wasson, but we at least have a date so someone appears to have found a marriage record even though the source isn't cite. So lets see what we get for: "Philip Lewis" wasson 1775 site:rootsweb.com In this case that finds only one page and it's not much help but it's a good example of why Google cache is important. The page referenced actually now has no reference to Wasson on the page at all! This is because it's a page generated from a GEDCOM file and when the file was updated and regenerated it created a new page named g0000166.htm that no longer contains the same content. But Google has a cached copy of the page it had indexed that included the name, the date and the name Wasson. Personally I find 98% of the these GED2HTML generated pages are useless because they almost never include sources of the data and the pages tend to be long (use Ctrl-F to search within the page). The pages often are not the same as what Google had indexed so I end up going to cached copies and still find no useful info other than possible leads on parents or children. Click on the link below the page summary for the cached copy. This is very handy because a lot of pages disappear from the Internet but leave traces. In this case it's still not very helpful for our search. It's the wrong Philip Lewis and wrong Wassons. Back to the problem of Google referencing pages that are no longer online: Google keeps cached copies for some time but eventually those disappear. But there's another great site that attempts to archive old web sites, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. <http://www.archive.org/index.php> For example, you find a web page referencing a site that looks interesting linked from some other site and the link is dead. I find many genealogy links are to sites that are no longer online. So go to the Wayback machine and plug in the URL there and there is a good chance that you'll find it archived: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php (just search Google for Wayback Machine or Internet Archive, it's faster than typing the link or looking up bookmarks) One trick for using the archives is that pages will have links to the old missing site. Right click on the link and paste that into the Wayback Machine. Sometimes only same pages of a site will be indexed or it won't be there, but I've used this trick to recover old web sites or even to find phone numbers and email addresses related to sites that went away years ago. The Internet Archive is a great site that deserves broader mention. There is an incredible wealth of old films, free music and books offered there. There are 30,000 books there including projects such as Gutenberg and library book scanning initiatives. There are 2,396 books there with "history" in the title and I have found family, county, state and world history books there that may have useful genealogy references. <http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=history%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts> Another good book search is Google Books. Back to Enoch Lewis, I tried Worldconnect, which I have mentioned before because it's such a great way to search for paired surnames. <http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi> There's a tree here that makes a plausible connection to an Enoch Lewis from a Lewis family in Radnor. That would most likely be a Welsh Quaker family and a good candidate for some relationship to the Enoch Lewis that was born 1776 who was a teacher at Westtown, a Quaker school. See: http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=chipmunk&id=I1056 2 There also is an Enoch Lewis cited in a book on the history of Delaware that placed one Enoch Lewis, cordwainer, was a resident of Wilmington circa 1750's. Also a history of Delaware County cites some Enoch Lewis references. You find these references via a Google search on: "Enoch Lewis" Delaware History Ashmead's Delaware County history seems to cite only the later Enoch Lewis but it's probably worth looking at in case I missed something. Scharf, Thomas J., History of Delaware, 1609-1888 has some references that may seem to be outside the area you're looking but I'd recommend a closer look. The first link in Scharf cites a market house built with funding from a group that includes Enoch Lewis and that includes people from Chester. Wilmington is reasonably close to Chester County. Another Google trick here is to pay attention to the [ More results from ... ] link at the bottom of search summaries. In this case clicking that finds 4 more references in Scharf's book not shown in the initial results. In one of those we find: "In 1736 lots were bought (in Wilmington) by Joseph Steel, yeoman, of Maryland; John McArthur, weaver; Thomas Tatnall, of Ridley; William Levis, Joseph Peters, Abraham Skinner, mariner; Lucas Stidham, Enoch Lewis, cordwainer; Hans Rudolph, Henry Heath, George Howell, storekeeper; David Bush, merchant; Alexander Hooge, carpenter; Thomas Downing, inn-keeper; Thomas Broom." That gives us a trade for this Enoch. Also we see in this book that the late Enoch Lewis, the teacher, ran a school in Wilmington (he also taught at the Quaker school in Westtown not far from there), and that the Shipley who helped found Wilmington was married to a Lewis and ran a shipping company. A cordwainer was a shoemaker. Taking this piece of info puts an interesting perspective on the wills Sandra cited. I'll include the abstracts. EVANS, WILLIAM. Cordwinder. Willistown. March 24, 1768. April 4, 1768. To brother Jonathan Evans £10. To sister Mary, wife of Ezekiel Bowen £5. To Levi Bowen and his wife Ann, my sister, all remainder of estate real or personal. Executor: Levi Bowen. Wit: Rowland Ellis, Enoch Lewis, Danl. Cornog. ELLIS, HUMPHREY. Haverford. September 8, 1731. March 17, 1741/2. B. 106. To sons Humphrey and Jeremiah 10 shillings each. To daughter Rachel 10 shillings. To daughter Eleanor £5. To granddaughters Perthiana and Sarah 5 shillings each. Remainder inc land and plantation to son Subilynus and daughters Margaret and Mary subject to maintenance of wife Jane during life. Executors: sons Subilnus and Jeremiah. Witnesses: Amos Lewis, Enoch Lewis, Thos. Vaughan. So, the Enoch Lewis here is cited as a witness to a shoemaker's will seems like it could be the same Enoch Lewis shoemaker who bought property in Wilmington. Note that the date of this 1768 will is later than the 1761 will we found for an Enoch in the George papers. So we've found at least 3 Enoch Lewises in the general area from 1741 - 1800. The 1741 will witness could be the earlier Enoch who presumably died around 1761. The one in the 1768 will is clearly not the educator born in 1776. Willistown is also in reasonable proximity to Wilmington and to Haverford and Radnor. Haverford and Radnor were related Welsh tract Quaker meetings. Swarthmore, where we found the will reference, is also a Quaker archive. All this does point to Quaker connections for Enoch, which means there's a good chance of references in the Quaker records such as Hinshaws Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy which may show arrival dates from other meetings, departure for other meetings, births and deaths. Also there may be more detailed records in the actual meeting records if you're willing to go search through archives. Also, with regard to Google search tips for genealogy, as an afterthought I did a search and found a few pages on the web offer various tips, some of which I covered here and some offer additional ideas. I believe we're at the golden age of genealogy with more records than ever available to us at out fingertips, but it's even worse than the classic needle in a haystack when it comes to searching billions of web pages to find the ones that are useful.