Excerpt from The Ancestry and Posterity of John Lea of Christian Malford, Wiltshire, England, and Pennsylvania in America, 1503-1906

The first effort to collect genealogical facts regarding the family of Pennsylvania Leas, who owe their foundation to the emigration of John Lea of Christian Malford, Wilts, Eng., seems to have been made between 1820 and 1825 by Thomas Gibson Lea, a great, great-grandson of the immigrant, who left a small, crude and fragmentary as well as erroneous collection of notes, which reposed in obscurity among other old family papers for almost if not quite fifty years. About 1875 these notes came into the possession of J. Henry Lea, a nephew of Thomas Gibson Lea and so greatly interested him that he at once proceeded to fill out, correct and modernize them. Up to this time he had been in commercial life, but having been attacked with the genealogical fever he gradually abandoned active business and adopted genealogy as a profession, in which he has acquired a reputation of being one of the most scrupulous and expert of workers of today and an authority, especially on the difficult problems of English research. The attractions of English work and the constantly increasing calls on his professional abilities soon made it necessary for him to abandon work on the American branch of the family and some fifteen years since he turned over to the writer the nucleus of what is now the American section of this work.

The fact that the birth place in England of the original Emigrant was early known, as well as the place and date of his marriage, may perhaps make it seem to the lay reader, to the amateur genealogist and possibly even to his professional brother who has confined his labors to American investigation, that it would be a simple task to trace out the English family, especially in a country where family pedigrees have been so carefully preserved. This is almost as far from the truth as possible. III our own case, many years of labor have been expended in tracing the English line, with a net result of seven generations in that line of which three are probably correct and four definitely proved.

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