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Most family histories, even ones prepared by the most learned genealogists, will be useful to a relatively small number of researchers, thereby making them unsuitable for commercial publication. Every so often, however, a family history comes along that commands the attention of a commercial publisher. My Neck of the Woods: The Lewis Families of Southeastern North Carolina and Northeastern South Carolina is one such family history.

My Neck of the Woods is the account of five different Lewis families known to have inhabited Darlington, Dillon, Florence, Marion, Horry, and Georgetown counties in South Carolina; and Brunswick, Columbus, Robeson, Cumberland, Sampson, Duplin, Pender, New Hanover, and Bladen counties in North Carolina. For each family, like that of William and Mary Lewis who settled in Brunswick County in 1731 (Key Lewis Family #1), Mr. Lewis traces descendants into the 20th century and, with the aid of computer-generated diagrams, illustrates their migration patterns throughout the Carolinas. Working from the U.S. federal censuses from 1790 through 1920, court records, secondary sources, and countless Internet sites, Mr. Lewis has laid the groundwork for genealogies of five separate Carolina Lewis families. Additionally, the appendices to the volume house a bounty of marriage, death, land, and other source records that constitute yet more clues about the Lewises.

Mr. Lewis' painstakingly prepared book also comes with a CD containing supplementary information about the Lewises that was available on the author's web site at the time of publication. For example, the researcher will find tables listing Lewis households named in U.S. federal censuses between 1790 and 1920. Other tables furnish time lines of all known Lewis men within each of the North or South Carolina counties within the scope of the work. Once researchers load the CD, they can go beyond the core findings of the published work to look for family relationships and patterns on the disk. In fact, Mr. Lewis hopes that researchers will visit his Internet site and share their own findings, additions, or corrections with him. In conclusion, while the author would be the first to assert that My Neck of the Woods, book and CD, is a work in progress, we are pleased to bring it to the attention of the genealogical community because of the scale of his undertaking. We are confident that Lewis and allied family researchers far and wide will be the beneficiaries.