The Lucas Book is a handsome leather bound typescript volume of the Lucas genealogy beginning with the burial of a Richard Lucas in 1572, and continuing down showing all the descendants down to about 1910.
We’ve had it in the family for many years, but the first time I remember really having a good look at it was about 1979, when I first came down from Whitehorse to live in Vancouver. I was fascinated by it, and it was around then that I first began to take an interest in genealogy.
Whoever compiled the Lucas Book has remained anonymous. Now that I’ve examined it in such detail I can see that many people were involved as the information is presented in slightly different ways for different families. The degree of detail varies, as does the currency of the information. The latest date in the book is about 1910, and I assume that is for a family fairly close to the compiler as some families have less current information on the whole.
The layout of the information on the descendants of John Lucas the Younger family (from p.16 on) is different from that of the descendants of his brother William Lucas (m. Phebe Gray, p.3), and I think that the main editor was someone from the John Lucas side rather than the Willam Lucas side. Just my hunch but I’m not completely sure. The William Lucas side had more illustrious and well-known descendants, but fleshing out the history of John Lucas the Younger’s side has also brought out some very interesting people.
I photocopied the book and then scanned the copies, so that many of the scanned images shown have pencil notations I’ve made to the copies. The original book has no notations. I’ve put some links in to a few pages.
Earliest Ancestors
Page 1. Here are the earliest ancestors of the Lucas family. At this early date nothing is really known for sure, and the family tree at the Hitchin Museum is slightly different for the early years. On this page is William Lucas (m.1671), one of the earliest Lucases to be a member of the Society of Friends. Of all the information in the book I’d imagine this page to have the greatest potential for errors and tracking them down would be a big (but interesting!) project.
Page 2. The second page begins with William Lucas and Mary Field in 1671, and shows their three children, the youngest of whom, another William Lucas, married Sarah Rudd in 1709. Again, this page has a lot of unverified information which may have some errors that could be corrected on further investigation.
William Lucas and Sarah Rudd had a number of children, including two sons, William (b.1710) and John (b.1716), who subsequently became the heads of the two principal branches of the Lucas family. The first branch, that of William Lucas, remained in Hitchin longer and continued their ties to the Society of Friends for quite a few generations.
The second son, John Lucas, is the head of the branch from whom I am descended. He was born a Quaker, but his wife Judith Marsom was not a Quaker so their marriage is not recorded in the Society registers. He was, however, buried in the Hitchin Friends Burial Ground, but in the burial register is a notation “Not a member of the Society”. Interesting that membership was not a criteria for being buried in the Quaker burial ground as he wasn’t the only one with that notation. There is a Judith Lucas recorded as having been buried in Middlesex around the right time period, but I suspect this is not the right one.
