Lum / Lumm family

Lumm families of America

concentrating on those in the Mid-Atlantic States and the Midwest, particularly the family of Jesse Lumm, Revolutionary War soldier from Loudoun County, VA, who died in Beaver County, Pennsylvania
...but now accepting data on Lums of the Southern U.S., including the Carolinas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas

The surname Lum is quite rare in the United States -- and made rarer because it is often spelled in different ways, such as Lumm and Lumb. Fancy script for the capital L has even been mistranscribed as an S, resulting in "Summ"! (And there are other variations such as "Lunn," which complicates things by being also a separate surname in its own right.) Lum is a Germanic name found among 19th-century immigrants from countries ranging from Norway to Germany to England. Edward H. Lum, in his 1927 book Genealogy of the Lum Family, provides some meanings of the name, including a deep wooded valley, ravine, or wood grove; or a deep pool in a riverbed. In Celtic areas such as Scotland and Ireland, it meant chimney or smoke vent, and in the Shetland Islands a rift or opeining in the sky as the fog clears; but these are of different linguistic groups and mere coincidence, probably of no importance to the surname.

An early family of the name was among the 17th-century settlers of "New Sweden" in the Delaware River Valley, from which may have come some of those branches living in Maryland and Virginia who are the forebears of numerous Midwestern Lumm and Lum families, including the one with which I am connected. But equally possible is that these descend from an English family that settled in Connecticut, Long Island, and northern New Jersey. Their immigrant ancestor was John Lum, in Stamford, CT, in 1642. The descendants of this John Lum are covered in Edward H. Lum's 1927 book, plus a 1993 update by Richard Lum bearing the same title. (For this reason, I'm not devoting much space to the northeastern Lums.) Among them, one Samuel Lum supposedly moved from northern New Jersey to North Carolina and his sons William and Jesse started a Southern line in Natchez, Mississippi, which spread to Louisiana and Texas.

I first came across the Lumm surname when I found a marriage record for a great-great-great grandmother's parents. James Fowler married Nancy Lumm on 16 Sept. 1830 in Columbiana County, Ohio. (For details on the Fowlers, see my Fowler web page. Checking the 1830 Ohio census for the county, I did not find the couple as a separate household, but found James' father, also James Fowler--and also two others of the surname Lumm: Jesse and James. As James was only a few years older than Nancy, I suspected that Jesse was their father. But I had no proof. Still don't, in fact--only the circumstantial evidence of their 1830 proximity, plus the fact that in the 1850 census Nancy said she was born in Virginia--which, I later learned, was where Jesse was from.

My breakthrough on this line came with GenForum's Lum Family Forum, where I found a posting from Michelle Martens of Iowa regarding Jesse Lumm. She had already done considerable work looking for details about Jesse and his probable family in the 19th century Midwest, including looking up Census records. We have corresponded for the past several months and I have tried to follow up on her leads through the LDS Family History Library here in Salt Lake City -- but the results are still quite scanty. Michelle had the idea of starting an online list or web page devoted to the Lumm family, and I agreed to give it a try via GeoCities. The page I built resided at GeoCities and then Yahoo! until the latter discontinued support for the GeoCities pages, after which I migrated the data into Rootsweb.

It is our hope to make contact with other Lumm descendants, so that we can pool our resources and maybe, with Luck, get to "the root of Jesse," so to speak. If you have the Lumm surname, and especially if they lived in the Midwest, we would like to hear from you. Contact either Michelle Martens at [email protected], or me, Ken Rockwell at: [email protected]

I'm also curious about the Southern Lum line which came out of the Carolinas and settled at Nachez, Mississippi, when that area was still called British West Florida. This line, which spread to Louisiana and Texas, included a number of Jesse Lumms over the years as well, although nothing guarantees any close relationship to my Jesse.

Anyway, let's hear from you. Anyone who wishes to contribute data on Lums and Lumms in the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, or South is welcome to, and I will give them due credit as the contributor of the data. (For the sake of privacy, though, I won't include vital dates on living individuals.)

A new idea regarding a new technology: DNA testing! If direct-line male descendants of various Lum and Lumm families were to team up and arrange a DNA test, we might see if there's indication of multiple migrations, or whether the Southern Lums and my mid-Atlantic Lumms are related, and these to the Northern (New York-rooted) Lums. I recently coordinated such a project for the Rockwell and Rockhold surnames, and could advise on how to go about doing a Lum test. Contact me if interested, and I'll put you in touch with each other.

--updated Jan. 10, 2003

Go to Jesse Lumm (VA/OH/PA) page
For records on Lumms and Lums from Virginia and Maryland, see the Mid-Atlantic file
Go to Lumms of the Midwest
Go to Lumm Census records Go to Southern Lums/Lumms