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Thomas Lacy, immigrant, reputed to have come from Wales to Virginia between 1860 and 1684 and to have settled in that part of New Kent County which years later was cut off into Hanover County, an area which was then on the very frontier of the early and somewhat scattered settlements. It is this Thomas who is credited with being the progenitor of a long and prolific line of Lacys who resided in various parts of Virginia, principally in the counties of Hanover, Louisa, Goochland, Albemarle, Powhatan, Chesterfield, Henrico, Buckingham, Bedford, and Halifax, spreading to the Carolinas and Georgia. With Virginia as the focal point, descendants spread fanlike to all points south, west, and northwest. Today descendants of this line live in almost every state in the Union. This branch is by far the largest of any of the pioneer Lacy families of Virginia. By tradition, subject Thomas was of French Huguenot stock, perhaps a son of a Huguenot who fled France and settled in Wales. This tradition of French Huguenot ancestry exists among widely separated branches of the family, some of whom have been out of contact with one another for generations. The writing of Rev. Drury Lacy (1758-1815) states: "His father, William Lacy, a grandson of the immigrant of English descendant and Norman-French extraction. His mother, Elizabeth Rice, was a cousin to Benjamin Rice of Bedford, the father of Rev. Doctors John H. and Benjamin H. Rice." Thomas Lacy lived to a very ripe old age and he was an exceedingly tall man. - Hazel Potter Lawler, The Stephen Lacy Family of Goochland County, Virginia
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