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The English name comes from the Old English lea, which originally meant a wood or glade.  It could derive from the many place names called Lee or describe someone who lived near a meadow.  Other spellings are Lea and Leigh.

Select Lee Resources on The Internet

• The Society of the Lees of Virginia.  Virginia Lees.
• The Lee Family of Virginia.  Descendants of Richard Lee.
• Lees in Ireland.  Lee records in Ireland.

England.   There were early Lees in England, in some cases Norman in origin:

• A Lee family (originally de la Lee) lived at Coton Hall in the parish of Alveley, Shropshire from the 1300's onwards.  This family is believed to have produced Richard Lee, the first of the Lee family in America.  Coton Hall stayed with the English Lees until 1821.
  

• Another Lee family, possibly related, held Langley Manor in Shropshire.  Sir Richard Lee of this family was a Royalist commander during the Civil War.  Only a timber-framed gatehouse remains of their house.
  

• A Lee line began in Cheshire at around the same time and had later branches at Quarrendon and Hartwell in Buckinghamshire and Ditchley in Oxfordshire.  This family had built their wealth from sheep farming and they were prominent local landowners in the 18th century.
  

• Finally, Symon Lee from Worcester moved to London in the early 1400's and was the forebear of an old Lee family in Kent.
  

Later Lee distribution showed a preponderance of Lees in the north of England, in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Ireland.  Lee is an anglicized version of the Gaelic Laoidhigh, an occupational name meaning "poet."  There was a John O'Ladaigh, otherwise known as John O'Lee, who was Bishop of Killala in 1253.  Lees from this source were later to be found in Galway and Cork.  Other Lees - from the Gaelic mac an leagha (son of the physician) - were in Galway and Antrim.  Meanwhile, many Lees in Ireland have been of English planter stock.

America.  The Lees have been a long-established and politically prominent Virginia and Maryland family.  The first of this family in America was Richard Lee who came to Virginia in 1639 and grew wealthy from tobacco.

The main Lee line at the Stratford Hall plantation in Virginia included two signers of the Declaration of Independence and Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general during the Civil War (and a postwar icon of the South's lost cause).  Other Lee homes and lines were at Blenheim, Cobb's Hall, Ditchley, Dividing Creek, Lee Hall, Leesylvania, and Mount Pleasant.

Asia.  In recent years, Asian Lees - either Li from China (the most common Chinese surname) or Lee from Korea (there are seven million Lees in Korea today) - have become more prevalent in the English-speaking world.  For this reason, California has the highest concentration of Lees in America today. 

Bruce Lee was the Chinese-American martial artist and actor.
Ang Lee is the Taiwanese-American film director who produced Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain.