Rhees, William Jones (13 March 1830–18 March 1907), government administrator and archivist, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Benjamin Rush Rhees, a physician, and Margaret Grace Evans. Rhees’s grandfather, the Reverend Morgan J. Rhees, had come to America from Wales, and his father was a direct descendant also of Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Rhees’s mother’s forebears included Evan Evans, a colonel of militia in the Revolution, and John Lukens, a member of the commission appointed in 1781 for the extension of the Mason-Dixon Line....
