The Reverend Edwin William Smith FRAI (1876 – 1957) was a Primitive Methodist missionary/anthropologist and author who was born in South Africa, studied at Elmfield College from 1888, and then worked in Africa.
The scholar of African Christian history, Adrian Hastings refers to 1925–1950 as "the age of Edwin Smith".
His father, John Smith (1840–1915), went to Aliwal North in 1874 and spent ten of the next fourteen years there.
In 1899 he married Julia, daughter of James Fitch of Peasenhall, Suffolk.
(selected from thirty-five titles) Archival materials on Smith are to be found in three locations: