Alexander Burrows date unknown. Picture shared by Milton Davis on Ancestry.com
I know a great deal about Alexander Burrows' life and his death here in California. He married my Great Great Grandmother Elizabeth Jane Hurd sometime before 1875 and they had a large family which they raised in Grass Valley. I had very little information about his life prior to 1870. My Auntie Claire had some basic information regarding his birth and early life based on family stories; from the information she provided I was not able to go any farther back than his birth in Riverstown, Sligo County, Ireland or find any other information on his immediate family. In genealogy work, this is called hitting a "brick wall".
The only information I had to go on was provided by Llloyd H. Phillips, the husband of Elizabeth Burrows Davis, daughter of Gladys Evelyn Burrows. He was living in Oklahoma at the time he and my Auntie Claire were corresponding regarding family history. He shared his wife Betty's notes about the Burrows family. He stated that Alexander was born in the town of Riverstown, Sligo County Ireland. His parents were English Protestants who conquered Ireland under Lord Cromwell of Orange. They were descendants of Oliver Cromwell of Kent, England. He graduated from the University of Dublin. That is all the information I had to go on. I had no idea who his parents or family were in Ireland, if he had siblings or why he would want to leave his place of birth to come to an unknown country and build a life.
To help with this mystery, I first looked at the history of the part of Ireland Alexander Burrows came from.
Entrance to Riverstown Ireland
A nice, short history of Sligo Town can be found at sligo-ireland.com. Sligo is fairly near Riverstown and both towns most likely share a similar history.....
Henry the VIII threw off the church's allegiance to the Roman Catholic church in 1534 and began his attack on the Irish chieftains, requiring their submission to the English throne. Insurrection and ruin marked the countryside for quite a long time. Cromwell was sent to Ireland in 1649 because the country was in such chaos. Dispossessed Catholics who had their lands confiscated earlier in history were consequently rebelling against Protestant planters and settlers by uprising and killing them by the thousands. Protestants killed Catholics, including those living in Sligo. Cromwell did indeed gain complete control of Ireland, but this control came by way of the horrendous and ruthless process of ethnic cleansing. Irish Catholics were forbidden to own land. The dispossessed were shipped to the Caribbean as slaves to the West Indian sugar plantations and 63,000 acres of Sligo land was handed over to Cromwell's soldiers. Of course, this is a simplification of a very complex issue with many levels of interpretation. The "curse of Cromwell" still to this day hangs over Anglo-Irish relations (olivercromwell.org).
So, part of the story I had to go on could very well have been true. The Burrows in Ireland lived in an area that was given to Protestant English settlers by Cromwell. But, were they direct descendants of Oliver Cromwell of Kent? In order to get to the bottom of the Cromwell link I had to first find Alexander's parents and the family he came from. Up until a few months ago, this was a brick wall. Could DNA clues help me?
I have been researching family history on Ancestry.com for a number of years, and finally agreed to have DNA analysis done. In addition to providing confirmation of my ethnicity (mostly English, Scottish, French (northern Italy, really) , with a little Germanic Europe, Irish, Welsh and Norwegian thrown in) I began to receive DNA matches. These matches would give me more matches, and if the person I was related to had a fairly formed family tree to work from I could begin to build a more complete tree of the branch I was working on. DNA work is time consuming to say the least. But, I did receive several matches of cousins that started to point me to a certain branch of the Burrows in Ireland, which led me to a will and a newspaper article from the Sligo Workhouse.
This is a working tree, still in the process of being confirmed. But, I am excited to share it! I have two cousins who were scheduled to take a trip to Sligo this summer, but due to the COVID pandemic they were not able to go. Finding records is still difficult on line, and this trip would probably have given all of us more concrete evidence of this family line.
I will start with the person who I think is Alexander's father...
Alexander Burrows of Drum 1810-1899. (Drum is also a small village in Sligo county).
His will of 1899 lists his children as follows:
Thomas Rutledge Burrows
Adam Burrows
John Burrows ...."living in America" and has a daughter named Francis
Jane Burrows White, husband of Adam
Alexander Burrows ...."resides in America"
Margaret Burrows Porteous
Esmenia (Amy) Burrows..."residing in America".
DNA has provided some concrete clues that get me closer to confirmation. I share DNA matches with people descended from Margaret Burrows Porteus, Jane Burrows White and Ismena who married a Frazer and moved to New York. Wow! I also share DNA with someone related to a Thomas Burrows who was a doctor in Riverston. He also had a son named Alexander who eventually ended up in Australia. He may have been a brother of Alexander Burrows of Drum.
I also came across this newspaper article on a connected family member's ancestry tree. It gives further confirmation that I might be on to the right family. It is from Sligo, Ireland.
Adam Burrows, a lunatic (1896)
Mr. McCarthy applied to his Honor to have Adam Burrows, at present an imbecile in the Sligo Workhouse, declared a person of unsound mind, and that the property of said Adam Burrows should be taken under the protection and control of the court, to be applied for the advantage of the said Adam Burrows, under direction of the court. The only next of kin of the lunatic were three lawful brothers and sisters--Thomas R Burrows, residing in South America; John Burrows of St. Louis, USA, Alexander Burrows, of California; Jane White, wife of Elliott Adam White, of Whitehall, Dromahair; Elizabeth Butcher Burrows, wife of Haman Butcher, of New York and Margaret Porteus, the wife of Robert Porteus of Clara, the petitioner in this matter. The property consisted of Adam Burrows' life's interest in a sum of L200, placed in trust for him, and four small houses in Manorhamilton, the yearly rent of which is L23. As all the lunatic's brothers and sisters were away, Mr. Porteus , of Clara, his brother-in-law a most respectable man, was anxious to have the lunatic placed under control of the court.
Mr. Porteus having been examined his Honor made an order making Mr. Porteus a guardian of the lunatic, who it was said was treated well in the workhouse being supplied wih tobacco, and his maintenance being paid for.
While going through Auntie Claire's Burrows file this little piece of paper fell out. I think Elizabeth Jane Burrows wrote this. The two things that really stood out to me were the words Drum and Clara. Those place names fit with the family I am researching. That is cause for a genealogy happy dance!
This is as far as I have gotten. There is no mention of his wife, as he was a widower. Names that pop up in searches are Fanny or Francis Motherwell. It also appears that there were many Burrows in this area, and they intermarried with the White family. The Burrows families started immigrating at around the same time. They also tended to use certain names over and over, such as Alexander, Rutledge, Ismena (in various forms), and Jane. So, my work is cut out. I will probably never get to the point of confirming that this family is related to Oliver Cromwell, but it is a great story none the less.
There are other bits and pieces that still need further research. I'm not sure who Elizabeth Butcher Burrows is. There is a death certificate for a John Burrows in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that lists his parents as Alexander Burrows born in Ireland and Jane Lawson born in Ireland. The dates don't exactly match up to the tree I am working on, so he may be a relative. My Great Great Grandfather earned his US naturalization on October 20, 1870 in Schuylk'l County, Pennsylvania. There may be a connection there that needs further exploration.
Did Alexander Burrows attend the University of Dublin? He certainly could have. Alexander of Drum had property and land and might have been prosperous enough to send his son to University. I need to do more research there, too. Road trip, anyone?
And why did the Burrows children make their way to America? History shows that the area they were from in Ireland experienced economic expansion with the growth of the merchant and landlord class in the early 1800's. Industries such as brewing and distilling and the rope, linen and leather trades grew. The railway came to Sligo in 1860. But, the area experienced a cholera epidemic in 1832 as well as the Great Famine in 1847. Both of these episodes hit the area exceptionally hard. It took time for the area to bounce back. (sligo-ireland.com). This, coupled with more positive economic opportunities in America probably made the move more appealing to the Burrows family. It certainly worked out for Alexander Burrows.
A newspaper article from the Daily Morning Union, Grass Valley, July 27, 1904 gives a short history of Alexander's life as a young man. It says...Alexander came to his county when a young man, became a school teacher on the Ridge. While teaching he studied law, and in due time became a practitioner. As an attorney he built up a strong practice.
In the next post I will relate the story of his colorful life in California as a husband, lawyer, literary publisher, community member and of his eventual death by suicide in San Francisco July 26, 1904.
And to end this post I will just say, this is why I love genealogy. It is about 35 miles from Sligo to Killala, Ireland. Killala is where ancestors on my Dad's Boothby side of the family lived in the early 1700's. They were Presbyterian settlers from England. They ended up coming to what is now Maine in 1720 due to strife between the Catholics and the Protestants.
Isn't that amazing????
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