INTRODUCTION TO THE HOUSE OF THE BURGESSES
This book is a guide to the descendants of one man: William Burges of Richmond (later King George) County, Virginia, who died in April of 1712 on his farm in northeastern Virginia. When the first edition of this genealogy was published in 1983, I naively believed that it was the last word on the subject, that very little should or could be added to my basic work. No one could have been more surprised than I to find the book taking on a life of its own. This second edition of the Burgess genealogy is ten times larger than the original, and better organized and presented, with the number of direct, name-line descendants of William Burges doubling from 2,400 individuals in the earlier book to 4,690 here, and the total number of descendants now exceeding 25,100. One major new branch of the family, the line of Edward Burgess Jr., has been added, and I have refined, corrected, and updated the original data to strengthen the roots from which all of our families sprout.
The origins of this volume can be traced to the summer of my sixteenth year, in 1964, when I first started asking my grandparents questions about our family. I found an antique Underwood in my grandmother's cellar, and meticulously typed out four sheets of data, two on my mother's family and two on my father's, all that they then knew about our past. I still have those original notes. Three years later I found my great-uncle, George O. Burgess, and the hunt was on. For four decades I have pursued this endless detective story with whatever time I could spare from my career. I was fortunate to locate other cousins who helped along the way, and was blessed to encounter my wife, Mary, who has shared my interest in genealogy and in so many other things.
The challenge is a deceptively simple one: to find every Burgess who has ever lived who is related to us. In recent years I have also become more concerned with the preservation of Burgess family heritage, having become acutely aware of how much has been lost over the past three centuries to indifference and the accidents of time. At one time all of the questions about the origins of the Burgess family could easily have been answered contemporaneously by any members of those families. No one thought such things were important enough to write down, or if they did put them on paper the documents have not survived to the present day. My primary intent with this genealogy is to recover whatever of our heritage still remains, and to preserve it by publishing it and disseminating it as widely as possible.
Of course, the further back one goes, the less one finds, until finally the well runs completely dry. This is the case with every family tree. Thus, some of the material in this book remains sketchy, particularly with generations prior to 1900, displaying very little of the real personalities of the men and women who were our ancestors; in most cases, nothing survives of these individuals beyond their names and dates. Whenever I've found some illuminating document or story, I've always tried to include them.
For present-day generations I have relied very heavily on the memories and records of living members of the family, supplemented by research in courthouses, archives, libraries, and cemeteries. I've been pleased by the almost universal cooperation I've received from distant cousins who couldn't possibly have known who I was; without their help, this book could never have been published. Much work remains to be done, of course, and more families need to be found or contacted. Some lines are incomplete because I've been unable to locate living descendants of these branches, others because I could not confirm that a specific individual died without heirs, or because I was unable to get a response from current descendants.
Additions and corrections can be sent to me at P.O. Box 2845, San Bernardino, CA 92406, or via
E-mail Michael
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
To find a specific family member, please look in the indexes at the end of this book. The first index lists those born with the name Burgess in alphabetical order by their full given names, with the page numbers where they appear in the text; the second index records Burgesses who are apparently unrelated to our family but have some other affiliation, the third lists slaves owned by Burgesses by their given names, the fourth lists the first names of Burgess spouses whose maiden names are unknown, and the fifth records all other individuals (including descendants of female lines) mentioned in the book in alphabetical order by surname, and then by given name. The contents pages also provide a thumbnail sketch of the family through its first six generations, and the seven genealogical charts similarly display in graphic form the relationships of those early generations.
This book is a guide to those born with the name Burgess, to those individuals adopted into or out of the family, and to their Burgess-named descendants; female members of the family are listed in more compact form with their children and grandchildren normally embedded entirely within their own entries, or expanded as necessary through a series of paragraphs that are progressively indented for each generation. The genealogy is arranged in descending order by branch and family from the most senior to the most junior lines. Complete families are grouped together, with the grandfather or father and each of his children listed in order of birth; those sons or grandsons who carried on the line may sometimes be mentioned briefly with a reference to a more complete entry later in the book if their own descendants exceed three or four generations. The numbers in front of each name indicate both the generation level of each individual and his or her order of birth in each family; for example, the number in front of my name, "10a," shows that I'm a tenth-generation descendant of William Burges (our original ancestor), and that I'm the oldest of my father's four children. These numbers are not unique, but are repeated over and over again, and have usually been used only with name-line descendants born with the name Burgess.
A typical entry tries to provide the full names of persons and the full dates and places of vital events, plus a mention of the census years, tax lists, city directories, military service, and other records in which an individual appears (particularly for those living before 1920), and something about the individual's career or accomplishments. The details included in a particular entry may vary due to lack of knowledge or response.
SOME COMMON QUESTIONS I'VE BEEN ASKED
People always want to know what kind of heritage we have, so they tend to ask the same questions over and over again. Here are the responses I would have given if I'd had time to consider each one carefully.
1. Where in Europe does our family come from?
The trail for our Burgess line ends in Virginia in 1712, and there's absolutely no hard evidence to indicate where we lived before then. Oral traditions in separate branches of the family have contributed many different stories about our origins, but all are too far removed from the actual arrival of our family in North America to be taken with more than a grain of salt. These stories variously claim that the Burgess family derives from England, Scotland, Wales, France, Ireland, Germany, or even Switzerland. My own guess would be the British Isles generally, although France would run a strong second.
2. What does the name "Burgess" mean?
A "burgess" was a free citizen of an English borough. A borough was a town or region in England that had the right to elect representatives to the British Parliament. In Scotland, the word had a slightly different meaning, a borough being any large incorporated town (Edinburgh, for example). Later, representatives to the Parliament, having been elected from boroughs, began calling themselves "burgesses." In colonial Maryland and Virginia, the legislature was called the House of Burgesses, and their elected representatives burgesses; the use of the word "burgess" for this purpose went out of fashion in America in the 1780s, and in England by the 1840s.
The word derives originally from the Latin word burgus, meaning town, and the related word burgensis, meaning citizen; with various foreign-language cognates, such as the French bourgeois/burgeis/bourges, the Spanish borjes, and the German burger, and so on. The Norman invasion of England in 1066 brought French words such as burgeis into the English language, often in corrupted form. By the thirteenth century, Burges(s) or Burgeis was being used as a surname in England, and by Elizabethan times, the name had become common in certain British counties. It was also fairly common in colonial America, more so proportionately than it is today. Also, many foreign immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century changed similar-sounding names (such as Burgeis, Bourgeois, Borjes, Bourges, or Burger) to the more acceptable, anglicized form of Burgess.
Prior to the Revolutionary War, when spellings were not fixed, the name often appears in records as Burges or sometimes even as Burge, and with many other variations (Burgis, Berges, Barguss, Burghess, etc.); these gradually became standardized to Burgess in most of our families after the year 1800, although one or two branches used "Burges" into modern times.
3. Are there any famous Burgesses?
None that we're related to. There aren't many scoundrels either. I'm afraid we're a pretty dull bunch. We do have several members who were rich by the standards of their day, some who killed or were killed in the heat of passion, a few who died in rather interesting ways, and a great many who were just modest successes in their own communities. Most of our family members were fairly ordinary, middle-class citizens. I've included a number of the more exotic stories that I've found, but have deliberately omitted events or scandals in which currently living individuals were involved, with a cut-off date of roughly seventy years ago.
4. Are all Burgess families related to each other?
No. Our family constitutes about 2.5% (one out of 40) of all those named Burgess residing in the United States. I reached that conclusion by matching the number of family members recorded in the Social Security death index (13,666) against the total number of deaths recorded (46,000,000) to generate an estimated percentage of .000297 for Burgess-named individuals in the general population of the United States. Multiplying that percentage times the estimated number of persons living in the U.S. (250,000,000) gives some 74,250 Burgesses resident in America. Roughly 59% of all the Burgesses in our family who ever lived are alive today, or 2,768 individuals, which, if divided by 74250, yields a final percentage of .0372794 of the total. However, this doesn't account for the fact that half of these individuals are women, many of whom married outside of the family; nor does it factor in widows recorded with the Burgess name. I've therefore reduced the total by one third, leaving a percentage of about 2.46%. This figure obviously includes much guesswork, and could be off significantly in either direction. There are at least twenty or thirty apparently unrelated Burgess families living in the American colonies prior to the Revolutionary War.
5. Why doesn't your book include all of the descendants in the female lines of William
Burges?
I recently tried to project the number of descendants in all lines of our ancestor, William Burges of King George Co., Virginia, based upon the 4,690 known descendants in the male line. Figuring that males and females divide about equally for each generation, and counting the actual numbers for the first five generations, I "guestimated" that William has over one million descendants.
6. Why didn't you include more pictures?
Two reasons: running a lot of pictures would cost so much that the price of the book would have to increase drastically; also, many of the pictures that I have wouldn't reproduce very well, either because they're faint or a copy of a copy.
7. Where's our coat of arms?
Unfortunately, there's none we're legally entitled to. A "coat of arms" was always granted to an individual, not a family, and normally inherited by that individual's eldest son, just like any other honor coming from the crown, and so on down the line. Only proven descendants in the male line of the individual in question are legally entitled to display a particular coat of arms. There may be many different coats of arms for the same surname, or even for the same family, particularly if it's a common name; but since we're unable to establish any connection with a European ancestor, we're out of luck. The coats of arms offered for sale by commercial firms are, I'm sorry to say, just a bunch of hokum.
8. What kind of work did our ancestors do?
Most of the Burgesses (and just about everyone else) prior to the Civil War were farmers. There were also a few ministers (who usually farmed as well), tradesmen (blacksmiths, for example), and soldiers (but only on a temporary basis). Very few members of the family before the Civil War had more than minimal schooling, although the majority of men could at least read and write. By the mid-1800s a few of the wealthier families began sending some of their brighter sons to academies or colleges. Girls became housewives or old
maids-in the "good old days" there just weren't many other choices available. Most women were not educated beyond the most basic level, and often were not literate, particularly in colonial times.
Life in those days was hard and simple, with few of the amenities we're accustomed to. Infant and child mortality was high, medical care was primitive, and it wasn't uncommon to have whole families wiped out within a few days by epidemics of, say, typhoid or cholera. Country life was far more communal than it is now, centered very closely around church and neighbor. The Burgesses were protestant from the beginning, originally belonging to the Church of England prior to the American Revolution, and then adhering to whatever protestant denomination was available as family branches moved west. In the late nineteenth century, we begin to see many more railroad and factory workers, as the young men begin moving off their farms into the big cities. This trend continues to accelerate into the 1920s and '30s.
9. How do I know our ancestry is correct?
For those who want to check my sources, I've tried to provide enough information for any competent researcher to follow my trail, family by family, branch by branch. This is particularly true with the older generations, where I've gone into much greater detail in citing evidence. The underlying logic of the family structure is detailed more fully in the section on evidence, and I've also provided transcriptions of key documents. Since the vast majority of my readers won't be interested in redoing the work, I suggest that a good measure of the book's reliability is your own family. Is it complete? Is it accurate? If so, then probably the rest of the book is, too. (And if it isn't, please tell me!)
10. What do the Roman numerals after some names mean?
I inserted these numbers after certain given names to indicate that there's more than one person born with the surname Burgess who has exactly the same name. Identical names are numbered in order by date of birth. The numbers aren't fixed, since they change as persons with those names are added or deleted from the genealogy. Because of this, I've put them in parentheses to indicate that they don't really exist except in the context of this book. I've kept them because I find them very useful in keeping track of individuals with very similar monikers.
11. Why did you write this book?
I've always enjoyed history, and genealogy is history in its most personal form. I also appreciate the "puzzle" element, the piecing together of little bits of information to form a coherent whole; solving mysteries and making sense of disparate pieces of information are things I enjoy doing. I like talking to people and traveling, and this is a relatively harmless way of accomplishing both, and having something more to show for it than a tan. Finally, I discovered, after marrying my wife in 1976, that we shared the same interest in genealogy, and that she had been working on her family history for many years. Now it's something we can do together. Over the years, we gradually began spending most of our free time digging around in libraries, courthouses, and cemeteries. Since the work never can be finished, we find it eternally fascinating.
ABOUT THE FORMAT
The following sections provide technical information on how this book is structured and why, and the underlying evidence for the family structure as presented:
I have used in this book an adaptation of the Burke's Peerage format, which
features a descending, hierarchical structure keyed to the paternal line, each successive
generation being indented one "m" space further than the previous. In the Burke's system, different styles of non-unique identification
numbers are used to designate each generation, beginning with the stammvater, who is unnumbered, and continuing with boldface numbers, regular face numbers, numbers in parentheses, and then numbers followed by italicized "a's," "b's," "c's," etc. These levels are not fixed, but start over again with the continuing head of a particular family branch (each succeeding monarch or peer, for example). Boldface dots in front of each name indicate currently living descendants.
I have maintained Burke's basic generational structure, each successive level being partially identified through set paragraph indentations, and I have also used a variation of their non-unique identification numbers. However, I assign each individual a generation number equal to the actual generation of descent from the person's most distant ancestor (William Burges of Richmond [later King George] Co., Virginia, being the first), followed by a letter which indicates order of birth within each person's family, beginning with "a." Generation level in some formats is indicated by a superscripted number following the given name of the individual; I have used a modified version of this scheme in headers to show immediate descent through the first five generations, but have eschewed such numbers in the main text, where they look too much like footnotes.
In other genealogical formats, all persons of a particular generation are grouped together into one section, and listed with their children, whose entries appear in turn in the next generation's chapter, and so on; with this type of arrangement, understanding immediate family relationships is virtually impossible without plotting the structure on a separate piece of paper. In still other formats, birth order in a family is indicated with lower case Roman numerals; however, these cause problems when one is trying to create standard indentation levels with word processing programs, since Roman numerals vary widely in width. In my book, the number "9c" tells us immediately that this individual belongs to the ninth generation, and is the third in order of birth in his or her family. All members of the ninth generation have their entries indented to the same level, a level unique to that generation. I have not used unique sequential identification numbers for each individual because they are confusing to the uninitiated, and must be changed with each new addition to the family.
With the Burke's format, one can see immediately at a glance the structure of a particular branch, except when a member of an early generation has a significant number of interpolated descendants. The Burgess family now stretches twelve generations at its greatest extent, and reached the thirteenth during the late 1990s. This creates problems of continuity and structure that defy the best possible genealogical formats ever devised. The 25,000+ individuals included herein cannot be readily comprehended in a family structure even by the genealogist who has constructed this book. Therefore, certain compromises have had to be made.
As with the Burke's volumes, I have elected to "carry over" certain key individuals (those with numerous descendants) in the male line; unlike the Burke's format, however, I have maintained generation-level indentation and entry numbering as before. In practical terms, this usually means that a male progenitor with at least three or four generations of descendants will be listed under his father together with his brothers and sisters in a "bare bones" record that gives only his name and date and place of birth, so that one can see how he fits into his immediate family structure; and then will be repeated with a more complete entry and a full list of his descendants at some later point in the volume.
This format tends to preserve "family clusters," particularly those living in the same area, together with their immediate cousins, and makes possible immediate comprehension of at least one's closest family members. I have provided "see" references back to each of these individuals' progenitors, so that the average user can, through the index, immediately "hop" up or down the family tree. In every case my choices have been dictated by an effort to make the material readily accessible, comprehensible, and understandable by the most unsophisticated of readers. Descendants of Burgess daughters have been compacted into a single entry under the progenitor's name, but even here I have spread the data as far as necessary to make them comprehensible, sometimes over several pages.
I have also chosen not to use footnotes, which I find intrusive in a book destined primarily for popular consumption, but instead have cited key evidence as part of each individual entry. For those born after 1900 (exactly two-thirds of the family), I have relied heavily on personal testimony from family members in those branches, both by mail and through telephone interrogation, supplemented with on-site investigation into whatever vital, court, and land records are available, or through research at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah and its local branches in Southern California, and in other library and archival collections. These entries include very few citations of evidence, since the sources in most cases have been immediate relatives; individuals who have been particularly helpful in supplying information for their respective branches have been noted in the text. I have attempted to identify cities of residence for all family members, living or dead, without supplying exact addresses.
For persons born prior to 1900, I have tried to provide, at the minimum, a listing of every census in which the individual appears, keyed to year, state, and county (and those censuses in which the person has not been found); dates of birth, death, and marriages keyed to state and county, where they are extracted from official records, or specific citations to other sources, where appropriate; a list of reference tools in which the person's biography has appeared (with full bibliographical data); known military service with exact names and numbers of units; career details (most male individuals from this period were farmers, and most women were housewives); known movements and resettlements; appearances in tax lists; burial places; and any key evidence of descent, including wills, probates, land, and other records, with full citations to county, book number, date, and page number.
I have also tried to show how this evidence was interpreted. From such signposts along the way, I believe that any knowledgeable researcher can follow my reasoning, and can confirm any specific piece of evidence easily and independently, and why I thought it important enough to record. A summation of the logic underlying the entire family structure, with its strengths and weaknesses, is also included in the section, "Evaluating the Evidence." Key documents have been transcribed verbatim in the text.
The design of this genealogy represents a deliberate attempt on my part to devise a new, more attractive, more usable format for very long and complex genealogies. The formats currently accepted by the National Genealogical Society and the major genealogical journals certainly have merit, particularly for the presentation of shorter genealogical structures in a scholarly milieu; but they display significant structural weaknesses when employed with larger families. The basic difficulty, as always, is to find a format that is both unobtrusive and simultaneously instructive, to discover a structure that can present complicated and intricate masses of data without having the average, uninitiated member of the public constantly stumbling over them. Mine is not the only solution, of course, or even the best possible answer to the problem, but it is the one that I have found most satisfying for this particular book.
Inevitably, those portions of this book dealing with earlier generations are based not just on fact, but on personal judgments extrapolated from sometimes scarce or even contradictory data. Sometimes other conclusions could have been drawn from the same information. I've been careful to label my claims clearly, stating where I am sure and where I am not so sure, and where I'm somewhere in between. What is here is as good as I could make it, given the inevitable pressures of time and money.
In the end, I am reasonably certain that a middle-aged, middle-class farmer named William Burges who died in northeastern Virginia in 1712 is the common ancester of most of those listed in this book (except for the John Meredith Burgess line). I welcome corrections and updates for a third edition five or ten years hence.
EVALUATING THE EVIDENCE
