Them Burfords

I didn't get any feedback yet from yesterday's post.  So I've made an executive decision to continue in alphabetical order with the branches of the family tree. I've already covered the Barnetts and the Bullards, and I'm not going to do the Beekmans because they are just a tendril offshoot from the Thomas/Treat branch. So that brings us to the Burfords. 

The Arnolds, which we just finished, were related to my mother's (Wathada) mother's (Cleffie) mother's (Annie) father, John Henry Arnold. (His mother was a Bullard.)

The Burfords are related to my mother's (Wathada) father's (Lester) father, Alexander Oscar Burford. So, here we go. (If you want more information about the Burford branch of the family tree, you can find it in my books When We Were Irish, and Cloud of Witnesses: Alexander and Lora, available on Amazon.)

PREFACE

“I don't think I will ever dig up any Irish ancestors because I don't think we have any of those. (After my whole life-time of being Irish, I don't know if I can adjust to being English or not!) Our Irish friends told me last year that Burford is not an Irish name, and they thought it was an English name. So I thought that whoever our ancestors were, they probably went from England to Ireland sometime in years past and lived there (and probably married Irish people), until they came to this country on a boat. So a few weeks ago, when I decided to track them down back to whichever one came over here on that boat, the first thing I did was check name origins at some website on the Internet. (That website seems not to exist any more now!) Sure enough, Burford was definitely an English name. Gibson is a name that originated only in Scotland, and it even told which area of Scotland. So Grandma Burford's father's family did originally come from Scotland. But her mother's family (those Gards) came from England. I have them back to 1559 in Poundstock, England. Some of them came from Devonshire. So as far as I can tell, nobody in our ancestry originated in Ireland.”  

– Wathada Burford Thomas

PHOTO: Burford, England