Brush Families of the British Isles

Brush Families of the British Isles

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Previous: Chapter 17.A: A single Irish source?

Section 17
Ireland to 1851

Chapter 17.K

Richard of Virginia

At the end of section 17.A we identified Crean BRUSH senior [Ir12] as having had three sons, John, James and Crean. Firmly evidenced by a memorialised deed of 1740. Which places them each as adults born prior to 1719.

There is a suggestion in multiple Ancestry family trees that a Richard Archibald Brush of Virginia was born in Clogher in Ireland around 1700 and had a son Crane around 1740. There is no direct evidence of his being another son of Crane senior but the dates are about right. Most of this information is unsourced but I have found one reference for a Crane Brush in a 1785 'enumeration' in Botetourt County Virginia. The idea of an Irish emigrant appears to be based solely on the use of the Crane name - which given its rarity seems a reasonable one. Could the shadowy Richard be a brother of Crane [IrR12]? The best summary is in a query posted by James Holt in a genealogy.com forum.

"A Richard Brush (perhaps also known as Archibald and born 1695-1715) died in Augusta County Virginia in 1762/3, leaving known children Blakely and Elizabeth and suspected children Ann, Crane, James, and William.Elizabeth married Samuel Norwood and moved to South Carolina by 1790.Blakely moved to Shelby County Kentucky after 1800.Crane and James moved to Kentucky by the 1790s - where they appear on tax lists in Lincoln/Jefferson and Bourbon counties, respectively. (Nothing more is known of Ann and William.)Several male decendants used the given names of Blakely, Crane and/or Richard, this being a clue that these estimated siblings may be related.In 1738 a Richard Brush (perhaps the man who died c1763) baptized two daughters (twins?) Elizabeth and Annie in Neshaminy Church in Bucks County Pennsylania; these baptisms appear in the records of the First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia.Before that I am not certain where this family was; but after searching for several years, I have come to believe that they likely came from Ireland (counties Tyrone, Armagh, or Down) where the surnames Brush, Crane, and Blakely were relatively frequent before 1850 in the area between the towns of Omagh, Clogher, Armagh, and Belfast.Several other Richard and Crane Brush men certainly lived in this area since the 1600s.(Blakely could well have been Richard's wife's maiden name.) Other possible origins are counties Dublin (esp St Michans Parish) and Longford in Ireland"

There is also a reference to Crane in a tax assesment of real and personal estate in 1803 showing him as non-resident at Bolton, Washington County, New York. The Bolton website includes the following puzzling quote. "Following the war years, land grants were issued to the retired soldiers as a reward for military service. The old Colonial military patents issued by King George III from 1769 to 1771 (Abeel, Campbell, Ogilvie, Brush, Garland, McDonald and Porter Patents) were located along the Schroon River." This may however have been a grant to the anti-revolutionary Crane Brush [IR??} discussed in chapter ??