Richardson - January 2023 - Person Sheet
Richardson - January 2023 - Person Sheet
NameAlexander RICHARDSON , GGG Grandson, M
Birthabt 1585, Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland
Death1630, Tyrone, County Tyrone, Ireland
OccupationBurgess From Edinburgh, Scotland
FatherSir James RICHARDSON , M (<1548-1625)
MotherLady Elizabeth DOUGLAS , F (~1562-1631)
Spouses
Birth1590
Death1640, Ireland
FatherJohn STEWART , M
ChildrenWilliam , M (~1615-1673)
 Robert , M
 James , M
Notes for Alexander RICHARDSON
http://welshjournals.llgc.org.uk/browse/viewpage/l...gc-id:1096266/get650 (January 2011):
According to a Richardson family pedigree copied and accepted by Francis Green, Charles Evans Davis Morgan-Richardson was descended paternally from a Scottish family who later settled in Ireland.1
At the beginning of the 17th century the Richardsons were an influential family of Edinburgh burgesses, and Alexander Richardson left his native Scotland for northern Ireland. In 1617 he bought the estate of in county Tyrone and built Drum Manor or Manor Richardson as it was also known. One cannot help suspecting that the acquisition of this estate was connected in some way or another with the many grants of land made by James I to those hardworking, stable and ambitious Scotsmen who benefited from the plantations of Ulster whence the native Irish had been cleared from 1608 onwards. 2

1. The primary source of the Richardson pedigree was compiled by the Reverend Hugh B. Richardson in the Francis Green MSS. Collection, Haverfordwest Public Library, Pembrokeshire, England.

Held Drum estate, Kildress, County Tyrone, by 1618-19.11

http://www.arlindo-correia.com/021001.html (September 2006):
The extended Murdoch family comes out as a very intelligent, middle-class organism, stuffed with independent minds, a model example of Protestant and British Ireland. One group stems from the Brethren and has strong dental and medical associations; the son of one of Iris's first cousins was a Unionist politician, while a second cousin was Professor of Philosophy at Queen's University. Uncle Elias, a Presbyterian married to a Quaker, and Harold, a Quaker, ran the two well-known ironmongers' stores at Dun Laoghaire; another cousin, Brian Murdoch, also a Quaker, became Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin. Cousin Sybil also married a Quaker in Reggie Livingston; and some Richardsons are Quakers. There are today a mere 1,500 Quakers in the whole of Ireland, and if the frequency with which Quakerism turns up in Iris's fiction invites comment, it is also disproportionately reflected in Irish history, being particularly prominent in famine relief, big business and education. If Iris was herself touched by Quakerism's emphasis on integrity, quietness and peace, its belief in the availability of Inner Light to all, that all are capable of growing in wisdom and understanding, it is as likely to be from her headmistress at Badminton School as from her Irish relations that the influence came.
Rene's family represents another strain in the history of Protestant middle-class Ireland: Church of Ireland rather than Presbyterian, Dublin-based rather than from Belfast, former 'plantation squires' rather than 'plantation farmers.' Not yeoman farmers and merchants like the Murdochs, the Richardsons, a complex and highly inter-related family, began as major land-owners in the seventeenth century and became minor gentry in the eighteenth, when Catholics were debarred from sitting in Parliament and holding government office, as well as suffering many petty restrictions, and Protestants had a virtual monopoly of power and privilege. Thereafter, the family's status declines. It mattered to Iris that she was grandly descended from Alexander Richardson, 'planted in Ireland in 1616 to control the wild Irish', as she put it, and living at Crayhalloch in 1619. Readers of An Unofficial Rose will recognise the similar name of the house 'Grayhallock', with its links to the wealthy linen merchants of County Tyrone. Alexander Richardson's family motto 'Virtuti paret robur' is proudly quoted in The Green Knight, and translated as either 'strength obeys virtue' or 'virtue overcometh strength.'
In the 1990s an amateur genealogist from Ulster, Arthur Green, wrote up his patient investigations into Iris's family history. He showed, amongst much else, that she was 'una bambina do sette mesi', painted her parents' marriage as a hasty register office affair, and tried to show that her claims to be descended from the Richardsons of Drum Manor, and her identification with an Anglo-Irish background, were, in his word, 'romanticism'. He also queried whether her father's civil service status on his retirement in 1950 was as exalted as she believed. Green, at the suggestion of A.S. Byatt, sent these findings to Iris's publishers, Chatto & Windus. Iris defended her pedigree with (at first) some stiffness, later lamenting that she had not asked more questions of her parents, and so been better-informed. She referred Green to O'Hart's History of Old Irish Families, telling him she had lodged copies of relevant pages with her agent Ed Victor for safekeeping. Both Rene's father Effingham Lynch Richardson and her grandfather Robert Cooper Richardson merit a mention in O'Hart which is noted for being, before 1800, notoriously untrustworthy, a source of myth, not fact. Given the burning of papers during the Troubles of 1921-22, the chances of establishing the truth seemed remote.
Fortunately, and unbeknownst to Iris, at the start of the twentieth century the Rev. Henry G.W. Scott, Rector of Tullinisken in County Armagh, had documented these Richardsons well. James I indeed granted the original Alexander Richardson Drum Manor, or Manor Richardson, in County Tyrone. Alexander's son William married Mary Erskine, heiress to the Augher Castle estate. County Tyrone, which in turn descended to their son Archibald. William left Drum Manor to his second son Alexander, who in 1682 married Margaret Goodlatte of Drumgally. His third son William, as well as inheriting lands near Augher, also obtained a lease of lands from his brother Alexander in the townland of Tullyreavy on the Drum Manor estate, where he built a house by the lake known as Oaklands, Woodmount or Lisdhu. O'Hart erroneously identified Crayhalloch with Drum Manor Forest Park and also with Oaklands, as if all were different names for one house, instead of separate Richardson estates, from each of which Rene could claim descent.
William (d. 1664) and Mary Erskine had three further sons. The eldest, James, married Mary Swan (1671-1740), heiress of William Swan, and their son Alexander (1705-71) succeeded to the estate of over a thousand acres at Farlough Lodge, strikingly situated above the Torrent river: a small five-bay, two-storey Georgian house with a dressed sandstone front and a square central porch near Newmills, County Tyrone, not far from Cookstown. Through the eighteenth century the head of the family was churchwarden and member of the vestry of Drumglass and Tullinisken parishes, overseer of the roads and an officer in the militia. Iris's great-great-great-grandfather, for example, was Alexander's eldest son John Richardson of Farlough (1727-85), who married Hannah Lindsay in 1757 and was a JP, High Sheriff of Tyrone in 1778, and Captain of the Dungannon Volunteers in 1782. Owning more than a thousand acres, successive heads of the family lived, it can be assumed, in some comfort as modest country gentlemen.
The Richardsons also produced serious artistic talent and had continuing artistic tastes, well before Iris emerged to give them retrospective interest. They formed a large extended family which included two women writers, one of them distinguished. Iris's great-great-aunt Frances Elizabeth Fisher (née Richardson) published well-received volumes of verse such as Love or Hatred (three volumes) and The Secret of Two Houses (two volumes), also a book about Killarney. The better-known is Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (1870-1946), who wrote under the name of Henry Handel Richardson. She was the daughter of Walter Lindesay Richardson MD, model for Richard Mahony in her trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917-21). Henry Handel Richardson was second cousin to Rene's father Effingham Lynch Richardson. Like Rene she was musically talented, going to Leipzig to study music before turning to writing. She spent her early life in Australia and then Germany, belonging, like her cousin Iris, to a broad British and European and not merely an Irish world.39 In her unfinished autobiography Myself When Young (1948) she refers to her strongly Protestant Irish Richardson relations, and their penchant for odd names 'such as Henry Handel and a Duke, more than one Snow and several Effinghams.' In The Unicorn Iris was to award her foolish character Effingham Cooper a key moment of insight.
The nineteenth century saw a downturn in Richardson fortunes, with the sons of yet another Alexander Richardson (1758-1827) squandering part of the £8,000 realised from sale of the Farlough estate. The phenomenon of downstart Anglo-Irish gentry was so familiar as to earn its own ingenious characterisation. Sir Jonah Barrington, whose racy memories of Irish history both Yeats and Joyce plundered, defines as 'half-mounted gentlemen' the small grantees of Queen Elizabeth or CromwelI living off two hundred acres. The Richardsons had been grander, somewhere between 'gentlemen every inch of them', whose finances were 'not in good order', and 'gentlemen to the backbone', from the oldest settler--families, generally also 'a little out at elbows'. Most of Iris's immediate maternal forebears were minor men-of-law - Dublin was a litigious city with many attorneys - belonging to the Protestant Irish lower-middle class. Rene's paternal grandfather Robert Cooper Richardson, grandson to Tyrone's High Sheriff, born in 1827, and son of Robert Lindesay Richardson, a revenue officer, was a clerk at the Dublin Probate Court. Robert Cooper's son by his first wife Hannah, Effingham Lynch Richardson, a 'law assistant' born in 1857, after a first marriage without issue made a second to Elizabeth Jane Nolan, daughter of William Nolan Esquire. Effingham and Jane had two daughters, Gertrude Anna (born 1891) and Irene Alice (born 29 March 1899), mother-to-be of Iris.
Rene's father Effingham Lynch Richardson died on 6 July 1904, not long after Ulysses' 'Bloomsday', one tradition making his death, officially from 'erphelsocora of the groin', drink-related. The fact that the Rev. A.W. Barton, Rector of St George's, rather than one of his three curates, took the funeral service, suggests that the family were actively involved in the life of the Church of Ireland at parish level. Iris also claimed Catholic ancestors. Curiously, a second Effingham L. Richardson was shown living at 40 Iona Road, Glasnevin, Dublin, until 1947, and working until 1934 at the Dublin Ministry of Labour. This second E.L. Richardson, a first cousin of the first, was re-baptised as a Catholic before marrying in 1883. Rene and her elder sister Gertie took 'Cooper', not among the baptismal names of either, as their middle name; they lived thereafter in the house of their grandfather Robert Cooper Richardson, and the twice-adopted name suggests gratitude to him for his generosity in fostering them after their father's death. The only story Rene would tell of her grandfather was that, though a man of industrious habits who at first kept his family well, when the 6 p.m. mail van arrived he would be facetious about this, in his Dublin manner. It was a signal for his first drink of the evening.

From the Gentleman’s Magazine:
Tallking about Sir William Richardson who died in 1830 aged 83 years.
“This gentleman was of the family of Richardson, seated at Smitton in the county of Fife, formerly Baronets of Novia Scotia.”

The major source of the Ricardson genelogy comes from the following source: Tullinisken Notebook V, compiled by the Rev. Henry Gordon Waller Scott, MA, LDS film 1279325. Presented to Armagh County Museum, The Mall East, Armagh, by Mrs Gordon Scott. The Tyrone Richardson who stem from Scotland differ from other Richardsons in Ireland.13

My information on the Richardson family background is limited to two sources; first some notes from what are known as the Swanzy notebooks, a set of children's copybooks into which Swanzy hand-copied (in pencil) information on different families as he found it, and which I had transcribed by Dublin researcher Dr James Ryan. The notebooks are in the Representative Church Body Library, the writing is said to be very difficult to decipher in places, and the notes are from newspapers and from a range of other sources, many of which are not attributed. The second source, which I did not know about when I arranged for Dr Ryan to copy the Swanzy notebooks, is a chart of the family of Richardson of Somerset in Amy Young's "Three Hundred Years in Inishowen". As she acknowledges in the preface to her book "the Rev H.B. Swanzy, Rector of Newry (who) gave me great help, in the shape of notes on the many clergymen who figure in these pages", I assume that she has drawn on the same material in compiling her chart.
Much of the material on the early Richardson family I have taken from LDS film #1279325, item 13, Notes on the Parish of Tullaniskin, presented to the County Museum of Armagh by Mrs Gordon Scott and compiled by the Rev Gordon Waller Scott MA for whom see Leslie Armagh Clergy under Creggan, Tullaniskin and Clonfeacle.
Notebook V, frame 48 has, from notes of Captain Richardson, of Trew Cottage, the observation that there are four distinct families of Richardson in Ulster unconnected with each other. They are
1) Richardsons of Drumm and the branches Scotch (which are the branches in which I am interested)
2) Richardsons of Rossfad & Richhill, from Worcestershire
3) Richardsons of Poplar Vale, Co Monaghan, from Norfolk
4) Richardsons of Eagerclougher near Loughgall, afterwards of Lisburn, they descend from Revd John Richardson, Rector of Warmington, Warwickshire (died 1602)12

Link between Sir James & Alexander 27 May 1617, Edinburgh, Parliament
Added by RachealRichardson on 19 Apr 2009
Alexander & James Richardson ConnectionJames VI: Translation 1617, 27 May, Edinburgh, Parliament Parliamentary Register 28 June 1617  28 June 1617
On the fourth day of parliament
http://www.rps.ac.uk/search.php?action=fetch_index...mp;google=Richardson
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