Richard Burton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard Burton (1751–1826), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Yorkshire, parentage, marriage to Isabel Middleton, his daughter Elizabeth, and his death at Armley. Notable: late-Georgian Yorkshire origins; the English progenitors of a branch that would later cross to America.

Richard Burton (1751–1826) was born in August of 1751 in the parish of Dent, nestled in the dales of Yorkshire, England, the son of William Burton (1712–1789) and Catherine Sedgwick (1717–1794). His Yorkshire birthplace placed him among the hill-country folk of the West Riding's northern reaches, where small farming, hand-loom weaving, and the keeping of sheep were the rhythms of daily life. Dent in the mid-eighteenth century remained a remote settlement, its inhabitants known for industry and a marked plain-spoken character, qualities long noted of the dales families from whom Richard descended.

In the course of his life Richard was joined in marriage to Isabel Middleton, and from this union the family records preserve a daughter, Elizabeth, familiarly called Betty, born in 1792. Betty would in her own time carry the Burton blood forward, living until 1852 and forming a link in the chain that connects this Yorkshire household to later generations of the compiler's kin.

Richard's lifetime spanned a period of remarkable transformation in northern England. He came of age during the reign of George III, witnessed the American Revolution from across the sea, lived through the long Napoleonic Wars, and saw the first stirrings of the industrial age that would so utterly remake Yorkshire's woollen districts. By the time of his later years, the great mills had begun rising in the valleys around Leeds, and the village economies of his youth were already giving way to a new order.

He died on the 19th of November, 1826, at Armley, near Leeds — a township that by then was rapidly absorbing the textile industry's expansion. He had reached the age of seventy-five years, a considerable span for a man of his generation.

Richard Burton was the compiler's 6× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, an English forebear standing several generations removed from the family's later American chapters.