This is the
history of the Broadhurst family that had its origins in the medieval market
town of Ashby de la Zouch in Leicestershire, England in the middle of the 17th
Century. Broadhurst is an old
English name. We have traced its
origins back to its earliest appearances in England in the medieval
period.
The literal meaning
of the Broadhurst surname is “dweller in the broad woods.” Hurst comes from Old English, the
Anglo-Saxon word hyrst, which carries the connotation of “woodland” or
“heavily-wooded land.”
The surname
Broadhurst appears in several different places in England. We do not know if all those with the surname originated in one place and are descended from a single “Adam”
Broadhurst, but we doubt it. It is both
reasonable and likely to suppose that the name arose independently in different
places, although for those inclined to pursue this issue it is now possible
through DNA analysis to settle that question definitively.
While we
know the names and relationships of our Broadhurst ancestors back to the middle
of the 1600s, the earliest ancestor in our line about whom we have more than
just names, dates and places is my great-grandfather Colour Sergeant James
Broadhurst, a British soldier who enlisted in the 17th Leicestershire Regiment
of Foot [e.g., infantry], left England for a duty post with the Regiment in
Canada, married while he was on station at Camp Hill in Nova Scotia, and
eventually left His Majesty’s military service to begin life as an immigrant
settler in Canada. Anything like a real history of the family begins with him.
We have information about his military service, his later occupations and
residences, and his children (whose relationship to me is that of “grandfather”
and "great" aunts and uncles).
We know a
bit about James' father John Broadhurst and John's extended family in England. We have some names, places, relationships
and key dates of ancestors a few generations earlier than James but as we go
back much further in time our facts are less certain and our data is more
speculative than proven--and in any event is not really history so much as a
list of ancestral names and dates.
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