Listen, My Grandchildren, 1969

Paul Buroker, a nephew of Nancy Buroker Shanahan contributed this information about Nancy. 

Here are the names of all of Joshua and Catherine's children: Martin, Darius, Levi, Jacob, Joseph, Caroline (Hardacre), Mary Ann (Baxter), Susan (Pence), Almedia, Louis, Nancy (Shanahan), Elizabeth (Clanin) and Sarah. At least eight of these children settled in the vicinity of Sweetser, Mier, Swayzee, and Converse, Indiana, and raised families there. 

Cousin Paul Buroker writes that the beginnings of the Burracker family started with the paternal grandfather as a member of the British King's Army (the Hessians) located in the American colonies. He was from Baden Baden, Germany. The king of England (George III) requested the king of Germany to send a shipload of German women from Baden Baden to the colonies to become wives of the Hessian soldiers. This was done because the German soldiers demanded it. In this group of women, our Burracker paternal grandmother (who may have been a Corder) came to America well before the Revolutionary War. The young soldier Burracker left the King's Army settled with his wife in Pennsylvania and became part of the so-called "Pennsylvania Dutch." They were not Dutch, as we know; they were German. Sometime later the couple moved down the Shenandoah Valley to Rockingham County, Virginia. 

From this couple came a son Martin (probably born about 1780) and two brothers, all of whom raised families. Two or more Burracker families went to Campaign County, Ohio. Three brothers, one of whom was a Martin (perhaps the father of Joshua), are buried at Owens Creek cemetery in Campaign County.

Martin's family was large. His son Joshua was the father of Nancy Buroker Shanahan. Joshua had at least three brothers -- David, Joseph, and John -- and two sisters. There is no record of the sisters, but we know that Joseph and David went to the far west and settled there.

Joshua Burracker was born in 1808 in Rockingham County, Virginia. There he married Catherine Pence and some time later moved to Champaign County, Ohio -- where Nancy was born in 1844. While there the family changed the spelling to Buraker, then later to Buroker. About 1845 the family moved to a farm near what is now Converse, Indiana. Two of Catherine's brothers had come to that locality earlier and taken land there. Joshua and his family moved to an 80-acre farm next to land owned by Catherine's brother, Lewis Pence. The land had but recently been part of a Miami Indian reservation or was close to the reservation. These early settlers got to know many of Indiana, including the chiefs. One was the once-powerful Miami Chief Meshingomesia. 

Posted Oct 15, 2013 by janadams10