When Alexander Officer was born in August 1726, in Ulster, Ireland, his father, James Officer, was 32 and his mother, Mary Armstrong, was 31. He had at least 2 sons with Mary William. He died on 3 October 1805, in Carlisle, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, United States, at the age of 79, and was buried in Old Graveyard, Churchtown, Monroe Township, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, United States.
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Historical Boundaries 1750: Cumberland, Pennsylvania Colony, British Colonial America 1776: Cumberland, Pennsylvania, United States
The French-born fur trader James Le Tort may have built a cabin in the area as early as 1720. During the colonial era, Scots-Irish settlers began to settle in the Cumberland Valley beginning in the early 1730s. The settlement of Carlisle, at the intersection of several Indigenous trails, was designated by the Pennsylvania assembly and the Penn family in 1751 as the seat of Cumberland County (named for the county of the same name in England). American engineer John Armstrong Sr., a surveyor for the Penn family, laid the plan for the settlement of Carlisle in 1751. Armstrong Sr. settled there and fathered John Armstrong Jr. in 1758. They named the settlement after its sister town of the same name in Cumberland, England, and even designed its former jailhouse (which now serve as general government offices in the county) to resemble the Carlisle Citadel.
Thomas Jefferson's American Declaration of Independence endorsed by Congress. Colonies declare independence.
Scottish and English: occupational name from Older Scots officiar, Middle English officer ‘servant, retainer’ and ‘officer’ in any of various senses. A kirk officiar in Scotland was an ‘officer charged with keeping order in the church and with enforcing church discipline in the parish’ or ‘beadle or church-servant’. In both Scotland and England the word officer was also used to denote the manager of an estate.
English: perhaps a shortened form of Old French orfroisier, Anglo-Norman French, Middle English orfreiser ‘maker of orphrey (gold-thread embroidery)’. Compare Offer 1.
Dictionary of American Family Names © Patrick Hanks 2003, 2006.
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