When William A Alexander was born on 18 June 1810, in Lewisburg, Greenbrier, Virginia, United States, his father, James A Alexander, was 43 and his mother, Margaret Hanna "Peggy" Lyle, was 34. He died on 19 January 1886, in Greenbrier, Virginia, United States, at the age of 75, and was buried in Lewisburg, Greenbrier, West Virginia, United States.
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War of 1812. U.S. declares war on Britain over British interference with American maritime shipping and westward expansion.
The Monumental Church was built between 1812-1814 on the sight where the Richmond Theatre fire had taken place. It is a monument to those that died in the fire.
Being a second spiritual and religious awakening, like the First Great Awakening, many Churches began to spring up from other denominations. Many people began to rapidly join the Baptist and Methodist congregations. Many converts to these religions believed that the Awakening was the precursor of a new millennial age.
Scottish, English, German, and Dutch: from the personal name Alexander, classical Greek Alexandros, which probably originally meant ‘repulser of men (i.e. of the enemy)’, from alexein ‘to repel’ + andros, genitive of anēr ‘man’. Its popularity in the Middle Ages was due mainly to the Macedonian conqueror, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC ) - or rather to the hero of the mythical versions of his exploits that gained currency in the so-called Alexander Romances. The name was also borne by various early Christian saints, including a patriarch of Alexandria (c. 250–326 AD ), whose main achievement was condemning the Arian heresy. The Gaelic form of the personal name is Alasdair, which has given rise to a number of Scottish and Irish patronymics, for example McAllister . Alexander is a common personal name in Scotland, often representing an Anglicized form of the Gaelic name. In North America, the English form of the surname has absorbed cognates from other languages, e.g. Spanish Alejandro , Italian Alessandro , Arabic or Assyrian/Chaldean Iskandar and Iskander , and their derivatives, e.g. Greek patronymic Alexandropoulos.
Jewish: from the adopted personal name Alexander (see 1 above) or shortened from the eastern Ashkenazic (originally Slavic) patronymics Aleksandrovich or Alexandrowicz.
History: A number of Scotch-Irish families of this name landed at New York in the early 18th century. By 1746, six of them were established in NC. Others came in through Philadelphia, for example Archibald Alexander, who came from Londonderry in northern Ireland in 1736 and established himself in VA. — The Revolutionary general William Alexander (1726–83) was always known as ‘Lord Sterling’ to his compatriots, although his claim to the title was denied by the College of Arms in London. His father, James Alexander, was a Jacobite who had fled to New York after the failure of the Jacobite rising in 1715. The claim to the title arose in connection with their ancestor Sir William Alexander, a courtier and poet at the court of King James VI of Scotland (James I of England), who created him Earl of Stirling in 1633.
Dictionary of American Family Names © Patrick Hanks 2003, 2006.
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