Elihu Burritt

Elihu Burritt was born in New Britain, CT and took up the blacksmith trade to help support the family. He had little formal schooling but apparently learned 50 languages became a mathematical whiz and was a reknown lecturer and author who took America and England by storm. A long and detailed biography by Ellen Strong Bartlett (New England Magazine, June 1897) can be found on the internet about Elihu Burritt, "The Learned Blacksmith". It's at the Cornell University website "The Making of America". An easy way to find it is to run a a Google search "The Learned Blacksmith" and simply go to the Cornell site. The 1870 Census lists Elihu, age 60, living with his widowed sister, Almira Burritt Strickland and her two single daughters, Anna and Ellen Strickland, in New Britain, CT.

rootsweb:http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=cole67&id...

I have his Greek Bible and my father is named after him. Amanda Brooke