Lizzie Borden Society Forum

I have seen a post from around twelve years ago on the Forum archive that mentions an Andrew Borden who was the City Hall janitor. Would this Andrew have been related, however distantly, to Andrew J. Borden? If so, I would be quite surprised as I was under the impression that almost all Bordens in Fall River were either wealthy, or at least had some kind of business or other. Paul Dennis Hoffman's book Yesterday in Old Fall River mentions that Andrew J. Borden's father was the first Borden not to possess wealth.

Matt to put it simple: No they were not all related. On "search" in the forum, type in "Borden family tree", and go to the attached links on the post. Hope this helps.

Thanks. I look forward to seeing the links. I wasn't sure if they were all descended from the same ancestors, ie Richard and Joan Borden.

Not all, but a good amount of them in Fall River were related in one way or another, though many would had been third, fourth, fifth cousins, largely descended from the men with surname Borden that settled at what is now Fall River in the 1600s, having come from England or Scotland.

But like with many surnames, you have multiple founders and I bet at least some Bordens in Fall River, especially from 1900 onwards, were not related to the early Borden settlers who came to the area in the late 17th century. A lot of immigrants came to Fall River starting in the 1840s when the mills begane to expand greatly and many more were built in the mid-1800s there. The majority of the Fall River 'immigrants' who came in the mid to late 19th century were Irish, English and Portuguese. Borden is a French-English surname.
However, from what I can tell, most Bordens in and around Fall River, even today are in fact descended from the 17th century Borden settlers and thus are related, albeit distantly to one another.

The late actress Elizabeth Montgomery (1933-1995) played Lizzie in the 1975 TV-Movie "The Legend of Lizzie Borden". A genealogist later determined, some time after Montgomery's death, that Lizzie Borden and Ms. Montgomery were in fact sixth cousins, several times removed! Both could trace decent from a John Luther, who has settled and lived near what later became Fall River/New Bedford in the late 1600s.