I have always thought that Brownlee Zuver was an unusual name. You find it spelled as Brown Lee and Brownlee. I had figured that it was some type of family name, probably from his mother’s side of the family because it doesn’t show up frequently in any of the Zuver lines.
While working on a different line of the family I stumbled across Brownlee as a surname. From my research so far I have determined, working backwards that there were 2 lines, brothers James and Archibald that came to the States around 1752. One branch headed towards Illinois and the other seems to have stayed in the Pennsylvania area.
Ancestry has a copy of the Brownlee genealogy written about 1895 and then corrected and added to in 1976. I haven’t located the connection to my Zuver line yet and like so many people of that time, they consistently married first cousins. The census records are helping to fill in any holes and verify children and spouses to some extent.
I haven’t found a Brownlee in history that would have been popular enough to name a son after, unlike Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and others. My guess is that Mary Sampson, Brownlee’s mother, has a connection with the Brownlee family that remained in Pennsylvania. She was born in 1801 in Beaver county, Pennsylvania, I am figuring her mother was a Brownlee.
It is going to take a bit more sleuthing to determine if there is some type of connection. As always the trip to the end is half of the fun!