James Parsons Burkitt
British civil engineer and amateur ornithologist (1870–1959)
James Parsons Burkitt (20 Aug 1870 – 30 Mar 1959) was an Irish civil engineer and keen amateur ornithologist. He was county surveyor in County Fermanagh from 1900 until his retirement in 1940.
Early life and education
James Burkitt was born on 20 August 1870, at Killybegs, County Donegal, third son of Thomas Henry Burkitt, Presbyterian minister, and his wife Emma Eliza, née Parsons.
Burkitt was educated at Galway Grammar School, and at Queen's College, Galway (then part of the Royal University of Ireland), obtaining the degrees of BA in mathematics (1891) and BE (1892) with first-class honours.
Career
Burkitt then became an assistant to James Perry in Galway, during which period he superintended the underpinning of a large bridge and the erection of a pier and swing bridge over an estuary of the sea. In May 1893 he became assistant engineer to contractor John Meneely Fisher on the Westport & Mulranny extension of the Midland Great Western Railway, and in February 1894 to the partnership of Fisher & Le Fanu (Brinsley Rankine Le Fanu) in the construction of the Collooney & Claremorris railway (part of the Western Railway Corridor). On the completion of the latter, he continued to work for Fisher & Le Fanu on the Belfast waterworks. In 1897 he was employed on the Downpatrick waterworks under Peter Chalmers Cowan. He appears to have moved briefly to County Donegal before being appointed county surveyor for County Fermanagh at the end of 1898 in succession to Frederick Richard Thomas Willson.
He held the County Fermanagh surveyorship for over 40 years.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6140980. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1870, 1959, 1900 and 1940.
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This entry incorporates text from “James Parsons Burkitt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.