Ancestors

No one can choose their ancestors. Our DNA is determined at conception. Scientists are now tinkering with genes, hoping to “cure” inherited diseases. We will see where those experiments lead. Meanwhile, I am surprised at all the people I know who are avidly looking for ancestors. They squint through long lists of names in old census records and travel down dusty country roads, where they tramp through the weeds in old cemeteries, searching for tombstones which bare their family names.

My mother was one of those people. Her mother – my grandmother – was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, having established descent from a private in the Continental Army. Mother carried the ancestor hunt further. When she visited me in Pennsylvania, I took her to Bucks County Courthouse where she found the yellowed contract signed by an ancestor and his wife pledging to serve as indentured servants, becoming virtual slaves of another man for seven years. Becoming indentured was the way the poorest of the poor paid for their passage to the New World. Mother assembled quantities of notes on the various “lines” she pursued, but she never organized her research. After she died, all those loose papers were turned over to my niece. I don’t know what she did with them.

On my father’s side, the family historian was H. L. Pattie, my father’s “Uncle Hugh”. While I was in college, I earned spending money by typing Uncle Hugh’s lengthy family history. Many hours I spent at the old Smith-Corona, trying to make as few errors as possible to avoid having to correct the five carbon copies. That practice made me an excellent typist, which served me well 45 years later when I paid for my daughter’s college by doing temporary work typing for large corporations in Chicago .

Uncle Hugh was romantic. He dreamed that the Patties (he thought the name sounded French) were originally Huguenots who came to the New World to escape religious persecution. He thought his grandfather was from New Orleans before moving to Kentucky, where he and his brother Joe, my grandfather, were born. At least he had the honesty to include in his family history a letter from Effie Ludlow Pattie, which said, as I remember, “That’s nonsense! Your grandparents were from Virginia, and they were married in 1790 in Caroline County, where I’ve seen the record in the county courthouse.”

Uncle Hugh included in his genealogy the information Effie supplied. His grandfather was named John Pattie. As I remember there was a William Pattie, just a bit older than John, who was also born in Virginia, and whose sister Lucy made an avadavat that her brother William and their father served in George Washington’s Army during the American Revolution. Ah! Another possible ancestor for the DAR. Unfortunately, at the time Uncle Hugh assembled his history, he speculated that John and William Pattie were brothers, but he could not find any records to prove this.

Recently friends gave me a book, “Immigrant Voices,” a compilation of first-person accounts of immigrants to America from 1773 to 1986. The book begins with the diary of John Harrower, a Scotsman, whose passage to America was paid for by a Virginia planter to whom he was indentured for seven years. Although barely educated himself, Harrower’s job on the plantation was as a teacher for the planter’s three small children. He was lived in a small building, which served both as his home and as schoolhouse. He was permitted to take additional pupils and keep the fees he collected.

Imagine how I felt when I read on page 45: “Tuesday, 14th. (June 1774) This morning entered school William Pattie son to John Pattie wright. . . .” and then on page 60: “Wednesday, August 2d. (1775) . . . . This day came to School Wm. John and Lucy Patties, and to pay conform to the time they Attend. . . . “

I was thrilled. And then surprised at my emotion. John Jr. was too young to join William and their father John at Yorktown – just as his youngest son, Preston, was too old to serve in the Civil War. Preston’s son, Joseph Preston Pattie, my grandfather, used to say, “I was born in ‘61. That’s the year the war begun.” My father, born in 1897, was too old to serve in World War II.

No heroes in my family tree. You can’t choose your ancestors. Still, it is nice to know who they were. My great-great-grandfather was not the privileged son of a wealthy landowner, like George Washington, but the son of a “wright:”, a little boy learning his A B C’s in that tiny Virginia schoolroom. In 1775.