Genealogy

Genealogy – looking for ancestors – is a popular pastime. With some it is a passion. I wonder what these people are looking for. Do they hope to find royalty? My husband’s professor at Northwestern University confessed that one of his forebears was the first man hung by the Pilgrims in Plymouth Colony in 1621.

My mother went to North Carolina and Pennsylvania searching court house records. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, she found a yellowed parchment by which one of her ancestors contracted to be an indentured servant, making him a virtual slave – a real slave, not a video character – for seven years.

History comes alive when I know one of my ancestors was there. I was thriledl in finding my great-great-grandfather’s name in the 1776 diary. John Pattie was a little boy enrolled in a school on a Virginia plantation. As an old lady his sister filed an avadavat that her father and brother William were soldiers in the Revolution. Perhaps my ancestor was there to see Cornwallis surrender to George Washington at Yorktown.

On the other hand my Mother never admitted that her great-grandfather, George Worstell, was with Sherman’s troops on the March Through Georgia to the Sea, burning plantations along the way. As a Southerner that fact was too shameful to believe.

“Pattie” is an uncommon name. Uncle Hugh, who composed a family history, was convinced that the name came from French Huguenots. There is absolutely no documentation to support this idea. Uncle Hugh was a romantic.

My brother Don found Patties in the London telephone book. When John and I exchanged our little house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for six weeks in a lovely two-story home in Suffolk, England, I looked in the Ipswich phone book and found the name which, to my old eyes, looked like “Pattie.” I called; an old man said his name was “Pattle.”

When I expressed my disappointment to my neighbor, she said, “Pattie is a North Country name.” She brought me a list of nine Paties from the Northumberland telephone directory. Sadly, John and I became busy with sightseeing all around the beautiful Suffolk countryside, going to great houses and little villages with magnificent churches. I never contacted a single Pattie in England.

On another visit abroad, I had dinner in Portugal with a young man from Chicago named Sebastian Patti. He said the origin of his name was Sicilian and that there is a town in Sicily called “Patti”. My theory is that back in the 1600's or 1700's some Sicilian stone carver went to England to build some of those handsome great houses and churches. He married an English girl. Somehow the “e” was added. Through the generations the family became English.


That’s my theory. There is no documentation. I am a romantic, just like Uncle Hugh.