Uncle Hugh's Family Tree

Uncle Hugh’s genealogy stopped with his grandfather, John Pattie of Kentucky – the one whose marriage license Effie Ludlow Pattie found in Virginia. 

Uncle Hugh also found records of a William Pattie, who had come to eastern Kentucky about the same time as John and his wife settled in Frankfurt in western Kentucky.  Uncle Hugh speculated that John and William were brothers, but he could find no proof of the connection.  

William’s grandson Silvester and Silvester’s son James were among the first Americans to trek all the way to California.  The account of their adventures is told in “The Autobiography of James Ohio Pattie”, a 19th Century best seller.  This wild tale makes good reading even today.  As for me, it is nice to know there was previously a best seller in the Pattie family. 

William’s sister, Lucy Pattie Yateman, filed an affidavit stating that her father and her brother William had “gone to fight with General Washington” during the Revolutionary War.  As a result of that affidavit, in his old age William was granted a small pension as a Revolutionary War soldier.  I was surprised to learn that this country has a long history of giving pensions to veterans.  Now my son Karl gets benefits for his service in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War – although he never went to Vietnam.  In my book, “Mama Goes to Paris”, I tell about Karl working in Army intelligence as a Russian expert, stationed in Frankfurt, Germany.    

Over 60 years after Uncle Hugh’s death, I looked for ancestors at the Garland, Texas, Public Library.  Sitting at a computer in a room full of other old ladies searching for their own family records, I was delighted to see pop up on the screen the yellowed paper of Lucy’s affidavit.  But I was no more enlightened than Uncle Hugh was about any connection between John and William.

Later I found that connection, thanks to my Italian-American friend, Jack Cinque. 

Jack was a first generation Italian-American.  His parents came to the U.S. as teenagers from Positano, Italy.  Jack was born in “Little Italy” in Manhattan, grew up in New York City, graduated from City College of New York, then obtained a master’s degree from M.I.T.  This son of an immigrant whose career started as a push-cart peddler in New York, had a brilliant career.  He came to Texas to work as head of a Texas City oil refinery and married Margaret Condon, a Texan and my dear friend and classmate at Texas State College for Women.  Working for Flour Inc., Jack traveled to Iran and China, and he and Margaret lived in Sydney, Australia, and in London, England.  My first trip to England was to visit them in London.

After Jack retired to Houston, he and Margaret attended a series of lectures on immigrants to America.  He sent me their textbook, a collection of first-person accounts written by immigrants.  The very first chapter was a diary written by a Scotsman who came to Virginia around 1770 as an indentured servant, contracted to be a slave until his passage was paid off.  He worked for a tobacco planter who wanted a teacher for his young children.  He was given a small building with both a classroom and living quarters.  He was permitted to accept other pupils for his small school. In the diary he wrote that “John Pattie, wright, of Fredricksburg, brought his children, William, Lucy, and John” and enrolled them in the school.

From this account I learned not only that John and William were brothers, but also that Uncle Hugh’s grandfather (my great-grandfather) John was really John Jr.  Also, John Sr. was a "wright" meaning a wheel-right.  On my first trip East, Emma Wright and I stopped in Fredricksbug to see the elegant home of George Washington's sister Betty, whose husband was a wealthy man who helped finance the Revolution.  I did not dream that one of my ancestors may have made the wheels for her carriage and perhaps also for General Washington, whose mother also lived in Fredricksburg.

Thanks to Lucy’s affidavit that her father fought for General Washington, I am eligible for the Daughters of the American Revolution. It amuses me to think I could join the D.A.R. on my Pattie line, thanks to Jack Cinque, a first-generation American.