In the small world department, one of my closest friends growing up still lives near my parents on the North Shore of Boston. We grew up hearing our parents and grandparents call each other cousin, but no one could readily sort out the connection – in our case, it was via my step-grandmother’s first husband, which means that Franz was really a connection, a cousin of my (step) first cousins!

Fast forward, and Franz and his wife used to bring their older children, now grown, to visit my father and stepmother for Halloween. It was an annual pleasure on both sides, as my stepmother would call me up afterwards to tell me exactly what costumes the boys had worn. Now as it happens, I can point to an actual genealogical connection between Franz and me, via the Francis family of Maryland and Pennsylvania, but there is also a connection between Franz and my stepmother: both are descended from the Patten family of Maine.

Walter Goodwin Davis’s series of genealogies, exploring the families of his great-great-grandparents (and published in a three-volume omnibus edition in 1996[1]), includes one on The Ancestry of James Patten covering the early generations of the families of Matthew, Hector, Robert, and William Patten, as well as their apparent kinsman William Patten of Wells. Franz is a descendant of Matthew¹ Patten as follows:

Matthew Patten = Margaret ____

Robert Patten = Susanna Goodwin

Capt. John Patten = Olive Lassell

Caroline Augusta Patten = Enoch Redington Mudge

Caroline Estelle Mudge = James Lawrence

James Lawrence = Marion Lee Peabody

John Endicott Lawrence = Anne Mercer Tuckerman

Susanna Lawrence = Ferdinand Colloredo-Mansfeld

Franz Ferdinand Colloredo-Mansfeld

My stepmother, Grace Vanner Steward, was descended from Matthew’s brother, Hector¹ Patten:

Hector Patten = ____ Suter

Lieut. John Patten = Mary Means

Margaret Patten = Capt. James Maxwell

Margaret “Peggy” Maxwell = Elihu Hatch

Freelove Hatch = Daniel Holway

Philena Whitmore Holway = Joseph Hill Jr.

Grace Mabel Hill = Samuel Alfred Vanner

Charles Maxwell Vanner = Eleanor May Riggs

Grace Hill Vanner

In this way, Gay and Franz are eighth cousins. Both Patten families stayed in Maine for several generations before coming to the Boston area in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. In both cases, their respective branches have kept a toehold in Maine while living within a few short miles of one another in Essex County, Massachusetts – a small world, indeed!

Note

[1] See Massachusetts and Maine Families in the Ancestry of Walter Goodwin Davis (1885–1966)..., 3: 84–162 at 90–95, 97–100. This work covers many New England families, and is often the best resource in print on the family in question.