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!
[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.