Last year, the Boston Globe interviewed my colleague Sarah Dery on the ancestry of recently confirmed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and myself on the “Boston Brahmin” ancestry of her husband, Dr. Patrick Graves Jackson. While I’ve also discussed here the numerous Harvard graduates in the Jackson family, one other interesting item is the origin of his name Patrick, which was a rather uncommon name for Yankee families in Massachusetts before the American Revolution.
Similar to my own name of Christopher, Patrick tended to be a name amongst Catholics, with Pilgrims and Puritans rarely using the name in the 17th and 18th centuries. Within our database of New England Marriages to 1700, there are only thirteen married men named Patrick in all of New England in the seventeenth century.
The first Patrick in the ancestry of Dr. Patrick Graves Jackson was Patrick Tracy (1711-1789) of Newburyport, Massachusetts. A Memoir of Dr. James Jackson (1903), written by Dr. James Jackson’s grandson James Jackson Putnam (1846-1918), includes the following account of Patrick Tracy (who was the maternal grandfather of Dr. James Jackson):
“Patrick Tracy, the progenitor of the American branch, was born in Ireland in 1711. He came to this country as a common sailor, and rose by dint of energy and enterprise to be the commander of a vessel, then the owner of many, and eventually a rich and successful merchant. He was generous and liberal, and left a good record as a public-spirited citizen. When the idea began to spread that even men of dark skins might love the rights of freedom, he responded by setting free a negro and his wife, well known in Newburyport, who had lived long as trusted servants in his household, and making a provision in his will securing to them a home and maintenance for the remainder of their days. From 1743 to 1747 he was vestryman at St. Paul’s Church, and during the Revolution he served on important committees, and in every way lent his support to the national government and cause. He died February 28, 1789.”
The African-American couple referred to above were Apropo Tracy and Dinah Hill, who married at Newburyport in 1783, where they died in 1810 and 1828. The 1788 will of Patrick Tracy mentions “my faithful black man Apropo” in considerable detail. In 1771, Patrick Tracy built a mansion for his son Nathaniel Tracy. The “Tracy Mansion” became the Newburyport Public Library in 1865 and remains so to this day.
Patrick Tracy did not name any of his children after himself, but had two namesake grandsons, including Patrick Tracy Jackson (1770-1847), an American manufacturer who was one of the founders of the Boston Manufacturing Company of Waltham, Massachusetts with his brother-in-law Francis Cabot Lowell and other associates. After Lowell’s death in 1817, the remaining associates founded the Merrimack Manufacturing Company and the city of Lowell was named for Jackson’s late brother-in-law.
By the mid-19th century, many of Patrick Tracy’s descendants were also descendants of Judge John Lowell, and treated in The Descendants of Judge John Lowell of Newburyport, Massachusetts, co-authored by Scott C. Steward and myself. By this point many of the later Patricks were probably named for Patrick Tracy Jackson.
A rather interesting namesake descendant was Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam (1904-1953), the subject of an interesting biography by Joan Mark entitled The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies. P.T.L. Putnam spent twenty-five years living among the Bambuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest in what was then the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His “Camp Putnam” was modeled after dude ranches of the American West. Putnam married three women from the United States, and was polygamously married at various points during the early 1930s to five African women of the Mboli tribe. His marriage to his last African wife, Mada, lasted well into his marriage with his third American wife Anne Eisner.
My chart below shows Patrick Tracy and his children and eleven namesake descendants in green over nine generations. The seven successive men named “Patrick Tracy Jackson” are numbered with retroactive suffixes.
