
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): Continue reading An Early Patrick in Massachusetts