Hi folks - Another Batton surprise.......
Just before I left for my recent trip to Aberdeen, Mississippi I got an email from Dick von Briesen (husband of Barbie Paton). Barbie is the great grand-daughter of Samuel Batton/Paton, and daughter of Kenneth Paton.
Some of the contents of Dick's email as follows :
Barbie and I are both 68, retired, and living in Canada. No wildfires or tornados here this year, thankfully.
Your letter is fascinating! Barbie and I, quite some years ago, decided to see what we could find about Samuel Paton's origins and antecedents. We mentioned this to her father, Kenneth Paton, and he said we'd never find anything, because, he said, Samuel changed his name when he came to America, and Ken didn't know what the original surname was.
We checked the index to Scottish births for a Samuel Paton and an Isabella Anderson being married in 1877, and there they were, in Tradeston/Glasgow. We obtained a copy of the original record, and found the names of their parents, George Paton and Eliza Massey, and David Anderson and Margaret Chalmers. So we assumed that Ken's name change was some kind of mythology. Prior to your letter, we had never heard the name Batton. It was puzzling that we couldn't find any trace of the birth or marriage of George Paton and Eliza Massey, but then, those were before the start of mandatory civil registration. We did find various records of brother George Paton at Cambuslang, but nothing that helped us find the parents.
Now we know the truth! And I'm sure we never would have found the Batton connection if you hadn't written.
The database you found on Ancestry.com of George and Eliza, sons Samuel and George, and their descendants, was submitted by me, several years ago. I submitted it to wc.rootsweb.com, and Ancestry copied it and merged it into their One World Tree, incidentally making it difficult to ascertain who submitted the information. One World Tree has never been updated, and never will be, so that data is frozen in time.
As far as we know, Ken and his siblings never mentioned the fact that Samuel's brother John and his large family also lived in New York. So we don't know whether Samuel and John saw each other frequently, or never. Likewise, we have no information on whether Samuel and John's children kept in touch. You'd think if they did Ken would have mentioned it. As far as we know, the Patons in the USA have always pronounced the name as rhyming with Dayton, not like Batton.
We don't know where Samuel was born. We didn't find the 1881 Scottish census showing Kilmarnock. Makes sense, though, as that's not far from Kilwinning, where his wife-to-be lived. Incidentally, a few years ago Barbie and I visited Scotland -- we went to Kilwinning, knowing that the Andersons had been dealers in alcoholic spirits, and noted that one of the prominent businesses on the main street was/is Anderson's pub. Alas, it was a Sunday, and there was no one we could talk to. We also went to Glasgow, and, with some difficulty, found where 153 Gloucester Street once was. It's now an expressway on-ramp. But we took a picture or two anyway, showing the on-ramp and the street sign "Gloucester Street".
We also checked out various places in Banff and Aberdeen where Samuel's father-in-law George Gordon and his family came from. And the GRO in Edinburgh.
It appears that George Batton and Eliza moved from Ireland to Galston, Ayrshire - is that your view? I see that there were lots of Patons in Galston before they got there - maybe they took the name Paton because everyone misunderstood when they said Batton, or to fit in and not appear foreign?
Pat and Barbie are delighted to have a new cousin, and maybe lots of new cousins! We'd be especially interested to find out whether there are Batton descendants in the USA, probably in the New York area.
I have added all the relatives mentioned in your letter to our family database.
I have also done some searching of Battons on Ancestry.com and wc.rootsweb.com since receiving your letter, and have added a number of Batton relatives found there as well. Our database is not supposed to be findable via Google or other search engines, and it is password-protected. Although anyone who stumbles upon the website can search it, unless they log in with a valid password they are blocked from seeing anything but initials of living people, and no dates or photos or other information about living people. The database contains about 10,000 people, more than half my relatives, not Barbie's.
Barbie and I live in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, about halfway between Montreal and Toronto. We'd be delighted if you could pay us a visit on one of your trips to North America. We also have a summer home on Otsego Lake near Cooperstown, New York, which is a very pleasant place to visit. It adjoins the grounds of Hyde Hall, the ancestral home of Barbie's mother's Clarke family, www.hydehall.org.
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