A Sea of Pattons

John Patton of Rush Creek Township, Fairfield County, Ohio feels a bit like my nemesis. This maddeningly elusive ancestor (I really must say supposed ancestor) left just enough of a trail of data in the first third of the nineteenth century to confuse, without seemingly leaving enough to connect definitively to the sea of Pattons in eighteenth century Pennsylvania.

I have written about “Rush Creek John Patton” elsewhere.

Although Pattons were not prevalent in early Fairfield County, there were a number of Patton connections just below the surface in the southeast part of the county.

William Thompson (~1744-1811), an early Scotch-Irish Presbyterian settler of Rush Creek, came to Ohio with his wife, Hannah (Wallace) Thompson. William’s first wife, who died in Pennsylvania, was Mary Patton, daughter of John and Mary (Anderson) Patton of Middleton Township, Cumberland County. William Thompson was a brother-in-law of John Kerr, as mentioned in his will in Fairfield County. Exactly how William Thompson and John Kerr were brothers-in-law is unknown. Was it through William’s first wife (Mary Patton) or his second (Hannah Wallace)? The maiden name of John Kerr’s wife, Rachel, remains unknown, but it is known that he entered land with John Patton in Rush Creek Township in the earliest years of the nineteenth century.

William Thompson's grave at Thompson Cemetery - from Find-a-Grave

This seemed a fairly simple connection. Was “Rush Creek John Patton” a brother of Mary Patton Thompson and, perhaps, John Kerr’s wife, Rachel? Although this seemed a neat solution, exploration in Pennsylvania unraveled this theory rather quickly. Primary and secondary sources seemed reasonably clear that John and Mary (Anderson) Patton were the parents of only three children:  William, a Revolutionary War veteran who lived in what is now Spruce Hill Township, Juniata County, Pennsylvania; Robert, who remained in Middleton Township, Cumberland County (but apparently died in Lewistown, Mifflin County); and Mary (Patton) Thompson.

The quest widened to the broader Patton families of Cumberland, Mifflin, Juniata, and Perry Counties – a maddeningly large and complex web of people, most with roots back to even larger networks in Lancaster and Chester Counties and all part of the larger phenomenon of eighteenth-century Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immigration to Pennsylvania.

Map of Area of Central Pennsylvania - from History of That Part of the Susquehanna and Juniata Valleys, Embraced in the Counties of Mifflin, Juniata, Perry, Union and Snyder, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

I’ve not yet solved the puzzle of “Rush Creek John Patton,” although I’m relatively confident that he has a place in the tangled Patton branches in Mifflin and Cumberland Counties. These branches become increasingly entangled with other early Fairfield families the further back I go:  Sanderson, Robison, Sellers, Martin, Larimer, McClung, Black, etc.

The following posts will try to look at this thorny issue from two perspectives:  the first looking “back” from Ohio, the second looking from the perspective of central Pennsylvania.