Excerpt from The Ancestry of James Patten, 1747?-1817, of Arundel (Kennebunkport) Maine

The title of this pamphlet, The Ancestry of James Patten, is to a great extent deceptive, for on the paternal side James Patten's father is his only ancestor now, or likely to be, discovered, while on the maternal Side we can trace a Slight three generations to a shadowy great-grandfather. However, the pamphlet is the sev enth in a series dealing with the ancestry of my great-great grandparents, and for the sake of uniformity it is so entitled. Actually it deals with the descendants of Six men who emigrated to New England in the early years of the eighteenth century, four of them being the brothers Matthew Patten of Biddeford, Hector Patten of Saco, Robert Patten of Arundel, and William Patten of Boston. The fifth, William Patten of Wells, presumably a close kinsman of the brothers, is included as by so doing all of the Pat ten emigrants who settled in Maine are conveniently grouped in one volume, while the sixth, James Johnston, finds an appropriate place herein as his granddaughter was James Patten's mother.

All of these men were of Scotch descent, springing from fami lies which left Scotland in the seventeenth century, encouraged by the British government, to settle in the northern counties Of Ireland which formed the ancient kingdom of Ulster, where they became a tough and unwelcome minority. After nearly a hundred years of religious, political and economic struggle, Siege and famine, which resulted in an ingrained hatred both for the Celtic Irish and for the English, hundreds of Ulster Scots prepared to undertake the long voyage to America. Soon all of the colonies from Maine to Georgia began to receive these new-comers, almost as foreign to the original English stock as they had been to the Irish. Some few remained in the seaport towns where their voyage ended, but, clannish to an extreme, the great majority settled in large groups on the fringes of colonial population where new land could be had for a low price. To distinguish them from the ethnic Irish whose emigration did not begin in force until the middle years of the nineteenth century, American historians have called them the Scotch - Irish. This convenient term is very annoying to writers of Irish descent whose chosen field has been the contri bution of the people of Ireland to American life, but as many descendants of these later emigrants, after a hundred years in America, persist in calling themselves irish-americans, or simply Irish, their objections to the use of scotch-irish seem somewhat childish.

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