Is it Partain, Parten, Partin, Partine, or Parton?
When I first began research, I thought it would be ‘easy’ because ‘there aren’t that many Partain’s out there’. Well, I was about half right and about half very wrong. The first thing I learned was that there are many variations on the spelling of the name, and just as many family stories about where our ancestors hailed from. I will address both here separately.
How is it spelled?
Well, that seems to all depend on which state your ancestors settled in. Most genealogy is based on a combination of two things: family lore and published records. And just based on family lore, you should know how your name is spelled, right? But it is not that simple when you try and document your family lore with published records.
There are many reasons why a name is spelled differently. The first is that most folks who were born in the 1700’s and 1800’s could not read or write. To this day, I have not found a single record of a Partain who marked on the early census’ that they could read and write.
When the census taker came around to the house your ancestor would have stated their name, and it was up to the census taker to spell it as they heard it. The same thing would happen when a person started at a church or was listed on a tax list: it was up to the person who could read and write to interpret what they had heard. Therefore, folks in Virginia would very likely get a different spelling than those in Tennessee based solely on the local dialect.
So what if your ancestor was wary of the new and struggling government? Perhaps they could just shoot the census taker – – which really did happen. This leads us to problem number two with census records. The census taker was supposed to go to each family personally, but with the distance between farms often being miles, combined with the often hostile attitude of folks towards any government interference with their life, it didn’t always work out that way. More often than we would like to think, the census information was not provided by your actual kin, but by a neighbor or county official willing to take the time to answer the census taker’s questions.
And finally we have handwriting itself. There is an art to reading handwriting from 200 years ago, and it is very often not an expert who is trying to decipher a name. For example, the difference between a handwritten cursive ‘a’, ‘i’, or ‘e’ for that matter, after the ‘t’ in our surname is quite small. I have very frequently seen these two mistaken for each other.
Where are we from?
Most likely England. Perhaps some Irish. But very definitely all-American as most lines trace back to at least 200 years here in the United States. Some people even argue that 99.9% of all Partain’s in America have one common ancestor: Robert Partin, who came to Jamestown, Virginia from England in 1609*.
For all of you out there not up on your Pre-Colonial American history, that predated the arrival of the Mayflower in Massachusetts by about 11 years. I would love to find something concrete to link my line to that of Robert Partin, but at this point the family is very difficult to trace beyond their first few years in the colony. With so few remaining records, what became of the family is pure speculation.
* For more on Robert Partin and the Ancient Planter’s, see his section further on in this book or take a look at wikipedia: http://en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_planter.