So,
I'm back with the first question, and with some of the the material that great aunts have accumulated over the years... Big up everyone who's contributed in any way to the store of Punnett lore.
I really look forward to any light that anyone can throw on our history. I'm thinking that I'll post the next question in March.
What do we know, apocryphal or factual, about Punnetts in France? Or elsewhere?
Were we Huguenots, forced to flee because of religious persecution?
Or
adventurers? Smugglers? Privateers?
Or did we even originate there?
from Victoria Punnett in New York, via Betty Jane
I have no idea where the Punnetts came from before England. Wish I did. France seems the best guess because the name suggests that. But there doesn't even appear any proof of that. One person I know thinks the name is Iberian. I tried to research that, but the language difference defeated me.
from Patricia...
Dad said the Huguenot Bishop… came to England with wife & 18 children. Some (maybe 3 ?) went to W I (B’dos). I had thought it was at the time of the Huguenot persecution but the dates seem wrong, tho maybe the Punnetts sensed trouble ahead & left sooner rather than later?
I did find an Anglican Bishop John Ponet, bishop of Winchester and earlier of Rochester (Canterbury). His Wikipedia entry is worth a look! He, however, was English and had only had one child.
“John Ponet (c. 1514 – August 1556), sometimes spelled John Poynet was an English Protestant churchman and controversial writer, the bishop of Winchester and Marian exile. He is now best known as a resistance theorist who made a sustained attack on the divine right of kings. Ponet was from Kent. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1533, was elected a fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge in the same year: and became a Master of Arts in 1535.”
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The Huguenots were French Protestants who were members of the Reformed Church established in France by John Calvin in about 1555, and who, due to religious persecution, were forced to flee France to other countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In the 1572 St Bartolemew's Day Massacre, 10,000 Protestant Huguenots were slaughtered by order of French queen mother, Catherine de'Medici.
In the years 1660-1760, some 200 thousand Huguenots fled France.
“Huguenot ship-owners, among others, became heavily involved in privateering, soon to be joined by their Anglican counterparts on the other side of the Channel.”
Robin Gwynn, England's First Refugees ~ History Today Volume 35 Issue 5 May 1985
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from Lisbie...
The story I remember, or conjured up, from my childhood, is that the Punnetts smuggled for the English under James I, who succeeded Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. If there's any truth to that, our bunch weren't in England very long. Yet the names of the Punnetts who landed in Barbados were not even slightly French!
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Or were we strawberry farmers in England?
Knees are aching, backs are breaking
Ladies fair who eat our spoils
Have you ever 'midst enjoyment
Realised our painful toils?
Forty, fifty in a punnet,
Each one picked by hand with care,
For a penny paid each punnet...
Thus you get your dainty fare.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, parenthetically in its entry for geneticist R. C. Punnett (1875–1967) ~ he of the Punnett Square fame ~ credits "a strawberry growing ancestor [who] devised the wooden basket known as a 'punnet’."
Punnet is not a French word.
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Years ago, I found this assertion on a website that no longer seems to exist, and I can't speak to its veracity...
"Research
shows that the family name Punnett has been around since the ninth century.
Records dating back to 1336 suggest there was a contingency of Punnetts in the
county of Leicestershire. During the time of the British Empire the surname
spread with the colonies to areas of America, Asia, India and Australia.
Punnett is the 1630th most common last name in Great Britain."
But...
Blair Ewing (grandson of great grandmother Mary Charlotte Deary's sister, Dorah) wrote
"The name Punnett is thought to be of French origin in the distant past. One letter from Kenneth Punnett of Rochester, New York, dated Jan 11, 1966, claims the original name was PONET and came from Brittany in France. Certainly spelling used to vary a lot in earlier times, and it is quite possible that it may have been PONET, PENET, PENETT, PUNETT. The variation of spelling in the baptisimal records of St. Vincent cover quite a few of these."
I did a cursory search for Ponet in Brittany, but found nothing there, though there turns out to be a Ponet-et-Saint-Auban township in southeatern France.
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Also courtesy of Blair Ewing from documents circulated in the family...
and courtest of India Dunn, via her Mum, Rachael Punnett, a different crest, a Punnett crest... but with the same motto morior pro meis, which an online translator reported meant "Die for my own"!
In closing, I want to mention something I recently learned about ~ a mythical bird called Sankofa, part of the Akan culture of Ghana.
The bird flies forward while facing backward.
It seems like an apt symbol for our family at this juncture. I hope we enjoy looking back together at the adventures of our forebears while moving forward to be good ancestors ourselves.
One Love, Lisbie x
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