our origin story?

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.

Mabel Christmas-Harvey (1948 poem by New Zealand author)

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

we gonna wheel and come again

Family all, greetings!  It’s been too long!

A recent exchange between some of the great aunts reinforced the urgency of a repository for family stories and information.    We tossed around ideas of how to go about this, and since this much-neglected blog already exists, we’re going to use it, but with some change in direction. 

The plan is to pose questions and hope for responses that will then be posted in the days/weeks to follow.  The questions will attempt to be roughly chronological, and may come in multiples in order to cover periods in our history. 

I hope for memories, questions, thoughts, stories, jokes, conjecture, questions... anything and everything that can add to the richness of the record.  Contributions do not require supporting evidence, and I suspect that sometimes our stories may even contradict one another, but that seems appropriate for the unruly survivors that we have been.  The one reality of which we are sure is that we have been in these islands from the beginning of European settlement, and stayed to become a part of an evolving unique culture.

Family, these questions are meant to encourage responses (and not just from great aunts), but are not meant to limit contributions to any one topic.  Please do feel free to share on anything Punnett related that occurs to you.

If you’d prefer not to get emails from the great aunts, please just let me know so I don’t intrude on your Inbox!  If there’s anyone I should add to the list, please let me have names and addresses so that I can make that right.

The first questions will post tomorrow (fingers crossed).

I’m also sharing a link to the art gallery of a Caribbean blog that I do with my maternal cousin, Nan Peacocke.  Paintings and photographs by family members (thus far...Zen, Tristan , Denise), are dotted throughout the blog, and have been showcased on the Art Gallery  (Lynn Cevene, Rachael, and, most recently, first daughter of Betty and Langley ~ Rosalind Punnett Wilkinson).  Five of Roz’s paintings shown belong to Betty Jane who graciously allowed their use.  https://archipelagospeak.wordpress.com/art-gallery/

I hope you’re all thriving.  And I hope that we can get some momentum going in creating a record, or an outline anyway, of our story.

Love to allyuh.

Lisbie xanother photo of our beautiful Valley from Lynden

Betty and Chrissy

 

isn;t this one lovely photograph?!

Would be ever so pleased if anyone has photos they'd be willing to contribute to the blog!

One love,

Lisbie x

43 years ago today...

 ... Christopher Alexander Punnett "shuffl'd off this mortal coil", but remains present in the hearts and memories of many of us who adored him.  So present, that there have been grandchildren born after he died who have vivid memories of him!  From time to time, family at home will meet up someone who still talks about him.  His contemporaries have mostly all trod on, but some of those young people in the villages who hailed him as Daddy Chris do, I trust, still recall him lovingly.  He was extraordinary in the most ordinary of ways.

I recently learned the word topophilia... it means love of place (From Greek topos "place" and -philia, "love of").  It suggests a strong sense of place, which often becomes mixed with the sense of cultural identity among certain people and a love of certain aspects of such a place.  W. H. Auden used the term in his 1948 introduction to John Betjeman's poetry book Slick but Not Streamlined, stressing that the term "has little in common with nature love" but depended upon a landscape infused with a sense of history.  It seemed to me to describe that ineffable connection that we Punnetts have with the landscape of our Valley, and of our country, as distanced as many of us now are.

​ “The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious,

the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.”

Margaret Walker

"There is St. Vincent, the most beautiful of the Caribee isles, with it’s bold, sharp, and abrupt mountains, its deep intervening romantic glens, and its lofty and rocky coasts. The delicious valley of Buccament is the admiration of all travellers. The famed botanic garden is the theme of general praise; and the island stands high in reputation as a healthy station."
Simmond's Colonial Magazine and Foreign Miscellany, Volume 1 ~ 1844

"… a visit to the delicious valley of Buccament..."
Between Slavery and Freedom: Special Magistrate John Anderson's Journal of St Vincent During the Apprenticeship

I was delighted to stumble upon our Valley being described as "delicious"! Of course, this was before Grandad acquired the estates, but our relationship with that land feels timeless to me.

Daddy loved his country, and had a passionate relationship with the mountains and Valleys adjoining Buccament. He was a strong believer, but not a churchgoer, so these words of Aldous Huxley always seemed written about my father.

“My father considered a walk among the mountains 
as the equivalent of churchgoing.”

Daddy and, later, his sons (Colin especially) regularly hunted in those mountains. Years ago when Mummy was still alive we (John, Mark and I with Mummy, as I recall) stopped on a drive to North Leeward and stretched our legs on an interior road near Rose Hall (I think), and a gentleman on a donkey asked if we were "Mister Chrissy children"... he told us stories of Daddy's hunting, and he even remembered the names of his faithful hunting dogs! 

The Nature Trail at Daddy's beloved Dalaway, and the newer Cumberland Trail have opened up some of his old stomping grounds to less intrepid nature lovers. I'd love to take this walk...

Cumberland Trail http://discoversvg.com/

"Located in the upper Cumberland Valley, the mountain trail was once used by villagers as part of linking to the upper Vermont Valley. The area was popular for the movement of animals, and was a “Mourning” ground for the Spiritual Baptists Religion. The Forestry Department acquired some lands from farmers in the 1960’s and this assisted significantly in maintaining the trail. The reforestation involved the planting of trees like Caribbean Pine and Blue Mahoe. The Cumberland Trail is also one of the habitats for the St. Vincent Parrot (Amazonia Guildingii).

The Cumberland Nature Trail is rested in the Cumberland Valley, traversing a variety of Forest Vegetation and Farm lands. At the initial section, the trail runs next to a wooden water pipe transporting water to a hydro-electricity power plant located in the Cumberland Valley. 

From its head at Grove, the trail winds its way eastwards for 1Km before veering to the south for another km. This 2-Km section of the trail actually mimics the curves and contours of the wooden pipe that conducts water from the Youngman's Valley to three (3) hydro-electricity generating units located at several points along the Cumberland River with the last one sited at lower Cumberland. Hydro-electricity generation and transmission is therefore an interesting element of the trail."

Cumberland Bay

Daddy was well known for a complete lack of talent for, and interest in, dancing, having apparently ended up on the dance floor with Lady Graham when she foolhardily insisted he accompany her in a dance! But, along with stories of tea meetings and other island traditions, he talked about country people dancing the quadrille, so I looked and found a YouTube clip of Caribbean people putting their spin on the quadrille.

quadrille - Caribbean style https://youtu.be/3eSHbXFl4aA

quadrille - European style https://youtu.be/OGgdGBMLFxE

My "ancestral memories" are filled with Daddy's tales of St.Vincent adventures and ghost stories, riding the rails in Canada, the quality of his attention, his enormous quiet kindness and insistent ethics, walks and drives at his side. He loved his family, and loved each person within it in a very particular and all-encompassing way, and we all loved him deeply. In my years with him, I knew a simple man of simple tastes and habits. His routine was predictable - he had raw eggs and coffee for breakfast, a lunch of meat with a selection of 'provisions' and a dish of peas or beans. After his afternoon rest he read Robert Service or Kahlil Gibran, and his cowboy novels (Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey), had a dish of fruit or a couple squares of dark chocolate, went for a walk, and came home for the first rum of the afternoon, and company. Dinner was steamed fish or soup, every evening.

He was talented, brave, kind, and eminently decent. He revered Abraham Lincoln. He was non-judgmental, he was fair, he was honest, he was funny. He was full of love. He was full of love. The Heavens are richer for his stardust.

Chrissy and his kids

Sending you all love today, and every day.  May you be safe and happy.