Arrière grand-père

My great grandfather always put Bordeaux in the FROM column on the birth certificates of all his kids.

Once he put Bordelais. We discovered from reading the certificates carefully that her could not read nor write. The adjunct HIS MARK was there instead of his signature. He only spoke French. He was born in 1844 –1845. His surname on the birth certificates said PUTAN as it is now spelled.

Armed with this meagre information I had decided to spend a couple of days in Bordeaux trying to track him down. He is very elusive and

everyone else in the family had failed to do so. I was not expecting success but feet on the ground are worth a million dollars.

Yet again we got lost on our way into town and took a long detour before finding the right road to our host for the night. Dominique was a friend of Françoise with whom we had stayed 2 nights before. She offered us the use of bed for the night.. I got lost yet again following the signs to a supermarket so 2 hours later I got back with our supplies for the day.

We cooked our soup and fortified it with lots of fresh veges and angel hairs. It is good to cook your own meal occasionally. Dominique got home at 11 pm so we were in la-la land when she arrived.

The next morning we introduced ourselves and prepared to go hunting for the needle in the haystack. We found our way to the tram station where a delightful young lady who spoke good English helped us figure out the technology to buy a tram ticket. We got chatting and found out that she had a friend from New Zealand who was working in Bordeaux in heart (disease?) research. We chatted away until it was time to swap trams and said farewell.

The plan for the day was to visit the City of Bordeaux Archives Department to do our research. Sally went off to play tourist visiting the new area called Darwin on la rive droite where they are developing abandoned buildings into an environmentally friendly living and shopping village.

I sat down at the computer and started. My level of French is not that good so I was very pleased to have some help for half an hour or so before I started checking the birth records 1844 –1845.
Nothing.

OK then passports 1844-1899.
Nothing.
I went back to birth records and found in the year 1845 Paton, Bernard.
Bernard was my dad’s name and Paton is very similar.
I asked the man how to find the actual birth certificate from the index .

“PUTAN, Bernar” he said.

Exactly how we pronounce our name in New Zealand with a slight French accent. Was this the real spelling of family name?
Did the person ( probably English), who filled out the birth certificates for my great-father, write what he heard because he couldn't spell it for him. We have always suspected it.

The archives assistant read to me the hand written certificate. It said something like - On the morning of 15 May a child was presented to me at the town hall at 11 o’clock in the morning. The father was Henry Paton, and the mother was Madeleine. The child is called Bernard.

That was it. Just a titbit that lead nowhere. The next day we went to the Departmental archives across town to check out more passports –( nothing found) and to discuss the possibility that he may have been a sailor ( and therefore did not need a passport.) Simple I thought.

“Do you have records of the crew of the boats who left Bordeaux?”

“Yes. But what boat was he on?”

“I have no idea.”

“Sorry but it impossible to find out.”

It isn't actually.

It is just very, very time consuming. The French kept records of every crew member, and every passenger, for every voyage the boat made, for every port on the Gironde ( Dordogne and Garonne rivers), for every year. It was literally a mountain of records to climb through. There was no way I was going to find it this trip. So with great sadness at having failed just like everyone else I left the archives and headed back to town.

But I think I have finally solved the mystery of the real spelling of our family name. All it took was one person from Bordeaux with a Bordelais accent to solve it ( I hope). When I return to NZ I will check out all the Paton's from all the surrounding villages and see what I can find. Another chapter in the mystery is about to begin.

And if we do not get too bored with our cycling we may make a repeat trip to Bordeaux next year and spend a week or two wading our way through all the maritime records to see what I can find.