Halkett Pattullo

Father of Mary (Pattullo) Short, and grandfather of Ruth (Short) Ellingwood and of T. D. “Duff” Pattullo, Premier of British Columbia. Born at Inveresk with Musselburgh, outside Edinburgh, he was the second son of Alexander Pattullo, a native of Dundee, and Jean Watson of Prestonpans. His father went out to Upper Canada in the autumn of 1820 and took up Lot 2, Con. 6, of Caledon Township, Peel County; his mother brought the children, James, Thomas, Halkett, Margaret and Jane, in 1823, as a Caledon local history has it. His father was killed by a falling tree in 1828, and his younger brother Thomas died in 1849, aged 31. In 1855 Halkett put up a stone to them at the Melville White Church, Caledon (record). His brothers and sisters, with the dates a printed genealogy gives them: James (23 Jun 1807, Inveresk - 10 Jun 1890, Garafraxa), who farmed nearby and later at Garafraxa (record); Jane (b. 9 Feb 1812, Mrs. Mountain); Margaret (23 Dec 1813 - 1894, Mrs. Kirkwood); and Thomas (8 Apr 1817 - 31 Oct 1849) (source).

He married Jane Robson, whose parents had also settled at Caledon, in 1833, and lived on his father’s farm. In 1855 the family moved to Blenheim Township, Oxford County, and he died there on 7 June; his widow’s stone at Woodstock records it (record). Bourdon gives 1865. “Pattullo was the second of nine children born to Jane (Robson) Pattullo (1809-79) and Halkett Pattullo (1810-65) … In 1855, the family moved to Blenheim Township, Oxford County,” Bourdon writes of their son Thomas (source).

His children, with WikiTree, Bourdon and Find a Grave together: Alexander (1835-1880, of Sanilac, Michigan); Thomas Robson (1837-1879), the Barkerville gold miner, who in 1876 took “$10,000 in gold dust and bars to the Centennial”; Jane (1839-1896, Mrs. Rennie); William (b. 1841), who went to the Pacific coast with Thomas in 1859; Margaret (1842-1879, Mrs. A. J. Campbell); Isabella (1843-1924, Mrs. John Laidlaw); George Robson (1845-1922), editor of the Woodstock Sentinel, registrar of Oxford County, president of the Ontario Historical Society and father of Duff; Lucinda F. (1846-1919, Mrs. Findlay); Andrew (1850-1903), owner of the Sentinel-Review and member of the Ontario legislature; and Mary (1852-1932), “the youngest,” who “seems to have been a favourite.” He is named as the father in the Oxford County marriages of his children Jane and Isabella (1862), Alexander (1866) and Margaret (1868), of George (1868), Mary (1879, record) and Andrew (1889), and in George’s death registration of 1922 (record). Find a Grave adds a grandson, Lt. Hugh James Pattullo, “son of James Durie Pattullo [b.] 1855 … son of Halket and Jane Robson,” which nothing else supports yet (source).

His given name, rare as a first name, was a surname. A Pattullo had married a Halket in Fife by the 1780s, and a Janet Halket Patullo was baptised at Bo’ness in 1755 (source). It very probably honours a Halket in his father’s family.

Research: research/ellingwood/Short_Pattullo_Comparison.md, research/ellingwood/Ellingwood_Wives_Families.md.

Open questions

• His death: 7 June 1855 (his widow’s gravestone) or 1865 (Bourdon, WikiTree). The 1861 census of Blenheim Township, with Jane as head or as a widow, would settle it; so would his own stone at Princeton, if one survives.

• Whom his name honours: a Halket in his father’s family (see alexander-pattullo-1773).

• James Durie Pattullo (b. 1855), given as his son on Find a Grave: a child of Halkett and Jane, or of another branch?