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Patriarch Sketches
Haplogroup R1b – Lineage 3A
Phineas Pratt appears to be the founder of the lineage 3a cluster of the Pratt R1b y-DNA group. For a definitive description of the life of Phineas Pratt, see Robert Charles Anderson’s, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England 1620-1633, Volumes I-III.
Phineas is among the earliest Pratt immigrants to the New World, arriving at Plymouth Plantation in 1622. His descendants can claim Mayflower descent via his wife Mary Priest’s family. Mary was the daughter of Degory Priest, a Mayflower passenger. Because of the Mayflower link, quite a bit has been written about Phineas and Mary’s family.
We are lucky in that Phineas, or Phinehas as he spelled it, left us a detailed description of his early years at Plymouth Plantation. Phineas could read and write and his estate inventory included 8 shillings worth of books. See the article written by Rodney McDonough in Mayflower Descendant: A Magazine of Pilgrim Genealogy and History, Volume 4 starting on page 87 for a great overview of Phineas Pratt’s “Declaration”.
Another resource for Phineas Pratt researchers is the book Phinehas Pratt and Some of His Descendants, written by Eleazer Franklin Pratt and published in 1897 and available on Google Books. The book was published posthumously by Eleazer’s sons in “loving memory of their father”. It is this volume that is undoubtedly the source of Phineas’s lineage. To quote directly from the book about Phineas and early New England,
“… two men bore the name of Pratt. These were Joshua and Phineas, and they are supposed to have been brothers. Phineas undoubtedly was the son of Henry. Tradition relates that the father of Henry was John, and that either John, or the father of John was a Frenchman who bore the name of Plat or Platt, …”
The identification of Henry Pratt as the father of Phineas was provided to Eleazer Pratt by Henry Pratt, grandson of Abigail Pratt Neal who was in turn the granddaughter of Phineas Pratt. In other words the great-great-grandson of Phineas Pratt provided the information on his long dead ancestor. What is interesting and perhaps telling about this possible father of Phineas, is the complete lack of the name Henry as a given name for the descendants of Phineas through his grandchildren. Based on English naming patterns, one would expect at least a Henry or two to appear in the first three generations of the descendants.
Joshua Pratt, who is contemporary to Phineas and is suspected of being his brother, does not name any children Henry either. Currently the Pratt y-DNA project is searching for a male descendant of Joshua to approach for testing. If Phineas and Joshua were brothers, we would expect a close y-DNA match to the R1b lineage 3a cluster.