Talk:Patrikas

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there is a controversy in genealogical research about who was this Patrikas' father. 82.181.234.211 (talk) 17:41, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

I am not certain whether this sort of long dissection about the correctness of the parernal filiation is suitable to include in the article itself, but I thought to present the background about the confusion here in connection of the article. 82.181.234.211 (talk) 18:54, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
 * oldest sources appear to know only the duke named Patrikas Narimantaitis (and its translations in other languages), i.e Patrikas, son of Narimantas. That is the explicit information about the filiation for example in the chronicle of Novgorod when it records in 1383-85 the fief holdings of Patrikas.
 * sometime a few centuries BP, such as in 1800s or in 1700s (which was some four hundred years after Patrikas lived) some amateur genealogist appears to have been the one who concocted the personage named as Patrikas son of Alexander (Patrikei Alexandrovich) and that creation appears to have taken place in Russia. Seeing that the Galitzin family's later generations have used that specific personage as their root, it would probably have been some sort of genealogist for example in service of the princes Galitzin. As a matter of high ancestry and boasting, this actually is not a significant difference: there is nothing essentially better for remote descendants in descending via Alexander from Narimantas than Patrikas being himself son of Narimantas, so this difference boils down to nothing else than a question of precise filiation and getting it correct. But these sort of mistakes were things frequently done in 1800s genealogical collections, it did not need more than an unclear wording or scribble in some old source. Patrikas had a son named Alexander, as far as reliable genealogies know - someone could have seen their names in opposite order in some scribbling (although even there probably intended as Alexander son of Patrikas by the original source, not Patrikas son of Alexander), and the ghost was born to literature. The princes Galitzin were powerful and numerous in the 1800s, and in the end of that century, the Brockhaus-Jefron encyclopedia, and undoubtedly also other printings, adopted the version presented by the Galitzin (Brockhaus-Jefron makes also other elementary mistakes, such as alleging that the Bulgak Ivan son of Vasili would have been grandson of that Patrikas son of Alexander; however Ivan Bulgak's father Vasili was son of George, himself son of Patrikas, and that person Vasili son of George is actually attested in historical archive sources both as to his death mention and then later as mention of his children's inheritance; whereas there did not actually exist any Vasili son of Patrikas in historical records and such Vasili Patrikeievich must be regarded as ghost created by careless Brockhaus editors). This ghost-like 'Patrikas Aleksandraitis' has lived onwards in many genealogies to the present day. I have seen some unfortunate individuals (without sound judgement) to quote Brockhaus as the ultimate source of truth (or, pravda) about this question - and what's worse, such idiotic parrots of Brockhaus do not usually even say an apology for their drive to push through their mistaken views even if shown wrong (I have understood that such is an attitude common enough among those who want to pretend they are experts about Russia).
 * many respectable genealogical works have since discarded that ghost-like Patrikei Alexandrovich and kept with Patrikas Narimantaitis. For example, Ikonnikov, and Schwennicke's Europäische Stammtafeln. As well as recent encyclopedias in Lithuania, Poland, etc, mention 'Patrycy Narimuntowicz', 'Patrikas Narimantaitis', 'Patrikei Norimuntovich' when it is question about the forefather Patrikas.
 * a good demonstration what confusion and inconsistency this has caused, is the 1979 publication of the french collector Jacques Ferrand, who pretty much followed what the families themselves gave to him. In his entry for the princes Kurakin, Ferrand in that publication (les familles princieres de l'ancien empire de Russie) gives the pedigree table according to the older knowledge: the ancestor was Patrikas son of Narimantas. But in the very same work, in the entry for the princes Galitzin, Ferrand (who has there in that chapter a preface text signed by a prince Galitzin which shows Ferrand's ties to his interviewees) then lists the pedigree in the version where there are Patrikei Alexandrovich, then Alexander son of Narimantas as his father, and of course Narimantas as the forefather as father of Alexander. It would be inconceivable to have such conflicting data in a real academic publication without any effort to explain the inconsistency (Ferrand made no explanation - perhaps he even did not realize the difference, as those two tables are separated by plenty of pages), but Ferrand is no medievalist. The Kurakin-entry forefathers between Patrikas and his great-great-grandson Andrew 'kuraka' are precisely the same as the Galitzin-entry forefathers between Patrikas and his great-great-grandson Michael 'golitsa', so (perhaps unwittingly) Ferrand agrees that these two branches did not separate yet from Narimantas, but -as is historically recorded- only several generations after Narimantas, four generations after Patrikas.
 * it would actually not be chronologically totally impossible for one Patrikas to have been son of Narimantas' elder son Aleksandras Narimantaitis, but the existence of 1300s historical records to mention Patrikas Narimantaitis, combined with the total lack of any Patrikas Aleksandraitis in historical records of that and next century, is telling. It is believed that Patrik was a rare name in those regions in that epoch.
 * Patrikas had three sons who are attested in historical sources: Aleksandras Patrikaitis, Jurgis Patrikaitis and Teodoras Patrikaitis (or translations of those names to other languages). There is no historical attestation of any Vasili Patrikievich (as opposed to 'Vasili Patrikeiev') in this family.