A resident of Florida who always knew she had Newfoundland roots — her paternal grandfather was a Patten from Grand Bank who married a Rice from Twillingate — she paid her first visit to her ancestors’ homeland on May 20, her 49th birthday.

Oliver has documented her extensive family tree, and as she leafs through bound pages filled with names and dates, she says her relatives are very alive to her.

“I am obsessed by my family tree,” she says. “And, my first question to anyone I meet in Florida is always ‘how long have you been here?’ and then we get into where the family came from.”

During her visit to this province, Oliver visited Grand Bank and St. John’s, got to meet a number of relatives, and did a lot of archival research.

On her Web site (http://members.tripod.com/newfie_girl) she says she is researching the following family names: Patten, Bendle, Buffett, Coffin, Foote, Forsey, Hickman, Hollett, Nicholle/Nicolle, Rice, Tibbo/Thibeau, Welsh and Wareham, in the communities of Grand Bank, Fortune, Robert’s Arm, Friday’s Bay and Haystack.

Her search has stretched across Newfoundland, Jersey, the Channel Islands, England and Wales.

Oliver’s interest in her family tree was sparked after her father had a stroke in 1990.

Following the stroke that left him paralysed on one side, her then 75-year-old dad, Gilbert Earl Patten, had trouble remembering everyday things, but could recall far back in his past.

“I wanted to get something that dad could talk about because he was pretty down and out,” Oliver says as she recounts how the first thing she did was get out boxes of photographs her father had saved and, with his help, identify the people and places depicted.

That went so well, she decided to do further digging into the family tree in order to entertain her father and have something else to talk about.

Oliver and her family moved to Florida from Toronto in 1964 when she was 10. Her dad was one of 9 children who were raised in Toronto, so she began by talking to her numerous family members there and getting as many names of other relatives as she could.

It didn’t take her long to collect 250 names of people related to her.

When she logged onto the Internet and began checking out sites such as Newfoundland Grand Banks of Genealogy, and e-mailing interested people, her list of names grew even more.

By the time her dad passed away in 1996, she had collected 1,000 names.

“Daddy was amazed,” she says, adding she now has approximately 6,000 names.

Over the years, Oliver has increased her knowledge of Newfoundland through reading books by authors such as Grand Bank native Robert Parsons, whose forte is stories of local shipwrecks.

Her interest in genealogy is restricted to her Newfoundland roots. Her mother Betty (Browne), who lives near her in Florida, was born in Kirkland Lake, Ontario.

Any time information about her mother’s side of the family comes her way, Oliver passes it along to her Uncle Pete, who is working on that side of the family tree.

Traced back centuries

Oliver has traced her paternal roots back to the 1600s, when people by the name of Nicholle came to Grand Bank from the Channel Islands and married into the Forsey family.

Their daughter, Susan Nicholle married John Patten of Grand Bank. The couple had eight children, the last one being Phillip Nicholle Patten, who married Matilda Welsh. Oliver notes in her family it was customary for sons to use their mother’s maiden name as their middle name.

Philip and Elizabeth Patten had a son they named Simeon Rose Patten. He married Annie Blanche Rice, who was born in Twillingate. One of their children was Gilbert Earl Patten, Oliver’s father.

In about 1910, Simeon and Annie moved to Cape Breton, taking Annie’s parents, George and Henrietta (Coffin) Rice, with them. The Pattens and the Rices later moved to Toronto.

Inherited defect

It was through research on her family tree that Oliver learned about a genetic birth defect called AVM or arterial vascular malformation, a growth on the brain that can cause migraine headaches and even aneurysms. Her father’s mother died of an aneurysm at age 50.

“The strangest thing about all this (the birth defect) is that it has been traced back to my great-grandmother’s Bendle family in Haystack, Placentia Bay. It seems to only affect the female side of the family,” she said.

In 1992, Oliver had a nine-hour operation to remove a peach-sized AVM which had caused her problems for years.

At home in Florida, Oliver is a wife, mother and grandmother. She worked for 20 years as a draftswoman, retired, then went back to work as an engineering sales co-ordinator, a job she’s done for the past year.

She took drafting in high school and it was her future father-in-law, Ted Oliver, who first hired her to work for him when she was 16 and still in school. Ted was a family friend she’d known since she came to Florida at age 10.

Oliver married Ted’s son, Jack Oliver, 28 years ago. Jack is a decade older than her, and she recalls the first words he ever spoke to her when she was 10 and he was 20: “Get off the back of my car, you little brat.”