The Catty family

The British and Canadian branches of this family descend from Louis Francois, later Angicised to Lewis Frances, Catty who was either a refugee from the French revolution or a French Canadian with a taste for scholarship who came to Brittain when there were as yet no Canadian universities, sources differ. The name may have originally been de Katte.

However it is known that at the time of the Napoleonic wars he taught French to army cadets at Woolwich Military Academy. He published a French Grammer; there is still a copy in the British Libray. He died in 1824.

One son, James Patrick enterd the army and served at Waterloo. In 1823 he married Shelley's friend Sophia Stacey. Health problems led to an early retiremnt in 1833 and he died at Cloford in Somerset in 1839.(His coatee is now in the National Army museum, the oldest item of Engineer's uniform in its collection).

His son, Charles, followed his father into the army, served in South Africa with distinction and retired as a Major-General to Portsmouth in Hampshire. Anther son, Corbet, was for a while in the household of the Lord Mayor of London and then lived in the family home near Maidstone where he built up a reference collection of mineral rocks now in the Maidstone museum. A daughter married a Royal Marine officer.

(Some embarassment was caused to the noted cat artist Louis Wain who created a "Catty family" of felines in the 1890s which included a "General Catty" but the family was delighted and had a print hanging on its walls for many years).

A number of descendnts of Louis Francois with this name can still be found in Britain and Canada, where some emigrated including General Catty's son Hamilton shortly before World War I.