My Family Connection to The World Cup

The world is gathering around football this summer. The FIFA World Cup connects us to cultural exchange, the excitement of daily matches, the patriotism of cheering our home or adoptive countries - and surprisingly, to our ancestors. Do you share a common ancestor with a historical World Cup athlete? FamilySearch built a page where you can quickly find out., if you have some basic info filled out in your family tree. Here is my ancestral connection to the World Cup.

The First World Cup: Uruguay, 1930

The S.S. Southern Cross sailed from Buenos Aires, Argentina 15 Aug 1930 to New York and landed 2 Sep 1930 after stopping at ports in Brazil (Source 1). A group of American citizens boarded at Rio de Janeiro, mostly men under thirty, with a couple of older gentlemen. They resided in a wide range of cities: New York, Maspeth, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Fall River, Gary. Some had just become naturalized citizens earlier that summer. This crew was the 1930 US Men’s National Team (and their coaches) returning from the very first FIFA World Cup held in Montevideo, Uruguay, and some post-Cup friendly matches in Brazil. 

Many nations had chosen not to spend weeks at sea to travel to the tournament, citing logistics or politics; the United States brought a well known striker Bert Patenaude along with a team of fifteen others to vie for the inaugural championship. Uruguay prevailed, and the United States placed third behind Argentina. Bert Patenaude is now remembered as the man who scored the first hat trick - three goals in a single match - of FIFA World Cup history, during the game against Paraguay. Reports initially conflicted over who scored the second of the three U.S. goals in the match, so FIFA’s official records did not reflect the achievement until 2006 when a football historian investigated the matter.

Bert Patenaude: French Canadian American

Bertrand Arthur Patenaude was born and raised in Fall River, Massachusetts, the son of Wilfred Patenaude and Rosanna Mailloux. The family names signal Bert’s French Canadian ancestry. The area lining the Atlantic coast from Boston to Providence, Rhode Island was one of the primary locations where French Canadians immigrated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Bert’s mother Rosanna was born in Saint-Sébastien and his paternal grandparents came from Sainte-Martine and Saint-Rémi, all of them Québec villages south of Montréal close to the United States border. Many Québecois from this region came to the industrial cities of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard to work in factories and mills when farmland proved unobtainable or unprofitable. 

Bert descends through his mother Rosanna Mailloux from Nicolas Sylvestre, who came to New France in 1665 as part of a group of soldiers directed  by Louis XIV to protect French colonists from conflict with the Iroquois over fur trapping territory. This group was known as the Carginan-Salières Regiment, named after the men who led the regiments during a war with Spain that had kept the French army so busy to the neglect of its colonies. Many Québecois descend from the soldiers who stayed in New France. Nicolas Sylvestre married Barbe Neveu in 1667 and fathered 12 children before he died in 1729. Bert Patenaude descended from the fourth child Pierre Sylvestre, and I descend from the seventh child François Sylvestre. The lines of descent make Bert my mother’s seventh cousin.

Global Sport, Global Family

The US Men's National Team of 1930 came from several different national backgrounds in addition to Bert. Coach Robert Millar immigrated from Scotland and became a citizen in 1922. John Coll immigrated from Scotland, worked as a boilermaker in New York, and became a citizen in 1929. Alexander Wood's family came to Gary, Indiana from Scotland and he became a citizen after graduating high school in 1926. George Moorhouse was born in Liverpool, England and came to Brooklyn after living in Montréal (Source 2). The team manager Wilfred Cummings was born to an English immigrant carpenter in Chicago. The multinational family history behind this inaugural World Cup captures how porous identity boundaries create a greater sense of global connection; though it would take until 1984 and 1990 for Black Americans to appear on the USMNT and at the World Cup respectively. Now in 2026, the US is fielding its most diverse team ever, including (poignantly timed with the Supreme Court decision) a birthright citizen born to Nigerian parents.

The magic of the World Cup creates global human community transcending time and place. We connect over sport, food, celebration. Genealogy, and the history that it helps us understand, can create global connections, too. Let me know if you find a World Cup connection in your family!

Sources

1. U.S. Passenger Arrival List, New York, 2 Sep 1930, S.S. Southern Cross, List of United States Citizens, sheet 2; digital image, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-G5H9-V2R : accessed 1 Jul 2026); NARA microfilm publication T715, Roll 4815.

2. US District Court for the Eastern District of New York at Brooklyn, Petition for Naturalization 131638, George Moorhouse (1930); digital image, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/2280/images/32126_23131820337206-00917 : accessed 1 Jul 2026).