Background

My mother was Mary Elizabeth Schnebly, who was born in Montreal in 1908. She married Richard Percival Pattee. Her father was Clarence Dexter Schnebly, born in Hackensack, NJ in 1883 and migrated to Montreal in 1906 to head the Drafting department of the new telephone company, a subsidiary of the Western Electric Company, in Canada and called the Northern Electric Co. He had 15 employees in his department, and by 1929 he had 400 employees and had been promoted to Telephone Systems Engineer. The telephone switching system used all over Canada was engineered under his supervision.

Clarence’s father, William Jacob Schnebly, born in 1852, had a grocery store in Hackensack, NJ, and his father wasWilliam Schnebly and his mother was Helen Voorhis Zabriskie. Both of these families go back six generations into the 1500s and include King John III of Poland.