Why Patrick Duddy is on this page

Heritage: Patrick Dennis Duddy is a Duddy-surname carrier in the American foreign service; the cited Wikipedia article does not document Irish ancestry. Heritage classification: diaspora-likely on the strength of the surname only.

Patrick Dennis Duddy is an American career diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Venezuela through one of the most dramatic stretches of US-Venezuelan relations under Hugo Chávez. Confirmed in mid-2007, Duddy presented his credentials in Caracas on 6 August 2007 and served until 11 September 2008, when President Chávez expelled him in retaliation for what Chávez claimed was an American-led plot to overthrow his government. Duddy returned eight months later, on 1 July 2009, after the Obama administration restored full diplomatic relations, and finished his assignment on 16 July 2010 — making him one of the few US ambassadors of the modern era to serve in the same post under two different administrations and on either side of an expulsion. He subsequently became Diplomat in Residence at Duke University’s Center for International Studies.

Heritage notes

Family root: United States — diaspora-unconfirmed-surname-only.

The directory threads Patrick Duddy back to the O'Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.