Early Life
Father Peyton was born as Patrick Joseph Gillard-Peyton in County Mayo, Ireland to John Peyton of Carracastle and to Mary Gillard of Rathreedane, Townland of Bonniconlon, County Mayo.
Father Peyton was the sixth in a family of four girls and five boys living in a small cabin at a 14 acre (5.66 hectares) stony farmland near the foot of Ox Mountains. The Peyton family was a deeply religious Irish Catholic subsistence farming family. Later on, some members of the family migrated to the United States.
Peyton was one of the children having a privilege to go to school. Patrick was sent to his mother's relatives in Bonniconlon to study at a school run by Tadhg O’Leary in Bofield.
As a young man, Patrick was rebellious and had moments of defying authority, resulting in dropping out of school. Despite the youthful rebellion, he remained close to his family, respectful of his parents, and was deeply religious. By his teen years, he was contemplating a vocation to become a priest. Religious recruiters such as the Capuchins and the Redemptorist fathers visited Carracastle in search of young men wanting to pursue the priesthood.
His curiosity about pursuing a vocation was set aside for a couple of years. Instead he would concentrate in helping his family earn a living when their father became too ill and to work the farm. Some of his elder sisters were already in America and were sending remittances to help the family left behind. In 1927, his sisters in America sent word that Patrick and his older brother Thomas could sail to the United States and join them in Scranton, Pennsylvania. On May 13, 1928, the Peyton brothers set sail.
The brothers arrived at Ellis Island in New York after a ten-day trip, traveling by steerage, a young Patrick who had never left his country was awed by the glamor of the well off Irish people who were in the leisure cabins above deck. The two took the train from New York to Pennsylvania and lived at the home of their already married sister, Nellie who was working as a housekeeper for the state Attorney General of that time. Patrick's sister Nellie already spoke to Monsignor Paul Kelley of the St. Stanislaus Cathedral and told of Patrick's inclination to pursue a priestly vocation. Monsignor Kelley told Nellie to bring her younger brother Patrick to the cathedral as soon as he arrived. By June 1928, with hard luck in finding a job, Patrick finally met Monsignor Kelley and was offered with a job of becoming the cathedral's sexton. In the words of Patrick at that time, a sexton was just another name for a janitor.
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