Mmm. Neither do I.If you'd find yourself capable of expanding on that cryptic comment, I'm sure we'd all be grateful. I make no pretence of being a classicist, I won't be offended.
Given the problems of saying much of anything about the history of Britain in the first part of the fifth century, I don't think it's possible to make generalizations about "Briton" vs. "Roman" and their relative popularity as identities at the time. Patrick was part of the aristocracy by birth, which among the Roman Empire was always very culturally unified, but he came of age at a time when the Empire's cultural cachet was rapidly attenuating in Britain (due to that whole Constantinus "III" thing), and he was kidnapped to Ireland in his teens anyway. He was an important regional member of the Church, which was extremely closely tied into Roman identity.
We certainly can't say anything about the long-term genealogy of his family - whether they had descended from people who had lived on the island since before the Romans came, were later immigrants, some combination of the two, or whatever. And it's dubious that that would have mattered to anybody anyway, especially after the third and fourth centuries. Provincial aristocratic identity was not seen as particularly distinct from the aristocratic identity of those who still lived at least part of their year in Rome itself, except for aesthetic/literary purposes or by the odd semi-xenophobic clarissimus who never left the Palatine Hill. Rome itself did not matter all that much; the Emperors themselves kept their courts on the frontier, and most everybody else had to follow along.
All we know about Patrick's family is that his father's name was Calpornius and grandfather's was Potitus, and that both of those men were employed by the Church, just as he was. In all probability, at least some of Patrick's extended family had moved to Britain during the Empire, and potentially some had lived there since before it.
