 He is also honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America on January 3.William Alfred Passavant was born in 1821 in Zelienople, Pennsylvania, the third and youngest son of Phillipe Louis Passavant and Fredericka Wilhelmina Basse (nicknamed "Zelie," hence the town's name).His grandfather, Baron Dettmar Basse, born in Iserlohn in the Ruhr Valley in what was then the Grand Duchy of Hesse and later became Germany, spent a decade in Paris as a diplomat and merchant before fleeing the Napoleonic Wars and emigrating to Philadelphia and then Pittsburgh in 1801.