The first ragdolls were registered in the summer 1965. The origin of the race however, is somehow obscure, not everything is true and contradictions between different stories occur.

It all seems to have started with a female angora cat, called Josephine. Her kittens possessed not only a very relaxed temperament, but also other qualities like non-matting fur, big body-size, non-fighting deposition and a low pain threshold. The neighbour of Josephine’s owner, Ann Baker realised this and accquired two females (Raggedy Ann Fugianna and Buckwheat) and a male (Raggedy Ann Daddy Warbucks). All three were probably produced by different sires. However, the last litter of Josephine and Josephine herself were killed by her owners, so Ann Baker unfortunately could not use further offspring of Josephine.

Ann Baker mated Daddy Warbucks to his halfsisters, Buckwheat and Fugianna, and divided the resulting offspring in two groups: those from Fugianna were called “the Light Side” and the ones from Buckwheat “the Dark Side”. These groups were crossed repeatedly internally and later back crossed with their parents to enlarge the breeding stock. Ann Baker’s breeding scheme resulted in three basic patterns (unfortunately also in a very small gene pool). The first scientific studies were conducted by Laura and Denny Dayton, who established the optimum nutritional requirements for ragdolls and set up a pedigree database.

The different Ragdoll patterns recognised by the FiFe