The Indian connection

I’ve done a lot of work through the years on my family’s history.  Unable to contain myself, I’ve gone spinning off into distant cousins of great-great-grandfathers and the like, fascinated by the spreading web of family. Recently, I’ve begun to look at it again, and to focus on the couple who were my paternal great-grandparents.

He was a coalminer turned soldier, she the daughter of a soldier. The twist is that he served in the British Army in India, where he married her when she was aged only fourteen. And I think that her ancestry wasn’t totally British. Curiously, there appear to be no children from this marriage until five years later.  That was very unusual in those days. I wonder if he was posted away from home immediately after the marriage, or there were children, but these died from some tropical disease (cholera was very much a fact of life then).

He was posted back to England and their first child was born on the way in Cape Town. There were to be at least twelve more children and by the time the eighth child was born, he had been invalided out the Army and they were back in Scotland.

My research has stalled because I need to follow his army records, and I can only do that at Kew in the Public Records Office. Also held there are records from India House, which might hold clues about her background. Her mother had an unusual surname which might be Anglo-Indian or Franco-Indian.

My great-grandmother must have been a redoubtable woman. A few years ago, I was given a photograph of her in her old age.  She’s dressed in the style of thirty years before and is a huge figure. She survived her husband by twenty-eight years and at least seven of her children pre-deceased her.  The coalfields of Fife claimed two of her sons, my grandfather one of them.  Consumption took a few more.  It’s a classic story of poverty and disease among working-class Scots of the time.

I mean to restart my research into my great-grandparents.  I want to track down that Indian connection and all it means.

Footnote This post first appeared in curlsdiva.com on October 5, 2008, before folkarethething.com existed. I’m transferring all genealogically related posts from that blog to this.