Oct 5th, 2008

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…)