Thursday 14 May 2015

If it isn't Medieval, it's boring, right?

 
Norman knights from the Bayeux
tapestry - is one my ancestor?
When I think of family history my mind always goes to that of my father's side of the family.  His is the side that has all the myths and legends, the story that one was a body guard to the French king Louis XIV, and lived at Versailles, a cross between Quentin Durward and a Musketeer.  Further back it becomes apparent that we are not native to England, having come to this country from abroad, from Brittany, and we came as conquerors not immigrants, part of the retinue of Count Alan when he joined with William of Normandy.  Great stuff, exciting, dramatic, Medieval...

But recently I stayed with my cousins in the north of England, in the most complete coaching inn the country, with stables, storehouses, staff cottages, cobbled driveway, stone flags in the kitchen and the most enormous inglenook fireplace with salt stores above, and a rather sweet sword hanging from it.  I digress - I think the story of this house belongs in another post.  My cousin spoke of the family history and for a moment I forgot that her history is my history as well.  The story that unfolded surprised me, left me open mouthed, and touched me with its poignancy.

It starts in India.  I have never been to India.  I have flown over it and looked down, and I remember my Gran telling me over and over that there was Indian blood in the family on her side.  As children we assumed, as the other adults appeared to roll their eyes at this pronouncement, that my Gran had lost her marbles.  We also wondered, given that she lived in Gravesend, whether we were, in fact, not related to Indians from India but Native Americans as my dad said there was one buried in a churchyard near the river - Pocahontas.  We thought he was also spinning tales, right up to the release of the Disney film.

So it was a revelation that I was told by my cousin that I do indeed have Indian blood, that my Great-great-great-great grandmother was a native of Ghazipur on the banks of the Ganges in Uttar Pradesh in north-eastern India.

Ruins of a palace in
Ghazipur, 1786.
Ghazipur still has the largest legal opium factory in the world, a factory started by the infamous East India Company in 1820.  This attracted the need for protection, and thus the army arrived.  And with them was one William Molt, born in 1798, who joined the 38th Regiment and ended up in Ghazipur. There he met with, and probably married, a native woman, named only once in the records as Mary, an assumed name as she was Hindi.  Her details were not deemed important enough for the army or the East India Company to record although other wives, thankfully, are fully detailed alongside their husbands.

William transferred to the 3rd Buffs and he and Mary Molt had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1830, who, through her father, met Ned Jennings, another regular in the 3rd Buffs.  Ned's joining the army was rather out of keeping with the family who all stayed in and around Basingstoke - right up until a few years ago there were still Jennings in Hampshire.  Ned married Elizabeth when she was 14 or 15, very young to our minds, and they had children, several who did not survive infancy.  However, as the East India Company directed their movements, they kept records of the family, and through the birthplaces of the children we can follow the family around northern India.

The travelled from the far eastern side of India to the border of Afghanistan and the town of Peshawar before going back east towards Delhi.  Eventually the family left India, possibly to escape the Indian Rebellion of 1857.  This event occurred in the very region that the family called home, spreading from Uttar Pradesh to Delhi.  Ned and Elizabeth may well have felt the conflicting loyalties - Elizabeth's mother was Indian whereas Ned was fully English.  They returned to Basingstoke between 1855, when a child was born to them in Delhi, and 1864 when their next child was born in England.  Sadly for the couple, they had to leave several children behind in graves in India.

Ghazipur, northern India;
Afghanistan is top left corner
Elizabeth Jennings is the daughter that interests the family the most.  She was born in Allahabad in 1844 and is my direct ancestor.  She left little behind for us.  There is a small white milk jug on display in the coaching inn.  It is just two inches tall and is rather ordinary and certainly not at all valuable, unless you are related to its former owner.  Sometime after she returned to England she married Henry Sprague-Harris, a name in itself loaded with significance as the children should all have been Spragues but their parents never quite got around to getting married, hence the double-barrelled name.  From this union came several children, and again the significant one for me is a girl - Nance, known to my father as Garg - my great grandmother.

It is one of those strange family occurrences that one side of a family seems to know a great deal more of the family circumstances than another side, and what is accepted by one, is unknown to another.  And thus it was here.  Garg had been very open with her daughters, the youngest being my Gran, so they all had an awareness of where they were from, if maybe that awareness did not extend to any detail about that Indian connection.  I was told she was a princess but this is a common way to explain away an unfortunate connection, but my Gran knew Mary existed.  Her aunt Florence, from whom my cousins are descended, only told her side that the family had been to India.  She herself had visited as had several of her children.

We will never know more about Mary, but her discovery means that I now know that my Gran had not been mad, though I suspect I know a lot more than she did about our ancestor.  I'm so glad to know about Elizabeth Jennings née Molt aswell, a strong woman if ever there was one.  She survived multiple pregnancies in an hostile environment, following on the coat-tails of an army, never spending more than a couple of years in one place, and then making that long voyage to England.  England must have been a challenge in itself for her and her Indian-born family, especially Elizabeth, the eldest - cold, wet, green, bland food - and a population that could not have looked on them favourably, if only for their skin that had to have been darkened by the heat of the Indian sun.

But what strikes me most strongly about my story is that the line of descent is followed through the female line in every step.  The men play a small role.  And as if to underline that, the three of us who are enthusiastically making conference calls to discuss this together along the length of the UK, are female.
 
And one of them is called Elizabeth.