One word! That was all it needed to enable me to discover more than a dozen totally unexpected ancestors from the Indian sub-continent; to locate a Jharkhand village which retains the name of a progenitor, and to identify a British ancestral line going back nearly a thousand years. That word was ‘Calcutta’, the birthplace to which my mother’s grandfather, Edward Hind Wood, confessed in the 1881 British census.
I say ‘confessed’ because there had never been the slightest hint, not so much as a whisper, within our family of a connection with India, and the suspicion is that Edward felt that his Anglo-Indian origins were best kept under wraps. As an otherwise unremarkable Surrey stockbroker, this was presumably in the interests of both his social standing and his career prospects.
From this initial one-word clue, it proved relatively easy (starting with the Families in British India Society website: www.fibis.org) to piece together four connected lines of Anglo-Indian descent, all beginning with late eighteenth-century unions between British-born East India Company employees and unidentified Bengali women. The men in question were two civilians: Matthew Leslie (c.1755–1804) and Ralph Uvedale (c.1747–1813), both from Cork in Ireland, and two military officers: Thomas Wood (1765–1834), an engineer from Perth in Scotland (after whom Wood Street in Kolkata is named), and Thomas William Clayton (c.1754–1804), whose origins remain unclear.
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