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The Blanchettes and the Roberts The family genealogy I write about here covers the period from about 1780 to 1949. One of the many family tree summaries I use is shown on the left. There are all kinds of gaps on the female side. The direct male line is clear because we are descended from two British soldiers, Thomas Blanchett and Robert Roberts, who went to India, never returned to Britain and whose relatives maintained their British culture in India. Blanchett joined the HEIC Army and Roberts joined the British Army. Both the HEIC and the British Army maintained records of their enlistees, and the "Raj" maintained records of British descendants in India. In addition there are copies of civil and religious birth, marriage and baptism records, some of which are in my possession. I have no records of the genealogy of the women these two soldiers married. If these women's antecedents had been in India for more than a couple of generations, as they probably had been, it is unlikely that clear written records of their parentage now exist or ever existed. Blanchette and Roberts were low level cannon fodder. There is no particular reason for records of the antecedents of their wives to survive from the early 19th century. Even if there once were records of their wives antecedents, they would be difficult to locate. The women who their descendants married in the late 19th century probably do have a traceable lineage, but I have spent no time on the search. These later wives seem to have been drawn from the "Indo-European", then also known as the "Domiciled European", community in India. By the later 19th century there were enough female descendants of European "settlers", and enough societal reasons to form a self sustaining "Domiciled European" (Anglo-Indian) community. Our family tree contains names which reflect the heritage of most of the European and other nationalities involved in India. Judging by the names I have been able to find, our Indian ancestors' names have disappeared from history. This conforms with everything that was happening in India at that time. In the mid 19th century Britons began expunging their Indian origins. Little is now known, for instance, of the Indian relatives of prominent Englishmen like Lord Liverpool, Prime Minister of England between 1812 and 1827. Nor is much known of the many descendants of, for instance, Sir David Ochterlony, an American turned Canadian who was the Resident in Ajmer for many years. Ochterlony had several concurrent consorts and many children. Although Ochterlony himself is buried in India, and although there is a monument to Ochterlony in Calcutta, there is a complete blank about his marital relationships and his children in India. In fact it is particularly amusing to look up Ochterlony in various encyclopedia. A typical encyclopedia entry from 1911 is shown here. The facts dug up by William Dalrymple for his book "White Moghuls" are summarized here. Comparing the two sets of data is particularly instructive. In 2003 there was a play in London about Ochterlony -- a description is here. We will not be able to find much on the actual lives led by our ancestors early in the 19th century. There will be no letters home, stored in damp Scottish castles, documenting their life in India. It is highly likely that Blanchett and Roberts were barely literate. At least one of them (Blanchett) shook the dust of England off his feet as he chose to make his life in India. The other (Roberts) lies somewhere in Southern India -- a humble Welshman sacrificed to the ambition of an egomaniacal, sex-crazed, faux Irishman -- the eldest Wellesley brother known in later life as Lord Mornington. The Blanchettes and the Roberts are the descendants of two of the British soldiers who flooded into India early in the 19th century. Very, very few of these soldiers survived and even fewer (about one in ten) married and raised families in India. Our ancestors did, and they did it at a time when the deck was heavily stacked against them. As I dug into their history and reconstructed their times I developed a lot of respect for these survivors. Thomas Blanchett in particular was a remarkable survivor as you will see from his life which I have attempted to reconstruct Robert Roberts died a little over a decade after arriving in India -- he died on the campaign trail. I will have something more to say on his soldier life the next time I add to the site. Here is a simple family tree of Roberts and Blanchette going back to the 17th century. The next few paragraphs gives a brief summary of the tree and our genetic stew: My GG Grandfather Thomas Blanchett1 was an Englishman descended from Huguenots who had fled persecution in France and arrived in England in the 17th century. Thomas married a widow named Hannah Boughton nee de Castor in India in 1829. Hannah was probably the widow of an Irish soldier, and almost certainly the product of the union of a Portuguese man and an Indian woman somewhere in her family tree. I grew up with families with last names of D’Souza, DaCosta, DeMello, Andrade, Pereira and so on, testifying to the impact of the Portuguese on India 400 years before I was born. The best math teacher I ever had was a man named Dick DaSilva at St. Anselm's High School in Ajmer. Thomas Blanchett's son (also named Thomas)-- I call him Thomas Blanchett2 -- married Ethel Gardner, reputedly the daughter of Lord Gardner. If she was indeed the daughter of a Lord, it is almost certain her maternal parentage was non-British -- the daughters of British nobility just did not marry British soldiers. They went back to England as children, were educated there and married into their own class-- to British officers or HEIC administrators. If Ethel Gardner is indeed the daughter of Lord Gardner, it is likely that her mother was an Indian "princess" or someone very high in the Indian social class. During the late eighteenth and early 19th century such a union was quite common. The wills of the period show that in the 1780’s over one third of the British men in India were leaving all their possessions to one or more Indian wives. One of my (Blanchette) grandmother’s grandfathers was the Frenchman Anthony Baptiste (b ~1815) -- undoubtedly one of, or the offspring of one of, the French entrepreneurs in India. Another of her grandfathers -- a Spaniard, was reputedly a Pleader (lawyer) in a Moghul court. Wotinell is a Spaniard doing in a Moghul court!? My GGG grandfather, the Welsh soldier Robert Roberts, married Elizabeth Ruek in 1807. She was almost certainly a descendant of a Dutch trader and an Indian or Portuguese woman. My mother’s brother Alex, himself the offspring of a part Armenian mother, married Joan Reifer, the daughter of a Dutchman, a product of the Dutch East India incursion into the East. My mother's mother, Grandma Roberts, was part Irish and part Armenian--a member of one of the earliest trading societies in the world. You will find a long (183k) article on Armenians in India here. As you begin to get into the meat of the Genealogy section you will see that there are many more genealogy pages on my father's side than on my mother's side. This is because there are two family relatives on my father's side who have provided me with family data. I have not yet been able to get the same kind of information from any relatives from my mother's side. Navigating through this section Genealogies are eye glazing and confusing. I hope I have provided enough background and biographical data to relieve some of the tedium, and enough navigation aids to reduce the confusion. In order to make sense of the history of our expatriate tribe, I wanted to understand the community which nourished them. Bear with me while I describe the genesis of our community in the section called Indo Europeans. I grew up in an interesting colonial sub culture -- a Railway Colony. The next section called "Separation of Societies" describes the background of why and how the British removed themselves from everyday Indian life and the consequent formation of voluntary ghettoes called Cantonments, Civil Lines and Railway Colonies. If on the other hand you want to skip the background of the community from which I spring, you can click directly to the beginning of the genealogies and follow the links. I start these with a page on Mum and Dad and then I work backwards through the generations to Thomas Blanchette and Robert Roberts. If on the other hand you want to follow a family tree and click on particular individuals to take you to their bios, use the family tree below. For those readers who want a paper copy of this family tree on one page, you will find it here You will find a link to this family tree at the top left corner of each web page in this Genealogy section. |
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On to Indo Europeans.htm.
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