This blog contains a summary of the ancestry of Rebecca Brandon, also known as Rebecca de Daniel Brandon and Rebecca Rodrigues Brandão, who was born in London in 1783 and died at Purnea near the Himalayan foothills in India in 1820. Rebecca was a Sephardic Jew from a family of merchants who had fled the Inquisition in Portugal in the mid-18th century. She was my four-times great grandmother, the wife of Captain (later Lieutenant-Colonel) John Littledale Gale of the East India Company’s Bengal Army ...
Read MoreThis indenture of 28 June 1770, never previously published, contains an agreement between Matthias Gale of London, merchant, and John Hasill, mariner, regarding the ownership of a property in Workington, a town in Cumbria on the north-west coast of England near the port of Whitehaven. Matthias, whose elder brother John was my ancestor, was one of an extensive family in Whitehaven who had prospered in trade with the American colonies ...
Read MoreA few posts back I wrote of the First World War death of one of my great-great uncles in France in 1914. Another death on the other side of my family is recounted in the press release opposite, from July 1915. Two Muslim sowars – cavalry troopers – went on a murderous rampage in Jhansi in central India and killed four of their British officers, including my grandfather’s first cou sin Marmaduke Gale. Their regiment, the 8th Cavalry, had been kept in India for internal security duties ...
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