The official version of my grandfather’s life was that he was born and raised in India, the son of a British soldier
MY LATE father never reminisced about his childhood. “Look forward, not back,” he would say, when one of us children tried to press him about his upbringing or his parents, both of whom had died before we were born.
My father wasn’t a brusque man, quite the opposite in fact. Rather, born in 1911 he was of a generation not inclined to soul-baring. Life could be incredibly difficult and cruel during the first part of the last century, particularly for the working class. Hardships, pain and anguish were too common to be afforded any more fuss than was necessary, so were borne stoically. The casual cruelties of a hard life were buried and left behind, not to be resurrected.
Information on the Adams side of my family has always been sketchy. There was an “official” family line, from which my father and his siblings would never stray. Well-practised little anecdotes about my grandfather would sometimes be volunteered, but I don’t think I once heard any of them mention my grandmother without being prompted.
She, Mary, died in early middle age, when my father was barely into his teens, so hardly any wonder I suppose that her children preferred not to dwell on the memory of losing a young mother. There had always been a whisper, too, from older cousins of mine, of something particularly tragic about Mary’s death. Nothing of a criminal nature, I should make clear, but if true, it would certainly explain a lot.
In any case, the upshot was that my grandfather was left the sole parent of five sons and two daughters, whose ages ranged from six to 19.
By all accounts, John Henry (Jack) Adams, an ex-soldier, ran the family home in much the same way as one would run a military barracks. His word was law, and had to be obeyed; his opinions were gospel, and not open to challenge. Apparently, he was so domineering that even after they had married and left home, his children still deferred to him. I never warmed to the idea of Jack, but he did sound like a fascinating character.
The official family version of his life had him born and raised in India, the son of a British soldier from Somerset. Jack himself had joined the army in India as a boy, and eventually rose to the rank of company sergeant-major. It was claimed (originally by him, presumably), that he was fluent in a couple of Indian languages.
Even as a child, I couldn’t help but wonder: With that background, how on earth did he ever end up in Ireland? And who was fit to judge his supposed fluency in Indian languages? I wanted the stories to be true, but part of me always wondered if Jack was, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a bullshit artist. He had an army pension, I knew that for certain, but the rest of it seemed too far-fetched.
The other week, I went online to see what I could find in the National Archives (an excellent facility). Sure enough, perfectly in tune with the family story, there in the 1911 Census of Ireland was John Henry Adams (39), his wife of seven years, Mary (30), and their then three children (my two eldest uncles and an aunt) living just off the Shankill Road, Belfast. My father was born a mere 11 days after the census was taken (on April 13th, 1911), a few years after that the family moved to Lisburn, where another three children were born, and in not too many more years poor Mary was dead. Intriguingly, on the census form under ‘Where Born’, Jack had written East India beside his name.
Where in East India, was now the question?
I found Jack again on the National Archives 1901 census, living alone near the Donegall Road in Belfast, and this time he had been a little more precise about his birthplace, Lucknow, East India. And more honest about his age: he was down as 31 in the 1901 census, and had therefore been 41 (not 39) in 1911. He probably knocked a couple of years off when he met Mary, to narrow the age gap.
There had been some talk, again from the older cousins, of my grandmother being Jack’s second wife. He had married his first wife in India, so the story went, but she and their child had died there, whereupon he resigned from the army and left India for Ireland. Whether this is true remains unclear, but on the 1901 census Jack did describe his marital status as ‘widower’.
There is much more work to be done on my grandparents (already I feel like I owe Jack an apology for doubting him), but thanks to the National Archives I am now armed with enough information to allow me to pursue their stories through birth, marriage, death, and British military records. I am smitten, and won’t rest until I uncover the truth about Jack and Mary. Although I am beginning to suspect that maybe – just maybe – I have always had the true story.