One more hint of Chinese heritage

My grandmother Maud was a Thomson. Her father, William Mitchel Thomson was career military, having joined the Royal Engineers at 14 years of age. There were eight children in the Hong Kong family. Five were girls and three boys. Only the last two. Lilian and Fred were born in Hong Kong. The rest were born in the UK; my grandmother, in Aberdeen, Scotland.

One of the sisters ( Catherine ) married Jimmy Doyle, a captain on the SS Nile. About 1919 she became ill with Diphtheria and it was decided that the climate in Hong Kong wasn’t good for her. As her husband was at sea most of the time, it didn’t matter much where they made a home so he offered her a choice between Australia, New Zealand, Canada or San Francisco. As two of her sisters had already moved to the Bay area of California, it was an easy choice. In 1920 she loaded her family aboard the SS Nile and set sail for America.

Later in life Jimmy Doyle wrote a short synopsis of the family as he remembered it. While it mostly dealt with the Doyle and Thomson clan, he made the following reference to my grandfather, Tobias Hunter. While it’s not all true to the letter, the ethnicity estimate appears to have been quite accurate, as per this excerpt!