A recap of my China links
Just to recap my family connections to China.
My mother Iris Hunter and her sister Nora Hunter were both born in Kowloon. My mother in 1911 and her sister in 1912. Both are supported by birth records from the Colony of Hong Kong. There were also two other girls born; one in 1910 and the last in 1913. Neither survived their first year.
My grandfather, Tobias Hunter was born in Hong Kong. This I was told by him, as well as being attested to by other family members. To date I have found no documentation but I have no doubt he was born in Asia. In 1909 he married Maud Thomson, one of six sisters who had come to Hong Kong with a Royal Engineers family. Both her parents had succumbed to Malaria in 1901.
My grandfather had two brothers and a sister. The eldest, James was born in 1874. He married ( Emma ) and lived in Hong Kong. He had one child, a daughter ( Ellen ) born in 1899. James died in 1937; his wife preceding him in 1933. Their daughter died in 1944. All died in Hong Kong and are buried there at Happy Valley. There are records of their deaths but nothing of their births.
The second brother, also older by a little more than a year, was George Hunter, born in 1876. Both George and Tobias worked together as young men at Jardine Matheson.
George married just prior to his brother Tobias, also in 1909 and also to a Maude ( Maude Amelia Hallas ) in Leeds, England. They seemed to have a rather rocky relationship, but had twin boys in 1913. Sadly George and Maude parted ways and the boys were adopted. It was fortunate for the boys as their new parents were Lady Cowley and her husband Sir Arthur Ernest Cowley. Both boys followed military careers, one in the Royal Navy and the other in the RAF. One of these boys had a daughter, who is one of the DNA samples in our Asia connection
The last of the China born Hunters was May Hunter, who was born in 1879. It’s told that her passport showed her place of birth as Foochow.
One last point of interest is that of the second batch of Hunter offspring born in England, to WLH and his wife Eleanor, the son, William Lethbridge Hunter was employed by the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank and he was posted to the Honkew branch. I believe the two sets of Hunters knew of each other and may have been closer than anyone mentioned. This second WLH remained single and produced no children. He passed away in 1933.
My grandfather’s sister May Hunter married in 1903 in Hong Kong to Thomas Cock of Shanghai. The Cock family were from Scotland and came to China after a generation or two in Calcutta, India. Tom Cock was born in Shanghai. His father was born in India and his mother, is anyone’s guess. I believe she was also of Asian descent as I now believe is the case with my own great grandmother. More on this to follow.