Introduction

Many family histories tell of fertile families, of tireless efforts to trace the numerous descendants and the pleasure of making contact with the living distant cousins.

This story is about the Albans, a family that seemed not to reproduce much - perhaps not by choice. At least that’s what I thought when I started out. For all sorts of reasons there seem to be few left to tell their story - and an interesting one it is.

Though English, many were not born in England. Some were born in the British Raj in what we now know as India and Pakistan. Many of the men served in the British Indian Army and in the foreign and diplomatic service in the Middle East and Africa. Careers in the army and air force have featured among many of the men. The women were foreign governesses, wives and mothers, bringing up children in difficult circumstances - often far from the support of extended family, their spouse or their homeland.

Despite the tendency of the Alban family to live away from Britain, some wives and children appeared in English censuses when they sent or brought their children back to Britain for education or when widows returned to the country they most identified with. Often without access to adequate health services many died prematurely.

It has been quite a challenge to piece this family together; some educated guesses have had to be made as many overseas records were not easily accessible, particularly to this largely web-based Australian researcher living thousands of kilometres from the British National Archives.

I am related to the Alban family by the marriage of a great great aunt. I met only two of the interesting characters in person, encountering the rest in my attempts to understand why there are virtually no descendants of this Alban family left.

In the course of this journey I have come across some very interesting and wonderful people whom I’ve only met in cyberspace - so far. Despite similarly tenuous connections to the Albans, they have become engrossed in their stories too. Together we've unravelled the tales through a series of frenzied emails from one side of the world to the other. I keenly look forward to meeting them face to face.

My Alban research began while struggling to find out my paternal grandfather’s origins. Perhaps, I thought, it would be more productive to work laterally by researching a cousin of his whom I’d met in New South Wales in the early 1970s. After that I simply became fascinated with this family.

The detailed family tree is given elsewhere to help keep track of people with such confusingly similar names!