From: dian_elvin@outlook.com To: india@rootsweb.com Subject: RE: INDIA Digest, Vol 10, Issue 100 Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2015 11:37:23 +0100 Dear Listers Please let me know if, by chance, you find any reference to the half-Indian children of Joseph Alexander Condell (who was in Madras as a cadet in 1805 and returned to Britain in 1836 on a ship with his two children and no wife). I have asked before and it turns out that there is often no mention of any Indian mistresses. He was normally based in Madras but may have had an illegitimate family somewhere else. The mother of his children may have died young. I have almost all the details of his military career and his later life in Scotland (where he married, with no mention of having been previously married or widowed, and no mention of his two children, who were found living with his sister in Staffordshire) but I have found nothing about his private life In India between 1828 and 1836. Should any of you come across any mention of anything about the Indian mother of Major Condell's children (my Indian 3xGt Grandmother, said by members of my mother's family to have been an Indian Princess!) I would be extremely grateful. I am now 80 years old and would love to find even the slightest piece of information, about their mother and their life in India, to give my own children and grandchildren. The son dropped his surname Condell and retained Alexander as his surname when he joined the navy. His sister, Mary Agnes Alexander Condell, married a tailor, James Joseph Collins, in the Stafford area and moved later to London, where the family lived for many years. It is the Indian lady I have been searching for and there may be no hope of any reference, unless, by chance mention is made of her in correspondence - a faint hope! Surnames in this family were Condell, Collins, Sawyer and Shargool. With best wishes Dian Montgomerie Elvin