Fifty years ago I arrived in this country with my South African husband the late Reverend Bob Clarke. I was the only child of an Irish father and an English mother, and had no first cousins. This month, after more than 35 years living in Makhanda-Grahamstown, I learned that the grave of a distant relative is to be found in this very town.
Among all my father’s many scattered relatives I have kept up with just one in Ireland, with whom I share a set of great-great-grandparents. That makes him, John Bellingham, my fourth cousin. Bellingham, now in his 92nd year, emailed me at the end of April to say that recent genealogical researches in his family had turned up the following intriguing information: one Ensign William Bellingham, apparently a cousin of our mutual ancestor, had died of a fever in 1822 and been buried in Grahamstown! Would I please establish where he had died, and if possible the location of his grave.
It was easy to explain to Cousin John that the Drift where Ensign Bellingham died was a ford on the Fish River. But in 1822 Grahamstown had still been a very new settlement, and as yet no churches had been built, so it would have been pointless to try searching in church burial records.
Being familiar with the handful of military graves near the old Provost, which are now in the Botanic Gardens, I started there. The result was an instant success.
Among the early 19th century gravestones, many of which are now almost impossible to read, are two which have been replaced with 20th century granite stones, clearly engraved. One is that of the three-year-old William Lucas, and the other that of “William Bellingham Ireland late Ensign the Sixth Regt of Foot”. He died when he was just 21, on 25 March 1822 – nearly 200 years ago.
I asked genealogist Fleur Way-Jones who had done the replacement of these stones, and she told me that it was the War Graves Commission. It seems their engraver made a couple of mistakes. The lack of a comma between “Bellingham” and “Ireland” made it look as if “Ireland” was his surname. Otherwise the Clarke family, on their frequent walks in the “Bots” would have suspected that this might be a relative. And when I consulted local military history buff Pat Irwin, he told me that the “6th Regiment of Foot” did not exist! However, the 60th Regiment of Foot was in these parts at the right time, so it looks as if this was another error. No doubt the original stone was in an extreme state of disrepair when the copying was done, perhaps even in pieces.
