Continuing the search for Miss Robertson of Cheltenham ........ born in India, who tended the wounded in the Great War

Now I know I will find out more about Miss Kathleen Roberts, but I fear it won’t be yet.

And that is a shame because I have now seen the medals she was awarded by the Red Cross for her work during the Great War.

The little I do know is intriguing enough.  She was born in Coonar in Maddras which was one of the hill stations favoured by the British during the hot season in India, her maternal grandmother came from Tasmania and was the widow of an Indian army officer who brought her children up in Cheltenham.

So I wasn’t surprised that this was where I found Miss Robertson in the April of 1911 and it made sense that she should be working in a Red Cross hospital in the town.

But that pretty much is it.

There were promising leads.  I found a Kathleen Robertson on the shipping lists for India both going out and coming back in 1934 but on closer inspection this was not her.

I found three of her aunts and an uncle and am still looking for more on her grandmother, Agnes Baker but  the trail stops at 1872.

In that year  Mrs Baker was in India.  This I know because three of her children were born there between 1872 and 1877, while her final child was born in Cheltenham in 1879.

What of course is revealing is the light it shines on those families who served the Empire.  Mrs Baker had been born in Tasmania but lived part of her married life in India briefly coming back in 1873 when she gave birth to her fourth child.

Some of the records for both her and her granddaughter will be in India and so may prove more difficult to access and I have yet to find any references to Miss Robertson’s parents but in time they will tumble out of the shadows.

The real search however is for young Miss Robertson, after all now that I have seen her medals I must go on.

Pictures; the Red Cross medals of Miss Kathleen Robertson, courtesy of David Harrop 

*Red Cross Nurses, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Red%20Cross%20Nurses