Mary Jane Prussia (1837-1924)

By the measure of this or any age, Mary Jane Prussia was a remarkable woman. You can find more information about her on the Web, especially from parts of the Indian Tourist industry (this will be explained later) so all I offer here is a brief summary and to link her into the wider Prussia family.
Mary is Jon McIntosh’s great great aunt. She was the eldest of three children, born to John Prussia and Mary Oliver. She had two younger brothers, John who died when still a child, and George Duncan, Jon’s great grand-father.
 
Mary’s father died in 1844 when she was 7, brother John a year later. I think that her mother Mary re-married in 1847 which may explain why Mary married Charles James Doyle in 1851, when she was only 14 years of age. She had her first child a year later, and then another child every two years until her husband’s death in December 1858. He was “killed in action”, probably at the Battle of Biswa, part of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-1858.
So, aged 22 with three small children (her first born, Evangeline, died in infancy) she married Christopher William Corbett in 1859. Corbett had also been fighting in the Indian Mutiny but had survived. His first wife, Mary Anne Morrow, had died, which meant that he bought three additional children into his marriage with Mary Jane Prussia. It is worth noting, I think, that Doyles, Corbetts and Prussias were all part of the Irish/Scots community that had emigrated to India during the 19th century.
 
Corbett was appointed the postmaster of Naini Tal, a hill station in northern India, unaffected by the mutiny. There he and Mary Jane Prussia had a further nine children, making 16 in all; according to one source they also raised a further four children who were the offspring of a recently deceased sister of Corbetts.
 
At this time Naini Tal was growing, mainly due to it becoming the summer capital for the governor of what was to become the province of Uttar Pradesh. To supplement their income Mary Jane, with the help of her daughter, Eugenie, rented out half the house as a lodging facility for visitors. This business grew as did the town, so land was purchased and further properties built. This income was particularly welcome after Corbett died in 1881. Not all was plain sailing – a landslide in 1880 destroyed at least one of their properties, but they went on to build up the business so that today Naini Tal is a popular destination for tourists, and Mary Jane is credited by some as being the “mother of tourism in Naini Tal”.
 
As I’ve indicated Mary Jane had numerous children, either natural or step or fostered. She gave birth to her first child when aged 15; her youngest, Archibald, was born when she was 42. As I began, she was a remarkable woman! She lived in Naini Tal until her 88th year, and was buried at the church of St John in the Wilderness with her second husband. (There are several home made videos of visits to the church on YouTube, one of which I have referenced below).

Her second to last child, Edward James (Jim) Corbett became very famous, and in some ways like his mother, was before his time; but more of him later.