The Prussia Family Page

Catherine Mitchinson (1822-1906) married William McIntosh (1801-1883) in September 1841, in Patrington, East Yorkshire. They had at least 7 children. The eldest, Duncan William, emigrated to New Zealand. Their second child, Donald, established an apparently successful business in Hull and Rotterdam – he is Mary’s great-grandfather. Their fourth child, Douglas, sought his future and fortune in India, where he married Sarah Jones (nee Leach) in Simla, in 1882.

They had four daughters, the youngest being Sarah Adelaide (or Ada); she married Harry Bates Prussia in Simla, in Nov 1911. He was the eighth child from a family of ten children, whose parents were George Duncan Prussia and Emma Lavinia Bates. [Simla is the capital of the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. In 1972 it reverted to its ancient name of Shimla. It was known as the summer capital of British India].

Ada and Harry had three children - twin boys, Geoffrey and Denis (born 1914) and a daughter, Naomi (born 1918). In 1920 the twin boys were brought back to the UK to live with Mary's McIntosh grandparents and it is thought that they were later adopted. The boys were raised along side Mary's father and uncle.

Geoffrey married Mamie Price in 1939 and they had two boys - Jonathan and Nicholas. This page documents the research on the Prussia family for Jon McIntosh, Mary's cousin.

At some point during the 1930s Harry Bates Prussia ran into some problems in his career as an accountant, and so he announced, via a notice in the Bombay Times (information via Jon McIntosh) that he would henceforth be known as Harry Bates McIntosh.

Maud Eleanor Prussia (1871-1951)

Emma Mary Prussia (1862-1944)

Emma Mary Prussia was the second eldest child of George Duncan and Emma Lavina Prussia. George's mother was Mary and so I assume Emma took her mother's name and her grandmother's. As the photogrpah above shows, she married Henry James Shields in 1880 and they had three daughters. Henry died in 1889; in 1891 Emma married William Blennerhasset DeCourcey and they had a further three children. William died in 1908; in 1911 Emma married for the third time, to Arthur Matthews, a man some twenty years her junior. He was the older brother of John Marcus Matthews, who had married Emma's eldest daughter, Edith. Emma died in India in 1944, the same year as Arthur.

Some points to note from this short biography:

(a) this might explain why the name DeCourcey appears in family legends
(b) my original thoughts were that Prussia and Blennerhassett were Germanic but they are, in fact, Irish, though the Blennerhassett family originated in Cumbria, before being given Irish lands and establishing themselves as a significant force in Irish politics. See Wikipedia "The Blennerhassett family" for further details.
(c) The grandson of the aforementioned Edith Shields and John Marcus Matthews is Christopher George St Clement Kendall, and he has provided many family photographs and detailed information via his page on Ancestry.com. He has suggested that the Prussia's came from Ireland to India via Liverpool. Christopher is Professor Emeritus within the Department of Earth and Ocean Science at the University of South Carolina which, ironically, Mary and John visited when they were in South Carolina in 2010. If only we had known ...