Mary Gets Married

It was just a one-syllable surname appended to May Wilson's own that gave me my first clue that there was yet another search term to add to the collection—another way to trace what became of the children of missionary couple Peachy Taliaferro and Mary Whitcomb Wilson. Yet, maddeningly, that new surname matched up with the one which came following that irritating device of providing only the two initials of the man whom she married.

The name was Gill, a common name in India—especially in the north, where the Wilson family had served in the mid 1860s. But even though I couldn't tell it at the time, those two socially-acceptable initials—J. H.—didn't belong to any of the Jats or Sikhs who customarily bore the name of that clan. It was, instead, the surname of a man from Ireland.

If I had been paying attention, the realization might have come to me much sooner that the very man from whose report I had drawn the sketch of May Wilson's missionary outpost was the man who became her husband.

But we seldom discover these things in chronological order. It was only much later, when I circled back to all the references I had uncovered to sort things out, that I discovered just who J. H. Gill might have been.

Evidently, Joseph Hamilton Gill took as many opportunities as possible to write about his missionary work. Even last year, a reprint surfaced of a book—A Winter in India and Malaysia Among the Methodist Missions—on which he had been credited with collaborating, back in 1891, with the author, Martin van Buren Knox. His reports appeared regularly in various missionary journals, concerning the work in the district in India to which he had been assigned.

A Northwestern University alumnus, the Reverend Joseph H. Gill apparently had attended the same seminary as had May Wilson's father, Peachy T. Wilson—Garrett Biblical Institute, today known as Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.

Owing to one of the Reverend's reports, I discovered that, though this was the first marriage for the now-forty-something May Wilson, it was the second for Joseph Gill. For years, he had been capably assisted by his first wife, Mary Ensign, the young Michigan woman he had married the same year he graduated from Garrett. Together, they immediately had left for the mission field in India, where, in addition to all the work accomplished under his charge, the couple raised five sons.

As often seemed to happen to such missionaries in foreign outposts, the conditions eventually led to deteriorating health. Such was the case with the first Mrs. Gill who, realizing her choices, decided to stay with her family, rather than quit the work to which they had been called. In the Reverend's report for Bijnor District in 1908, he described the last few months of his wife's life.

On July 15, 1910—as Intense Guy pointed out yesterday—the Reverend Gill took as his wife Mary Wilson, and together they continued the missions work in northern India.

That, however, was an arrangement not to last much longer, for a note in The Christian Advocate soon after indicated that the Reverend, himself, had passed away on January 17, 1912. At sixty seven years of age, the County Tyrone native had succumbed following a surgery in the ironically-named city of Lucknow, India.

At some point following her eighteen month long marriage, the bereaved Mary Wilson Gill returned to the United States, where she stayed until 1917. At that point, for whatever reason, she decided to return to India once again.

It was the necessary documentation which all travelers eventually need to obtain that gifted me with the details of how to proceed with research on this next generation of the missionary Wilson family. On account of a detail embedded within this document, I found the clue as to where to find at least one of the Wilson children, back at the death of their mother in 1874 when their father "arranged homes" for the children stateside before returning, alone, to India.

If, after all these years, Mary Wilson Gill wanted to return to India, she had to apply for a passport.    

May Be Mary

Sometimes, the best way to handle a genealogical puzzle is to avoid the temptation to explore every avenue. Just settle on one and wrestle with it until the answer can be pinned down.

So it was when tackling the question of what became of all the children of missionaries Peachy Taliaferro and Mary Whitcomb Wilson. Though there may have been four of them in America once the missionaries returned home on furlough, the only solid lead came from their eldest daughter. Only problem: depending on which resource mentioned this daughter, she was called by two different names: May, and Mary.

The answer: search by both names.

It is almost like searching for two entirely different people. Even so, zeroing in on this one quest meant setting aside all possible distractions for the other children—whatever their official names turned out to be, and regardless of where they grew up. After all, it is much better to focus on one person than be scattered between four wild chases.

Back to the Google search engine it was, looking for any mention of either May or Mary, combined with that relatively common surname, Wilson. I tried the whole exercise in tandem with other search phrases, like "missionary to India," or alongside her parents' names (especially her father's singular identity).

As unlikely as it seemed, there were a few telling passages in field reports from India, featured in journals for the church which originally supported the Reverend Wilson's missionary service. This, in addition to the basic material I had found in the White family genealogy which included Mrs. Wilson's entry. According to the genealogy, the Wilsons' daughter

came to America with her parents when a child and was educated and has returned to India as a missionary.

Time to do some math. If May—or Mary, the daughter—had come to America in 1873 at the age of seven, which the passenger list on her trip from Liverpool to New York had indicated, that would give us a year of birth somewhere between 1865 and 1867. A generous margin, of course, but a prudent one. If finishing one's education and then obtaining funding and appointment to the mission field would put Miss Wilson—at the most conservative estimate—back on the field by the time she was twenty years of age, that would mean she wouldn't show up on records until at least 1885, likely later.

Sure enough, at about that time, records began to include reports of the Reverend Wilson's daughter, returned to the field. There wasn't, however, just one location mentioned in the reports. The best I could tell, it appeared May—or Mary—had been born at one of her father's first assigned posts, a place known as Bareilly. This was the name of both a city and a district in the northern Indian state known as Uttar Pradesh.

Looking at a map of the main cities in that state today, one can notice a few interesting details. For one thing, we have already stumbled upon the name of one city there: Allahabad, location of the home in India of the traveling professor, Alec Hill and his wife, the former Edmonia Taylor of Pennsylvania, who had provided the unusual name of Peachy Taliaferro Wilson to local journalist and writer, Rudyard Kipling. Though you may not think you recognize the name of another city in Uttar Pradesh—Agra—you will, once you realize one of its prime pieces of real estate has become a quite well known landmark to Western eyes.

It was in this same northern region of India, pushing up against the border with Nepal in the Himalayas, that the Wilsons' daughter spend her preschool years. It is likely the same region to which she returned, in her twenties, to take up the work which her parents had left behind.

In some church publications, however, there was indication that the younger missionary Wilson had moved beyond that region to another one, more of an outpost, and one referred to as "lonely" and isolated. That mission, in the church reports, was called Pauri in the district referred to then as Gurhwal—now spelled Garhwal. Farther north and further into the Himalayas, the mission included a school, at which the younger Mary Wilson served.

With only brief mentions of her name in conference reports during a few years, it was difficult to piece together any history of her service in India. There was another complicating factor, however: in addition to having to search for her by two different given names—May or Mary—another surname had been appended after the Wilson. Yet, I could find no mention of any marriage.

Still, I couldn't pass up the hint. So now, I was searching for both May Wilson and Mary Wilson, but adding the additional variable of another surname, as well. Thankfully, it was this tiny clue that led to a few research breakthroughs which I earnestly believe I never otherwise would have found.

Above: Sketch of the mission premises at Pauri, Garhwal, India, from Manual of the Methodist Episcopal Church, volume 2, Phillips & Hunt, 1882; in the public domain.