Christine Wilkie’s research into her mother’s ancestry has crossed continents and uncovered intriguing stories of murder, missionaries and depravity, says Gail Dixon
READER STORY A reader shares their discoveries
Ask Christine Wilkie what she remembers of her early childhood and she will describe a large estate house on stilts amid tropical blooms and palm trees. She was born in 1943 and lived on a sugar plantation called ‘Dekinderen’ that her father Alexander Weir managed. The estate was in Demerara, British Guiana, which became Guyana in 1966.
The area was known as “the land of mud and sugar” because the Demerara River often flooded, hence the stilts. “The rain came down in sheets,” Christine recalls. “I remember being left in a sandpit during a torrential downpour, bawling my eyes out until my mother rescued me.”
Christine’s mother Margot (née Turpin) experienced a complete culture shock when the family moved to Banffshire in northeast Scotland. Alexander was suffering from gastric problems and could no longer live in the tropics, so he decided to farm in Rothiemay not far from his childhood home.
“My sisters and I felt like fish out of water at the little village school in Scotland. The other children thought that we must be posh because we were born overseas, but our farmhouse was so cold in winter that we had to wear coats to go upstairs.”
Christine lives in Aberdeenshire today and is retired from her career as a social worker. In recent years, she began to feel more curious about her roots in Guyana and the Caribbean.
“My mother was born in 1918 on Barbados where her father Milton was a priest. In the 1920s, the family moved to Demerara where he became a canon. That is how my parents met. Mum told me that Milton’s father was Edmund Adolphus Turpin, archdeacon of St George’s Cathedral, Kingstown, on Saint Vincent. Archives revealed that Edmund was baptised on Barbados in 1851.
“Mum gave me a tattered old photograph of a baptismal font that was engraved with the words, ‘The Venerable EA Turpin’. It had been erected in memory of my great grandfather. Mum also believed that Edmund’s father Joseph Turpin could have been Bishop of Tobago.
“I wanted to know more about
