MH

John Calland's ancestors? 1635-1750

This brief diversion contains people who might have been the immediate ancestors of John Calland of Madras. Please click here to go back to the Families home page.

I looked for possible ancestors for John Calland of Madras. From the earliest records available online, the CALLAND name existed in Sussex, Kent, Scotland, Lancashire and Yorkshire in the 1550s-1580s. The largest early group was in Scotland but Lancashire later held the largest proportion of later hits when searching the IGI or the censuses on Ancestry.co.uk. I have consistently ignored all Lancs/Yorks CALLANDs in the following research.

Huguenots?

But Madras John later claimed a piece of land on Pall Mall which had been granted in a lease in 1758, when none of his immediate family was in London. And there had been an influx of Huguenot refugees to London in the 1680s. Even earlier, in 1655, Samuel Morland wrote from Geneva to Cromwell's Secretary of State Thurloe [British History Online] concerning relief funds being sent to the persecuted churches of Piemont, and the "£5,000 which Mr Caland had readie is almost all at Grenoble" [it was not clear where Mr Caland was, but he was called Mr not Monsieur, and £££ not francs, so he could have been in England]. In London's 1700s there were CALLENT/ CALLANT/ CALAND/ CALLANDs, all of which spellings were probably interchangeable. The Huguenot Society's website says that although many refugees to London used the French Huguenot church in Threadneedle Street (and an Isaac CAILLAND and his wife Marianne MOURGE baptised their son Jacob - the French version of James - there in 1732) many of the early refugees simply attended the local anglican church, which might explain these CALLANDs being baptised at St Martin's in the Fields in the 1700s ...

John of Alverstoke

John of Alverstoke (our John's father - I have a copy of his will) was the first CALLAND in Hampshire, as far as I can tell. He was comfortably-off, owned property, and either owned the India Arms in Gosport or used it to auction goods - the details are in the Madras story. It is possible that he moved to Hampshire from London's Westminster. Because the best match I have been able to find for John's parents are John and Mary Anne CALLAND, married April 1702 at St Martin-in-the-Fields and baptising a son John there in 1705 and Robert in 1708. This John was certainly in Gosport by 1741 because the London Gazette of 26th December carried a notice for the bankruptcy sale of several houses in Gosport, to be held 'at Mr John Calland's at the The India Arms in Gosport'. A similar sale was held there in April 1743. Being there on the spot (and having the catalogues beforehand) might explain how John acquired the various houses he later left to his son and daughter.

CALLANDs in London

I found some tantalising London-based references. Some CALLANTs were clustered around Croydon and Maidstone; these are self-consistent and, I think, are a separate group so I have not included them here. But consider these remaining hits from various internet sources - there were really not very many of them around:

And then nothing until

Mourning ring Calland auction

All the dates above, the family name of Robert, and the connection of importing foodstuffs and the grocery trade, could be made to fit into an ancestry for Madras John. I cannot take the data any further, and include this digging just in case it helps anyone else.

Copyright © Marion Hearfield 2009