Return to family history top page
Contact:
The pre-1950s Langford Raes are a nightmare to sort out because not only were they living in Southern Ireland, India and Burma, making their records problematic to get at, and not only did they tend to be Catholics with sprawling families, but they had a limited collection of family names which they re-used in long chains like strings of beads, so that you get different individuals with the same names in different orders (Francis Langford Rae and Langford Francis Rae are two different people). Or the same person might suddenly re-sort their names into a different order (Bertram Denis Langford Rae and Bertram Langford Denis Rae are the same person). And they didn't always use all of their names (Francis Langford Rae, Francis Rae and Francis Ray are probably the same person, who sometimes also appears as Langford Rae). And some branches of the family, and some individuals within the other branches, treated "Langford Rae" as if it were a double-barrelled surname, while others definitely saw "Rae" as their surname and "Langford" as a family-specific personal name which could be either a first or a middle name according to taste (my grandmother called herself "Mrs Langford-Rae" but her husband called himself "B.L.D. Rae"). Also, many of them were good enough Catholics not to use contraception, but bad enough ones to have multiple partners, resulting in a crazily-branching bloodline.
Also, there are at least two major branches of the family in the Raj, one lot in Calcutta and one lot in Burma/Myanmar, plus an offshoot in Assam and a spin-off of the Calcutta branch who moved back to England and became estate agents. These groups are obviously related because the same sets of names crop up in both: the problem is to find out how they connect.
For the family in Ireland, I have had the benefit of an extensive family tree written out in around 1925, which appears in both a full and a contracted version on microfilm #: 596417 at the Latter-Day Saints' Family Search Centres, along with a page from Joseph Foster's The Royal Lineage of our Noble and Gentle Families together with their Paternal Ancestry which covers members of the Day (O'Dea) family who married into the Raes. This tree is massively useful but unfortunately it was drawn up in order to show the transfer and inheritance of landed estates, rather than bloodlines per se, and so the putative marriages and children of family members who did not inherit have mostly been omitted.
Apart from this incomplete tree and the page from Foster's Royal Lineage, what I have to work with is a medley of Irish, Indian and Burmese references, incomplete and often with wildly assorted do-it-yourself spellings, from FamilySearch, The National Archives of Ireland and the India Office records held at the British Library, some of which have been digitized on Find My Past, plus an assortment of Victorian newspaper clippings and snippets of family history from some uncles and cousins on the Burma side, and from a cousin on the Calcutta side whom I encountered on the net and a few other people who are researching the family. Some of it can't be absolutely guaranteed, but I've managed to work out two family tree diagrams which make sense and fit everything I know or have been told about the Langford Raes, so pending information to the contrary this is probably how they fit together.
