Saturday 19 May 2012

Beginnings



"An extraordinary family saga, the Kiernander contribution to South Asia".



Lt.Col. G.A.Kiernander with FM M. Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan.
(East Pakistan. 1966)
In 1965, my grandfather, George Albert Kiernander (1926-2006), then a lieutenant colonel in the Pakistan Army, wrote to the University of Uppsala in Sweden to research the history of the Kiernander family.  This foray into the archives inspired his distant cousin, Benjamin David Kiernander (b. 1914), to painstakingly trace, in the pre-internet days of the 1980s, the earliest recorded origins of the family, and to construct our first comprehensive family tree.

B.D. Kiernander with the R.A.F.'s biggest bomber - the Lincoln.
(Khartoum, Sudan.  25 Jan. 1949)

Over the past few years, I have garnered from the internet and the British Library various snippets of information, and  the purpose of this blog is to bring together, and so make sense of, these fragments.  It is my hope that this will serve as a touchstone and a meeting place for others, so that our mutual history may be preserved and better understood. 

The Kiernander family is rooted in British India, but branched across the British Empire and beyond, bearing testimony to a fascinating past.


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