Our Family
Harold Oscar McQueen, the eldest of three brothers, emigrated from London
to what was then the Cape Colony towards the end of the 19th century, arriving
in Cape Town about 1895. He married Julia Fourie and had a number of children,
five of whom reached adulthood, married and had families. Four generations
later, most of Harold Oscar's surviving descendants are still living in
South Africa although many have moved from Cape Town.
We have been interested in our family history since at least the
very early 1900s. This was probably sparked by a family heirloom in the
form of a powder horn, originally owned by a James McQueen, who served
in the British army during the Peninsula wars and who was killed at Waterloo.
This powder horn - which was presumably hand made, purely as a decorative item - is now held by the Cape Town branch of the family.
Births, marriages and deaths, from the early 1800s until about 1920, have been
recorded in the back of a family bible.
Subsequent research has filled in missing details of past family members,
but we have been unable to trace back the line with any certainty beyond
the James McQueen of Waterloo. Although military records provide information
on his place and date of birth (1773), records for the Scottish village of Girvan
show that three children named James McQueen were baptised within a few
weeks of one another (all possible related and at least two of them almost
certainly cousins). Efforts to identify "our" James by eliminating one
or two of the others through tracing their descendants have so far been
unsuccessful.
Although we seemed to
have reached a dead-end as far as tracing back further, we have managed to
"trace forward" from James and find a number of our co-descendants (see our genealogy page). The
first James had two sons (that we know of) who grew up in the Colchester area,
with the elder son (Alexander) having a large family of 10 children. We
have been able to make contact with a large group of Alexander's descendants
now living in America.
Our branch of the family are descended from the second son, named James after his father, who moved from Colchester to nearby
Manningtree, where he established a saddle and harness business. In 1842 he married May Ann Paskell, who came from nearby Mistley. We still have some of his business cards, dating from this period, plus the engraved copper plate from which they were printed. James and Mary Ann later moved to London, where their children were born. We have been able to trace their McQueen descendants down to the present day and also trace Mary Ann's family, in some instances as far back as the late 1600s
