Family
On 21 September 1847, Thomson married Jane Nicholson, granddaughter of the architect Peter Nicholson, in a double wedding ceremony with her sister, Jessie, who married John Baird II. They had twelve children in total and would later lose five of them in an epidemic. Thomson died on 22 March 1875 at his home in Moray Place in Strathbungo, Glasgow, fittingly in one of his own creations. The architect was buried in the lair adjacent to that in which his five deceased children were laid to rest, in Gorbals Southern Necropolis, on 26 March 1875, and he was joined there by his widow, Jane, in 1889.
One brother, George Thomson (1819–1878), became a baptist missionary in Limbe, Cameroon (then known as "Victoria"), where he combined his religious activities with a passion for botany. An epiphytic orchid of the Pachystoma genus was named Pachystoma thomsonianum in his honour.
His nephew, Rev. William Cooper Thomson (fl. 1820–1880s) was a missionary in Nigeria, after whom the bleeding-heart vine Clerodendrum thomsoniae was named.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Thomson
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.”
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“The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law. Virtually there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for the cunning and another for the simple, one law for the forceful and another for the feeble, one law for the ignorant and another for the learned, one law for the brave and another for the timid, and within family limits one law for the parent and no law at all for the child.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)