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
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