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 life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“Nor does the family even move about together,
But every son would have his motor cycle,
And daughters ride away on casual pillions.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Providing for one’s family as a good husband and father is a water-tight excuse for making money hand over fist. Greed may be a sin, exploitation of other people might, on the face of it, look rather nasty, but who can blame a man for “doing the best” for his children?”
—Eva Figes (b. 1932)