Photo Galleries
My father Piotr Komierowski's Family Album
Genealogy
Paternal Grandfather = Konstanty Komierowski z Komierowa h. Pomian
(ref 10.720.198)
Maternal Grandfather = Hugh John Godley from Killegar Baron Kilbracken
(ref 6.2.2.1.3.1.7.9.2.1.6.1.1.) which can be linked, somewhat amusingly, to Francis Seymour, Lord Seymour of Trowbridge in the (Descendants of King Henry VII ref 6.2.2.1.3.)
Anecdote
Not long ago, a cousin posted a picture of a beautiful door-knocker, in the form of a dragon, that had been designed by her great,great grandmother (my great grandmother) Lilian Swainson. As a result I went and found out more about her and also of her husband Vereker Monteith Hamilton, who was born in Argyllshire. They were both artists (he a painter; she a sculptress and medallist) and they met in London whilst students at the Slade School of Art (between 1881 and 1886). Her father had been an assistant secretary in the Admiralty and her sister was also a Medallist trained by the same man. He was 30 and she was 21 years old when they married in 1886. They had four children, including my grandmother Elizabeth. He had just returned from what was then Ceylon, where he had gone to start a coffee plantation. He had written an autobiographical work called "Things that happened", which I had on my bookshelves but had never read. I took it down and in the middle of the book found the following passage, referring to a time in 1878/79:-
- "Another type of gambler in our District was a certain Count Komierowski, who was one of the coolest and neatest men I ever saw. He was always ready to bet on any subject, and to any amount. Altough quite a young fellow he had, I believe, been a member of the Parish Jockey Club. He was as different in appearance from Glenny (an inveterate gambler) as he well could be. He was fairly tall and slight but extraorinarily strong and as hard as nails."
He goes on to relate how the bet was about how many snipe Vereker and a friend would shoot one particular day. Well they fell one short and Komierowski won the bet.
Now my real reason for writing about this is because of the extraordinary co-incidence that this Komierowski was my father's father Konstanty. I knew that he had been considered a bit of an adventurer and had gone to to Ceylon seeking his fortune by acquiring precious stones and other suchlike. At that time there was no State of Poland (it having been partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary) and while he was there Konstanty applied for and received British naturalisation. I found the document in 1878 in my father's papers, which he used to support his own application to become British in London after the war.
So there it was in black and white how my father's father and my mother's grandfather had met in Ceylon, gone their own ways, returned to their home "countries" and then fallen in love and married. Some sixty years later in 1943 Michael Redgrave gave a party at his apartment near Putney Bridge to which he invited some Polish Officers (including Konstanty's son Piotr) as well as his neighbours on the same landing (my grandfather and his children including my mother Katherine).They married in 1944 when she was 21 and he was 44. That was how my parent's actually met and I only learned that from a journal my father had written in Polish, which wss translated for me by my manager in Kraków. Small world? Coincidence? Destiny? ... but Fate for sure.
There were a couple of other coincidences/similarities with both sets of my great grandparents. Vereker's father had died in 1855 and then he was orphaned in the spring of 1856 when he lost his mother, at birth. The other Polish great grandparents (Konstanty's mother and father Aleksander Komierowski and Julia Dembowsksa) were also both artists, who travelled Europe painting reproductions from the Galleries. They both also happened to be deaf, but I have no idea if that was behind how they met each other. Aleksander, like Vereker, was orphaed during his first year of life. It's a funny old world.