William Stewart Smith worked in the firm of Gilmore & Co. (along with Henry Gouger, probably related to one of the executors of the will of Smith's brother, Thomas Smith) based at New Ghaut Street and Clive Street. This company may have been a break-off from the more famous Fairlie, Gilmore & Co., which starting in the last decades of the eighteenth century had created a vast network of trade ranging from China, Manila and New South Wales to the Malay Peninsula. Gilmore & Co. had also built a ship named the Vansittart in Calcutta, launched in 1813. Smith was married on 4 October 1836 to Ann Olive, daughter of the late Colonel Fehrszen at the residence of John Fyfe, Esq., in Glasgow.
(Colonel Fehrszen had come to India in service of the Shropshire Regiment. While leaving Trichinopoly in January 1820 for Bellary, he died as a result of a cholera outbreak. He had distinguished himself serving with the second battalion in Spain and the South of France, and was buried in Salem in Tamil Nadu.)
By 1842, however, Smith had moved to Serampore along with his erstwhile partner at Gilmore & Co., Kenneth Ross Mackenzie. On 20 March 1840 a son was born to him in Calcutta. They were resident at Elysium Row (currently Lord Sinha Road. https://goo.gl/maps/xnf0h). Mrs. William Stewart Smith gave birth to another son on 15 January 1843, the same year that Smith died.
Sujaan Mukherjee
