C.F. Von Lintzgy is listed as an apothecary in the Calcutta Magazine and Monthly Register (see http://tinyurl.com/over9kc). He had married Isabella Andrews in 1828 and then Amelia Mary Ann Abercomby in 1832. The Colonies and India from London reports the death of C.F. Von Lintzgy in May 1896 and describes him as the 'one of the oldest European medical practitioners in India.' Von Lintzgy has also been praised for his work as interpreter to the Coroner's Court. The Bengal and Agra Annual Guide and Gazetteer lists C.F. Von Lintzgy as 'Chemists and Druggists.'
A descendant of the Von Lintzgy family, Audrey Von Lintzgy, has written:
My mother Kathleen Cameron married Harold Robert von Lintzgy, “up-country” in East Bengal in 1937 and both of them were raised in Calcutta. My mother’s father was Major Clarence StClair Cameron. I believe her grandfather and g-grandfather were also military men.
The von Lintzgy family were in Bengal from around 1781, when D.C.B. von Lintzgy arrived there, giving his Country of Origin as Rusland, the old name for Russia. I am not a historian but I do believe that Prussians (Austrians and Germans) were being expelled from Russia, their land seized by Catherine the Great around that time. D.C.B. von Lintzgy apparently married a Begum, and they lived in Bankipore. I have never been to the churches in Bankipore or Barrackpore, but would so much like to search for their marriage record, and the Baptismal record for their son Charles Frederick von Lintzgy, born in 1801.
I suspect that D.C.B. von Lintzgy (I wish I knew what those initials stood for!) was trading, probably in Jute, between Bankipore and Calcutta. The von Lintzgy family in the next two generations owned a property called Screw House in Calcutta, and I am advised that this property was for “screwing” the jute tightly for export.
The burial of Amelia von Lintzgy in the Scottish Cemetery, along with two of her daughters who had married brothers called Durup de Dombal (Indigo Planters from a very distinguished and noble French family) is interesting because Amelia was the wife of Charles Frederick von Lintzgy, the first generation of the family to be born in India.
Charles Frederick was a Medical Doctor in Calcutta and his gravestone has been moved to the South Park Cemetery to preserve it – there is a note at the Scottish Cemetery in their records, saying that he was “a very well known doctor in his time”. I have no idea where he would have qualified. He was interpreter to the Coroner’s Court. One of his sons also became a doctor. William John von Lintzgy qualified around 1862 through St Andrew’s University in Scotland, but died at the age of 28 in Assam “of a fever”. I looked for his grave in Shillong, without any luck. His graduation is listed in the British Medical Journal of (I think) 1862. I found it on-line.
I have huge amounts of information about the von Lintzgy family. They seem to have declined socially in India, and I know there is a branch in Jamshedpur, and have met those in Kolkata and Asansol. Two of the Asansol von Lintzgy family are graduates of the university in Bangalore. My father and some of his cousins who left India in the 1940s all did well in the UK and Brazil. Dad was a Civil Engineer in East Bengal until 1951 and then General Manager of Ghana Railways till his early death there in 1959.
[Pers. Comm.]
Elsewhere, she also writes:
My grandfather, g-grandfather and gg-grandfather were all listed at various times as Apothecary and Doctor, and they certainly ran their own Pharmacy in Calcutta for nearly a century. The gg-grandfather was said to have been well known for his famous mixture for the treatment of liver problems, and I was slightly amused to see that his cause of death was "liver failure".
[see http://searches2.rootsweb.com/th/read/INDIA/2003-09/1064157212]
Charles Frederick Von Lintzgy's plaque has been moved to South Park Street Cemetery.
Souvik Mukherjee
