Early in the 19th century, a branch of the van Someren family (originally of Dutch extraction) sat both at the heart of the East India Company and of the Christian missionary networks in Southern India. As the British crown took the Company’s power and responsibility to itself following the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny’, the family continued to serve the British ‘Raj’ and especially the missionaries in India.

Amongst those missionaries were a number of Germans — Hebich, Rhenius being notable examples. Friedrich Wolff came to India from a rural background in Lower Saxony in 1843 and married into the van Someren family, as did his brother-in-law, the notable Tamil scholar George Pope.

During the 1930s Friedrich’s granddaughter Amalie Beck collected the memoirs of his wife, Mary Crisp van Someren, and did what she could to bring the family — divided by the First World War — together, at least in print. She completed ‘Missionsleben’ in 1939, incorporating anecdotes and further information from a range of family sources. Her work, which was never published (and whose existence remained unknown to the English-speaking family) has now been translated into English. Dick Wolff has added considerable further research and complementary material to it.

The four month journey between India and Europe meant that the missionary couple’s children were heavily impacted by separation. A section of the book charts their biographies. It provides a fascinating insight (mostly from the women’s perspective) into the struggles of the missionaries, not least amongst themselves and with their own sponsoring organisations. It reveals the motives that sustained them, the ambiguities in the missionary enterprise, and the personal cost of that mission to them and their children. And mostly in their own words.