I have been carrying this thought quietly for a while now that if I do not start looking for my maternal grandfather’s story soon, I may never be able to. My mother lost him when she was only eight or nine years old, sometime around 1954 or 1955. She remembers little, and what she does remember is blurred by the passage of time and the heaviness of grief. Talking to her about him is not easy. She gets emotional, and sometimes I hesitate to ask because I am afraid of reopening old wounds. But if not now, then when.
All I have ever known is his name: Francis Sandra. Even that name is full of questions. My grandmother was apparently his second wife, but I do not know for sure. My mother’s NRIC used to carry the surname Sandram, with an “M” tacked onto the end, while her brothers carried Sandra. She eventually paid a lawyer to have the “M” removed. The details are messy, inconsistent, and incomplete.
What has struck me recently is the possibility that Sandra might not have been the original name at all. In reading about the Jaffna Tamils who came to Singapore in the early 1900s, I found an echo that made me stop. Jaffna Tamils, from the northern tip of Sri Lanka, were known for their education and their professional standing. The British recruited them as teachers, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, and administrators. They built lives here, especially in the East Coast and Katong areas. Many of their names were long, elaborate, and rich with history, names like Sandrasegaram, Sandrasegaran, and Sandrasagra. In colonial Singapore, those names were often shortened for convenience when dealing with the British administration. Sandrasegaram could become Sandra.
One name in particular stood out to me: Harry Sandrasagra, a lawyer from Jaffna who became a King’s Counsel. His family’s story fits the pattern, educated, professional, mobile, and part of that early wave of Jaffna Tamil migration. If my grandfather’s surname came from that root, it would mean he was part of a community known as the “Scotsmen of the East,” respected for their intellect, precision, and ambition. My mother did not have many good things to say about her father, so I am not even sure if the links are accurate.
Francis as a first name suggests he may have been Catholic or Anglican, as many Jaffna Tamils were after attending mission schools like St. Patrick’s College in Jaffna. Those schools taught in English and prepared students for work in British colonies like Singapore. If this is true, then perhaps he arrived here in the 1930s or 1940s, already trained for a role in the civil service, teaching, or administration.
It is a strange feeling, piecing together the life of someone you have never met, from hints and patterns and the habits of a community they may have belonged to. It feels like walking into a room where the furniture is still there but all the photographs are gone.
I want to request his records from ICA. I want to go through church registers and parish archives. I want to search the Straits Settlements directories and newspapers for his name, both in its shortened form and in its possible longer versions. Most of all, I want to sit down with my mother and ask her what she remembers, even if it is hard, because her memories are as much a part of this story as the documents I might find.
Time is running out. Not just because the paper trail fades with every passing year, but because the generation who knew him, even briefly, is leaving us. Once they go, so will the last living memories.
Maybe I will find nothing certain. Maybe I will find pieces that never quite fit. But I would like to try. I would like to give Francis Sandra a place in our family story, not just as a name but as a man who lived, worked, and loved in a Singapore that no longer exists.
If I can put even a few of those pieces together, then perhaps my daughter will one day know more about where we came from than I do now. And perhaps she will see that searching for our roots, however incomplete, is its own way of keeping the past alive.
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