Looking for Charles Frederick Braine

Charles Frederick was my great grandfather. Looking for my roots on the web, I read that he was buried at Dimbula, in the central hills of Sri Lanka, where he was a tea planter. Last year, my sister Beula, Bandara (who is married to my cousin Marie) and I drove up to Dimbula to look for his grave. He was an Anglican and belonged to the Church of England, now known as the Church of Ceylon.

The Pastor at the Dimbula church told us that the graveyards were at Warleigh and Bogawantalawa, a few miles beyond. Al Warleigh, we found a lovely stone church situated above the Casterleigh Reservoir. My grandfather was born in 1874 and the church was built four years later, so I am fairly sure that he had attended service here as a child.

But we could not find the grave of Charles Frederick. The graveyard, although it had been cleared of weeds, showed signs that it had been neglected for a long time. When the tea plantations were nationalized in the 1970s, the British planters, who formed the bulwark of the congregations at Anglican churches, left Sri Lanka and the churches fell into a period of decline. Now, Tamil parishioners, descendants of estate workers who had been converted, keep these churches going. The Christ Church at Warleigh is in good repair, as these photos show. We were told that it's popular among British tourists.

We drove onto Bogawantalawa, where we found a 
small Anglican church, St. Mary's, on the roadside. The Pastor, Bro Thivyapalan Gnanapragasam, came to help us search 
the graveyard. What we found was the grave of 
Charles Frederick's infant son, the younger brother 
of my grandfather Charles Stanley. The child's full name 
was Frank Wyndham Becher Braine (his mother's maiden 
name was Becher) and he had died on March 9, 1879, 
at the age of 11 months. 

We may have been the only relatives who turned up at this grave in more than a hundred years.