Mrs Mitchell (senior)
(1809-1873)
8 May 1862

Volume 6, page 281, sitting number 7993. 

[The sitter is identified as ‘Mrs Mitchell (senior)’ in the Silvy daybooks. The following sitting is Mrs F.G.J. Mitchell, presumably this sitter's daughter-in-law. On 12 April 1856 at St George’s Hanover Square Fanny Georgina Jane Hasler married Captain Alexander Mitchell of Stow in Midlothian.]

Born at Rhynie in Aberdeenshire on 23 January 1809, Jane Gardiner was the daughter of John Gardiner of Smithston. 

On 5 September 1829 in Aberdeen she married banker Alexander Mitchell of Stow near Edinburgh, who was Cashier at the Aberdeen Town and Country Bank. Their marriage produced two sons before Alexander Mitchell’s early death in Dundee on 30 October 1834.

Mrs Mitchell appears on the 1861 census, a 52-year-old widow living with her eldest son Alexander Mitchell and his wife ‘F.G. Jane Mitchell’ at 6 Great Stanhope Street in Mayfair. For his profession Alexander Mitchell gave ‘Magistrate for Berwickshire and Selkirkshire.’ Educated at Eton and at Christchurch, Oxford, he was formerly a captain in the Grenadier Guards. He was later the M.P. in the Radical interest for Berwick-on-Tweed from 1865 to 1868. He was also Provincial Grand Master of the Freemasons of Berwickshire. He died on 16 May 1873. 

Mrs Jane Mitchell died, aged 62, on 19 May 1871 at Clovenfords and was buried in the parish churchyard at Caddonfoot in the Scottish Borders. 

‘At Laidlawstiel, on the 19th instant, Mrs MITCHELL, widow of the late Alexander Mitchell, Esq., banker, Aberdeen’ (Dundee Courier, 23 May 1871).