Archibald Jacob

Captain Jacob resigned his commission to settle in New South Wales in 1820, where he became a merchant, importer, coastal trader and landowner, securing land grants during the early settlement of Newcastle, and in the Hunter Valley northwest of Sydney.

By the time of Archibald's birth in Bengal in 1829, Captain Jacob had returned to India with his wife and two very young daughters, and had become a jute planter in Jessore and indigo merchant in Calcutta.

His mother Anne died four months later, in October, in Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), while on her way back to Sydney by ship with her three daughters and two other sons.

Archibald and his younger brother Robert had been left behind in Calcutta, where they were boarders for a time at La Martiniere, a newly established Protestant private school for children of European expatriates, before sailing to England to be brought up and educated by his mother's relatives in Nottinghamshire and Cheshire.

In 1851 Archibald and Robert made their way back to New South Wales to take up the family land holdings established in the Hunter Valley by their father in the 1820s.