In 1842, when the Basel Mission recruitment team visited Jamaica, Americo-Liberian, George Peter Thompson fell in love with the then 16-year old Catherine Mulgrave. Born in 1819, Thompson was orphaned as a child, he was taken to Europe by the Basel missionary, the Rev. J. F. Sessing. He was raised in a Beuggen mission house in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, from where the Pietist movement originated. Thompson had been educated as a mission assistant in Basel Mission training school and seminary in Basel, Switzerland. Upon the recommendation of the Moravian mission and the tacit approval of the Basel mission, Mulgrave though initially undecided accepted Thompson's proposal. It is on record that her patroness, Lady Mulgrave, who she was still in contact with, opposed to the union but before she could voice her concerns, the Basel team had already left for the Gold Coast, together with the recruited Caribbean missionaries and Mulgrave who had then married Thompson on 11 December 1842. Catherine Mulgrave had suffered a miscarriage on the voyage from the West Indies to Africa. Thompson and Mulgrave had their first child, a girl named Rosina in 1844. In 1846, she gave birth to her second child, a son baptised George.
