This chapter uses the marital histories of a prominent governing class family in early nineteenth-century India to explore the British family's function at the interface between the public and the private sphere in a colonial setting. Loyalty to kin had functional and symbolic importance, Margaret Hunt has argued of eighteenth century England, for it helped people to make sense of a society in which bureaucratic structures were few, authority was for most intents and purposes lodged in households, and social valuations at all levels of society were often more related to blood and ancestry than to individual. By examining the marital fortunes of a prominent imperial kin network, the chapter illuminates British governing-class families' accommodation of the social, cultural and economic demands and opportunities of empire. It explores the imperial family fortunes of Gilbert Elliot, the first Earl of Minto, who served as Governor General of India from 1806-1813.