Val's birthday and name day

It was Val's birthday and Name Day today (St Katherine of Alexandria), and we had a pretty busy day. First we went to the Hours and Readers Service at Mamelodi, and then went to the annual prizegiving at St Athanasius School in Tembisa, with the monks from St Thomas's Orthodox Church in Sunninghill. Here is Val with Fr Evsevije (Eusebius).

At the prizegiving just about all the children got certificates for something, and several of them presented plays or sang songs.

For a fuller report see my Khanya blog.

Ogilvie family and other news

Yesterday we had a letter from Andy Blum in the USA, asking about a David Ogilvie who was mentioned in a family history newsletter from Blue Earth, Minnesota, USA.

This David Ogilvie (1852-1943) had a fairly interesting life, and Andy wondered if he was related to the Ogilvie family of the Eastern Cape, from which Andy himself is descended.
We couldn't trace any connection, however.

The Ogilvie connection is through Emily Ogilvie (1827-1912) who married Edward Lister Green (1827-1887), who was the brother of Val's Great Great Grandfather Frederick Thomas Green (1829-1876). The Green brothers were born in Montreal, Canada, and came to South Africa with their widowed father in the 1840s.

Edward Lister Green was a soldier who served in India, China and Ireland, and eventually moved to New Zealand, where he died in 1887. Some of their children moved to the USA, and Emily died in California where she was living with her daughter Maud Ogilvie Jowett.

Emily was the daughter of William Ogilvie (1795-1850) who fought at Waterloo and came to the Cape Colony with Lord Charles Somerset, the Governor. He married Mary Maria Hollings, who was governess to Lord Charles Somerset's family. They had four sons and four daughters, but none of them seem to have had Minnesota connections, other than some of Emily's descendants. William Ogilvie had a hardware store, and sold Westley-Richards rifles, and two members of the Richards family came from Birmingham to Grahamstown and married two of the Ogilvie daughters. Andy Nation of New Zealand had Edward Lister Green's diary and sent us a copy of it with some family history notes he had made. We have transcribed it on to computer, and can send copies to interested family members. There is more information about the Ogilvies in Some frontier families by I. Mitford-Barberton and Violet White (Cape Town, Human & Rousseau, 1968).

Edward and Emily Green had 6 children, and among their descendants are the Nation, Rutherfurd, Mocine, Lewis and Blum families.

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In more immediate family news, our dog Ariel recently had puppies in her old age. For anyone interested, there is a report and pictures on my tribal blog.

Hailee Growden chosen as queen of the Mummers Parade

Does anyone know where Hailee Growden fits in to the family?

clipped from www.herald-mail.com Miss Maryland Shana Powell, left, crowns Williamsport High School's Hailee Growden as the 2007 Alsatia Mummers Parade queen. (Photo credit: Joe Crocetta / Staff Photographer) Williamsport High School’s Hailee Growden was chosen as the queen of the parade at the Alsatia Club’s headquarters earlier in the day. Growden won the crown over nine other local high school homecoming queens by selecting a box with a golden necklace inside.

Romange Growden objects to cemetery party

Romange Growden has objected to a Halloween party in Palmetto, Florida. Not sure if she's related.

clipped from www.myfoxtampabay.com Romange Growden says she's mortified the place where her husband and mother are buried -- and the place she'll eventually be -- is the site for a Halloween party. "I just don't see why a cemetery would get involved in Halloween. Just the thought of it! What, do they want to raise the dead?" she asked.

Hayes, Dunn, Doddrell

Louise Doddrell left a message in the Bravenet Message Forum (see sidebar for link).

She is descended from Gertrude Hayes who married Robert Seymour Dunn, and we're looking forward to an exchange of family history information.

Hospital

I took Val back to Sunninghill Hospital yesterday, and they checked her arm, said it was healing, but she now needs to visit a physiotherapist, and must be weaned from the sling gradually.

Accident

Val went to a course for work in Johannesburg on Monday and Tuesday, and fell down the stairs at the Balalaika Hotel in Sandton on the way down to the parking garage. When she got to the car she found her arm wasn't working, so she phoned me and Jethro to come and fetch her, as she couldn't drive.

I took her to Sunninghill Hospital on the way home, and they put her arm in a sling and did all sorts of X-rays, and asked her to come back and see an orthopaedic specialist the next day. So yestyerday I took her back to the hospital for that, and she got an even more fancy cling, and they said a bone in her shoulder is cracked, so she will be sort of incapacitated for the next six weeks or so.

And you thought your family had skeletons in the cupboard

And you thought your family had skeletons in the cupboard?

How about this: Yes, I'm related to that Himmler.

Cottam and Bagot and reading novels

I went to the LDS Family History Centre in Johannesburg today and transcribed more baptism records for the Cottam, Bagot and Mashiter families.

I reread Rider Haggard's novel Allan Quatermain, and found that family history made me enjoy it more, as it had links with my great grandfather Wyatt Vause and Val's great grandfather Daniel William Pearson. I've written about it more fully in my LiveJournal.

Emily Growden

I'm not sure if this is one of ours, but I found it on Athens Exchange:

Say It In Slang is a vocally sound record, excuse the corny pun. Gonzales delivers his signature dreamlike vocals, but one thing that sets this album apart from other M Coast records is that Emily Growden, wife of band member Derek Almstead, contributed her voice to lead a few of the songs. Her light, feathery voice is a perfect complement to Gonzales' guitar work. It's almost flute-like. The opening track, "Sailing Around the World" starts the album off with her voice, and is more than enough to catch your attention. Needless to say, Emily's voice is a wonderful addition to M Coast's laidback and lazy sound.

Anyway, I'm collecting information on all Growdens, hoping I'll find connections between them some day.

Miscellaneous family and research information

Today I moved 367 records of people from one genealogical program to another. Most of them were in material sent by cousins, quite a lot relating to the Nipper and Benoke families (descended from William and Ann Allen of Winscombe, Somerset). I hope to have a kind of consolidated pool of information about the descendants of William and Ann Allen to share with any members of the family who are interested. There are some related families about which we have very little information -- Purnell and Hill, for example.

There was also some information sent by Diana Richter on the Beningfield and Grice families of Durban.

The other day I met John Sutherland of Australia, who was looking for his grandfather Robert Sutherland, some of whose children were born in Pilgrim's Rest. I showed him how to look in the archives, but unfortunately there wasn't much. There was a cryptic reference to a Robert Sutherland who had died in Mozambique, but not enough information to show that he was related.


We're still having bandwidth problems, so if anyone writes e-mails and they bounce, try again at the end of the month, in case we've run out of bandwidth. In the mean time I'll try to be sparing about looking at other people's blogs and web pages, to try to make the e-mail last until the end of the month.

Message forum and guest book - gatvol

As you know, there is a message forum and a guest book that you can use for introductory messages and things that aren't in reply to any particular blog posting.

Here are the usage statistics for your message forum service for 2007.

Every time a message is posted in either the guest book or message forum I get a notification by e-mail and get all excited, thinking there's a cousin with new news about the family, or even a new cousin that I hadn't known about before, but 90% of the time it turns out to be some clown trying to advertise cheap cigarettes or steroids or something, and so most of the messages have to be deleted.

The statistics shown above are from before I deleted the last junk message -- they now show no messages for March and April, though in fact there were about 10, all of which I had to delete.

The message forum was also for comments on my regular web pages, apart from the blogs, but no one really seems to be using them.

And now I'm gatvol. For those who don't know, "gatvol" is a South African idiom. It literally means "hole full", and is roughly equivalent to "up to here" in other English dialects.

If there was a significant proportion of genuine messages to all the spam it might be worth it, but since genuine messages are getting rarer and rarer I might close the message book and guest book altogether to save me the hassle of going in to delete the junk. The trouble is, that means that the useful messages that are already there will be lost as well. But it doesn't seem as though anyone will miss them. I don't know why the spammers bother, since hardly anyone reads these things anyway.

Comments? Will anyone miss the message forum or the guest book?

A quiet week

Not too much to report on the family history front over the last couple of weeks. We've been recovering after Easter and all the pigging out in bright week. You can say what you like about Easter eggs -- I like mine fried, with bacon. Actually our Bright Week breakfast was the BEST breakfast: Bacon, Egg, Sausage and Tomato.

Taking some people back home after the Easter vigil at about 3:30 AM we fell into a hole in the road, because another car would choose just that place to come down the hill with its lights on bright, and the streetlights were out too. So I've had an enforced stay at home after buying two new tyres and waiting for the wheel to be repaired.

And then yesterday the Internet went off again. No, not again, we said. We increased out limit from 2 Gig to 3 Gig, but it still ran out. So while waiting to get that sorted out, I spent less time on line and played around with askSam for Windows, the program I use to record a lot of information in the archives etc. I used to use askSam for DOS -- still do, in fact, and find it easier to use. But the new Windows printers don't print from DOS programs, so you have to go through all, the schlep of outputting to a file, and then pulling it into a Windows program like Wordpad to print. So I thought I'd play with the Windows version, and it's producing some quite decent reports now. But, unlike the DOS version, it's not so easy to just pull the output into e-mail and send it to family members around the world. But if I keep playing with it, maybe I'll find out. I've been using the DOS version for 16 years now, and it's still hard to beat for sheer usefulness. I use it more than any other program.

And then we did get an e-mail from Val's cousin Peter Decker, which was very encouraging. We visited his father 30 years ago, just after we got married, and pumped him for information about the family, but then he moved away and we lost touch, and so having his son contact us was a nice surprise.

Now our internet connection is working again, so I'm writing this after a couple of disconnected days, but looking at the usage I suspect that it may be caused by spyware or something like that. The uploads are tracking the downloads, which makes it look as though someone is using one of our computers to disseminate spam or something, so we're updating our antivirus and anti spyware programs.

Robert Laing of Colington

Mon 19 Mar 2007 carries an obituary for a South African genealogist, Robert Laing of Colington, who died on 12 March, 2007, in Johannesburg, aged 58.

Robert Laing was sometime chairman of the Genealogical Society of South Africa, and was an enthusiastic researcher into genealogy and heraldry, though rather given to claiming dubious and even outright spurious titles for himself, though his friends and fellow genealogists usually good-humouredly granted them to him, and he was referred to in the Genealogical Society's publications as Chevalier Robert Laing, and Robert Laing of Colington.

We had some common research interests as Dorothea Wilhelmina Katerina FLAMME (1816-1858) married Peter LAING in Cape Town in 1836, and they had three children, who went to Scotland with their father. Robert Laing never managed to establish the connection between himself and this Peter Laing, but he did spend quite a lot of time researching it. Dorothea Wilhelmina Katerina FLAMME was the sister of my wife Val's ancestor Petronella Francina Dorothea FLAMME, who married Henry CRIGHTON.

Huguenot ancestors from Brandenburg

A little less than a year ago I blogged about the Falkenberg branch of Val's family, where we discovered a couple more generations after more than 30 years of searching. But Val's great-great grandfather Christian Falkenberg married as his second wife Justine (Jessie) Schultz, who was 9 years old when they came out on the ship together from Germany.

Back when we first started we found that the Schultz and Falkenberg ancestors came from what was then the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and we thought that that branch was a dead end. But a Mr Hans-Georg Bleibaum in West Germany said he could find a researcher who would look for us, if we would send him some cash for a parcel of groceries. So we sent the cash, and he sent the groceries over to East Germany, and several months later came a letter saying that Val's ancestor Martin Schultz had married a Marie Payard, and he had traced her cancestry back several generations -- all of them descendants of Huguenot refugees from France who had fled to Brandenburg after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

And for several generations they had lived in the same area, the Ueckermark, and married French, so their records were all in the registers of the French Reformed Church. And so we had the families: Payard, Bettac, Bevierre, Berthe, Varembourg, Devantier, de la Croix, Peronne, and several others. One thing that surprised us was that the earliest ancestors were tobacco farmers from the French/Belgian border.

For a long time it just remained a list of names until we made contact with Barry Alexander in Australia through the Fidonet BBS network. He was descended from Devantiers, and had a book about the family. Many of the Brandenburg Huguenots had gone to Denmark and from there to other places. So we had not only a list of remote ancestors, but had made contact with real live cousins as well.

There were so many in these families that we found quite a number of other people researching them, and have managed to compare notes. I'm trying to get all the ones related to us in one file, but they intermarried with each othert so much that it is sometimes hard to work out the relationships, and I keep discovering another researcher who has found some more somewhere.