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.

Internet problems

Still having problems with Internet access. We bought an extra 2 gig of access till the end of the month, but it meant having a new temporary account and changing all sorts of settings, and in the process some e-mail was lost, as they put in the wrong address. Things seem to be working for now, though, so if you sent any e-mail to which you expected a reply, please resend.

And please, before sending any e-mail with big attachments (over 100Kb), ASK FIRST! Running out of bandwidth causes huge problems.

No web access

I've had no access to the Web since last Thursday (15 March), and am posting this from an internet cafe, so there won't be any new postings or responses to comments here until access is restored, whenever that may be. So if you've made a comment on this blog and there has been been no response, that is why.


I'm not sure what the problem is -- my normal e-mail still seems to be working for now, though Web mail on Gmail, Yahoo etc is gone. We've reported it as a fault, but it could be that we have just run out of bandwidth -- kids looking at too many YouTube videos or something. I never look at YouTube myself for precisely this reason, but I think my sons do. If that is the cause, then we'll have to forbid videos altogether. My wife is looking for a job, and losing Web access for 2 weeks each month makes it difficult.

Benoke family - Allen descendants

June Murphy has just sent me a lot of information on the family of her great grandfather Hooper Scott Benoke, and from it I've been able to to work out that June and I are 5th cousins, and we are both descended from William and Ann Allen of Winscombe, Somerset.

The Allen family seems to have been quite prolific. At various times I've discovered mysterious cousins staying with Hayes relatives in censuses in Bristol, and have gradually been tracking them down, and most have turned out to be Allen descendants. Some of the surnames of descendants are Hayes, Williams, Hill, Purnell, Nipper, Benoke and there are probably many more to be discovered.

Waiting...

Nothing much to report.

Several people have got in touch over the last couple of months, and promised to get back to us with more information, but so far none of them have.

Just writing this to show that this blog hasn't been abandoned.

A few more Hayes bits

Yesterday I went to the LDS Family History Centre in Johannesburg, and looked at the microfilms of the parish registers of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. A lot were faint and illegible, but I did manage to find the marriage of John Hayes to Margaritta Jane Caple, and the baptism of their son William Wickham Hayes. John Hayes was the brother of my great great grandfather James Andrew Hayes.

The Caple (or Capel) family were from Winscombe in Somerset.

Allen, Williams, Benoke, and Nipper families of Somerset

June Murphy replied to a query I had left on the RootsWeb message boards, about the Allen, Williams, Benoke and Nipper families of Somerset. She is descended from Hooper Scott Benoke, who was staying with his grandfather Giles Williams in the 1861 census.

June also left a message in our message forum (see sidebar), that Hooper Scott Benoke is her great grandfather, and descended from Ann Williams. She notes that he was married three times, and I only had information about one of his marriages, to Louisa Nipper, who I suspected may have been related to Joseph Nipper and Mary Williams. June confirmed that Louisa was their daughter, and so first cousin to Hooper Scott Benoke, as their mothers were sisters. So now I'm hoping to hear more from June on Hooper Scott Benoke's other marriages, and his descendants.

My great great grandmother was Rachel Allen of Winscombe, Somerset, who married Simon Hayes or Hays. Rachel's sister Hannah married Giles Williams, hence the link between the families. Giles Williams and Hannah Allen had four children, one of whom died young. Hannah appears to have been dead before 1834, though i have not found a record of her death or burial. In 1834 Giles Williams married Sidonia Sweet.

Death of Mary Jane Conway

I've just had a phone call from Belinda Kalantar to say that her mother, Mary Jane Conway, had died a couple of weeks ago.

She couldn't give details, as the phone line was so noisy (I'd only just reported the problem to Telkom when she phoned), and I'll only be able to post this if there are enough clear second on the line.

Mary Jane Conway (born Parsons), or Jane, as she liked to be known, was born in Bristol, England, on 18 February 1928, so yesterday would have been her 79th birthday. She was my second cousin. Her mother, Nora Amy Hayes (1896-1982), was my father's first cousin.

Since my grandfather, Percy Wynn Hayes, had died when I was 7, I knew very little about our Hayes relatives in the UK, but when we got interested in family history I tried to find out more, and wrote to a lot of Hayes families I could find in the Bristol and Somerset telephone directories. One thing I did know, that my father had a cousin with the rather unusual name of Herrick Hayes, whom he had met when he had gone to England for the Scout Jamboree at the age of 14. One of these letters was passed to Jane Conway, and she wrote to me and we have been in correspondence since 1981.

We never met until a couple of years ago, when Val and I took a holiday in England, visiting ancestral places, and we spent a day with Jane Conway and other Hayes relatives in Bristol and North Somerset.



In the photo are Josephine Tsegaye (born Hayes), her sister Catharine Stokes (born Hayes), Jane Conway, and Steve Hayes.

On that day we fetched Jane in Bristol, and went to visit Josephine at her home in Kelston, near Bath, and then Jane came with us and showed us the ancestral home at Axbridge, and Winscombe, where earlier generations of the Hayes and Allen families had lived

We hoped that one day we would be able to save up enough money to go and see her again, but, sadly, that was not to be.

Mocine family update

Lois in Wisconsin has just sent us an update on the Mocine family history and we'll be checking through it to see if there are any births, marriages and deaths we don't have, and bring our family tree up to date. Thanks Lois!

Lois lives among strange creatures called Yoopers who wander around in the snow feeding deer, if her blog is to be believed!

For a long tim,e we were in correspondence with Lois's mother and stepfather, Katherine and David Mocine, and most of our knowledge of that branch of the family came from them.

The common ancestors we have are William John Green and Margaret Gray of Quebec. One of their sons, Edward Lister Green, married Emily Ogilvie in Grahamstown, Cape Colony, and eventually settled in New Zealand, and one of their grandchildren went to the USA and married Ralph Fullerton Mocine.

Edward Lister Green's brother Fred was an elephant hunter in what is now Namibia and Botswana, and is Val's great great grandfather.

Crighton or Creighton

When we started doing family history, soon after we were married, one of the first things we did was to ask Val's grandmother, Emma le Sueur, (formerly Greene, formerly Chelin, born Decker), about the family. Val's grandfather was her second husband, Allan Greene, and she couldn't remember very much about her in-laws, other than that their name was Creighton, and they were leather merchants in Cape Town.

Creighton was the name of a small village in Natal, so we looked in the Natal archives, but none of the Creightons we found seemed to fit. Then we went to Cape Town, and looked in the archives there, and found that the spelling of the name was Crighton, not Creighton (with an exception to be noted below). Henry Crighton (1815-1870) was a saddler in Cape Town (Gran's "leather merchant" came close enough), and there was even a newpaper obituary, though like many Victorian obituaries, it was full of padding and no substance. His wife was Petronella Francina Dorothea Flamme, whose grandmother was a slave, and probably the most indigenous South African ancestor we have between us.

The eldest son, William John Crighton (1842-1886), married Anna Maria MacLeod (1849-1917), and their eldest daughter Mary Francis Crighton (1868-1957) married Frederick Vincent Greene (1858-1949), and they were the in-laws.

At least three of the Crightons married into the MacLeod famioly, and we have quite a lot of information about the descendants of both families, so if anyone reading this is linked to any of these please get in touch, or at least leave a comment. There were numerous descendants of Charles Augustus MacLeod (1838-1909) and Annie Crighton (1850-c1934).

Both Henry Crighton and his son William John had several children, and so the Crighton family was quite numerous in South Africa. One of William John Crighton's sons was Daniel John (1880-1939), and in the archives we found correspondence with his granddaughter, Nita Crighton, who lived in America, and was researching the family history too. We were able to make contact with Nita (now Nita Harris of California), and met her when she visited South Africa a couple of years ago.

Daniel John Crighton's brother Frank Percy (1876-1953), however, adopted the Creighton spelling.

Devantier family

A few years ago Deborah Devantier posted this on a message board, and I must have missed it at the time:

I am researching my husband's family tree and know that his gradfather Otto Wilhelm Devantier arrived with his mother and 6 siblings in Queensland Australia in 1874. Unfortunately his father died on the voyage out and all we know was that he was Carl Wilhelm Friedrich Devantier born 1834 in Schonermark. Other names that are given on marriage and death certificates are Schwedt, Angemunde, Niederlandin and Uckermark. I realise there was a large Devantier family in this area, and have seen the family trees posted on the web. Would very much like to connect Carl Wilhelm Friedrich.

I do have a link to this family, and can give information on ancestors, and hope to get some on descendants. So I hope Deboarh (and other Devantier researchers) will get in touch.