Devantier family

I’ve just had a message from Torben Devantie in Denmark:

I will just let you know, that the adress on my website The Devantier Family Tree, has changes a little bit.

It is now just

www.devantie.net

And if you are on facebook I have a group there called Devantier Family.

There is also a group on Orkut, Família Devantier, which has 55 members, mostly from the South American branches of the Devantier family.

Our branch of the Devantier family were Huguenots who left France in the 17th century and settled in Brandenberg, north-east of Berlin. From there descendants have spread to many parts of the world. A large group went to Denmark, and some have gone to North America, Australia and Brazil. There is more information about the family on our Devantier family page on Wikispaces.

Torben Devantie’s web site has a lot of  genealogical information on the family, showing how the various branches are linked.

Kitchen gardening and publishing

I’ve just had a note from Peter Badcock Walters (my second cousin on the Hannan side)  saying that he and his wife Toni have retired to Clarens in the Free State (I seem to know lots of people who have retired there), and they are into kitchen gardening, and also publishing books about it.

Their blog is Kitchen Gardening for Kindred Spirits, and their publishing arm is Lizard’s Leap Press. Peter once drew some illustrations for an edition of the works of Herman Charles Bosman, and is now planning a new edition with even more illustrations.

Most popular blog posts of the year

These were the most popular posts and pages on this blog

2009-01-01 to Today

Title	Views
Geocities Genealogy Pages	686
Geni.com — a flawed site	342
Families	339
Mysterious family and place names	209
The Hannan family	153
Childhood memories: Ingogo 1948	130
Growdens visit Athenian Krewe	129
Altavista still better than Google for g	126
Dead at my age	119
Germans in the Eastern Cape	114
FreeCen and researching Cornwall familie	113
About this Blog	112
In Durban – visiting relatives and resea	94
In Pietermaritzburg	90
Death of Canadian author Mollie Gillen	90
Tombstone Tuesday: earliest Sandercock	89
Software for family historians, biograph	82
Tombstone Tuesday: John and Mary Stooke	73
Tombstone Tuesday: Greenaways in Blislan	65
William Park of Bath, Belfast and Quebec	64

December birthdays

There is a genealogy blog carnival, in which people are asked to blog on family members who have birthdays in December, so here are some of  our family members with December birthdays:

Ralph Carr (1818-1862)

Ralph Carr was Val’s great-great grandfather, born in Whitehaven, Cumberland, England on 19 December 1818, the son of Ralph Carr and Mary Walsh. He was baptised on 24 January 1819 at Holy Trinity Church, Whitehaven.

Like his father, he was a seafaring man, and in those days Whitehaven was quite a busy port.

He married Isabella Little at St Bees, Cumberland, on 20 August, 1846. They had six children, Mary, Ralph, Edward, Elizabeth Renney, William Edward and Thomas. Mary Carr (1847-1897), the eldest, who married Thomas Ellwood, was Val’s great grandmother.

Ralph Carr died on 4 May 1862 on board the schooner Hematite of Whitehaven during the passage to Oporto in Lat 43 2 N Long 9 4 W, in the 42nd year of his age. He was buried on the west side of the harbour at Corunna, Spain, near to the grave of the celebrated General Sir John Moore who was killed during the retreat of the British Army to that place during the Peninsular War against Napoleon, which is the subject of a well-known poem by Charles Woolfe.

William John Crighton (1842-1886)

William John Crighton was Val’s great great grandfather. He was born in Cape Town on 25 December 1842, the son of Henry Crighton and Petronella Francina Dorothea Flamme. The family were saddlers and leather merchants, and William followed in the family business. They lived in Woodstock, a couple of miles out of Cape Town.

William John Crighton married Anna Maria MacLeod (1849-1917), daughter of William James MacLeod and Mary Kerwick, in January 1866. They had eight children: Mary Frances, Isabel, William John, Frank Percy, Daniel Jhon, Charles Joseph, James Percival and Percival.

The eldest, Mary Frances, was Val’s great-grandmother, who married Frederick Vincent Green.

George Coenraad Behr (1846-1902) and Charlotte Christiana Johanna Behr (1851-1944)

Not an ancestor, but the double brother-in-law of William John Crighton, George Coenraad Behr was born on 23 December 1836 in Cape Town, the son of George Hendrik Behr and Maria Magdalenia Steinhobel. He married Harriet Crighton (1851-1919), the sister of William John Crighton, and they had ten children.

George Behr’s sister, Charlotte Christina Johanna Behr (1851-1944) married Henry Joseph Burnard Crighton (1845-1887), the brother of William John Crighton and Harriet Crighton. They had no children. She also had a December birthday, being born on 21 December 1851.

Disk crash and lost e-mail

I’ve had quite a lot of computer problems recently, including a dying hard disk. I won’t go into the details here — if you really want to know you can read them on my general blog at Notes from underground: Frustrating computers.

I managed to replace the dying disk drive with a new and bigger one, and restore backed-up data to it, but lost most of my e-mail for the last three months, from 1 September to 7 December, including messages in my “to-reply” folder.

I didn’t lose anything in my family history data files and notes, as I back those up and transfer them every day to my laptop computer, so the biggest loss is the e-mail, and in family history most of it relates to the Sandercock family, as we started the Sandercock mailing list in October. Most of the list mail is accessible on the web, but some people sent me things privately. So if you sent me something and were expecting a reply, and don’t receive one, please, if possible send a copy of your original message, or at least a reminder.

I also received something on the Descendants of Edward Sandercock and Elizabeth Higgs from an anonymous correspondent. It had quite a lot of new material, which I have entered into the family file, but am unable to attribute it to any source, because I no longer have the original e-mail.

Cooperative family history

Last year we started a family history Wiki, in the hope that it might make it easier to cooperate with others in gathering family history. The Wiki format, which has been so successful in compiling Wikipedia, one of the most useful encyclopedias the world has ever seen, seems ideal for family history, where members of families all over the world  can contribute different parts of the family story.

Daily page views of our Family Wiki 2008i

We began the family wiki in May 2008, and it seems to have attracted plenty of visitors right from the start — more than this blog, in fact. I thought we might get 2-3 visits a day, perhaps 40-50 a month, but it has been quite a lot more than that, rarely dropping below 25 page views a day.

Daily visitors in 2008

Since each visitor usually looks at more than one page, the actual number of visitors is also quite interesting. It seems that it has rarely dropped below 20 visitors a day.

OK, not everyone who visits the site is related. Some may see a surname that they are interested in, but find that it is a different branch of the family, especially with common surnames. They might come, look at the index and a couple of pages, and see there is nothing connected with them, and leave again.

Edits and Editors - 2009

That is rather discouraging.

You can see how discouraging it is by seeing the number of page edits, which has dropped since it started. Also the number of editors is revealing. Only one other person has contributed anything to the pages, and I’ve had to write all the rest myself. The essence of a wiki is that it is cooperative, and many people contribute something to the full story, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. But surely some of the people who visit find a family that is connected to theirs, and could contribute something to the story. And only two left messages.

There is also the question of where visitors come from.

Where visitors came from - 2008

Most of our families were originally from the UK and Canada, and some are from Germany. Some were Huguenots who went from France to Prussia in the 17th century, and spread from there to other parts of the world. The recent generations are in Southern Africa, but we also have others in places like Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

Most visitors are from the USA, probably because more people there have internet access than those in other places. But there are relatively few from some of the countries where most members of our families came from or are living now.

So if you go to our family Wiki and find you are connected to any of the families there, please consider contributing something, however small. Ask if you can become an editor — if you can show you are related, we’ll make you one right away. And add something to one of the pages — an anecdote, an extract from a will, whatever. It doesn’t have to be perfect — that’s the beauty of a wiki. Someone else can polish what you write, and one story sparks off another memory, so someone else can expand it and put it in its context, and that way we all benefit.It can be a legend, a rumour, a story you were told, a black sheep in the family. If it’s a legend or a rumour, just label it as such — those things too are part of the family history.

Of course if we are sixth cousins we’ll have a relatively small proportion of our families in common. So what do you do if you want to write something about one of your relatives who isn’t related to us? Why, start your own family wiki, of course, it’s quite easy to do, and then we can link them for the common relatives.

So please, don’t just be a leech, sucking information from web sites without giving anything in return. You can learn lots of things from the web, but you can also pass on sometrhing of what you have learned so that others can benefit. Please visit our family wiki, but if you are related, please contribute something as well.

Software for family historians, biographers and others

Dennis Allsopp

Dennis Allsopp (Author of Genota and Genota Forms) was visiting Johannesburg, so I dropped in to see him and we had an interesting chat.

We chatted about software for genealogists and family historians, and three topics in particular:

1. The need for an event-based database program for genealogists, historians, biographers etc.
2. Dennis’s own genealogy research programs, Genota and Genota Forms
3. Old utility programs for which there are no modern equivalents.

As a result, I’ve uploaded a few of the old utilities to the website of the genealogy software forum, in the hope that they may inspire some enterprising hackers to reverse engineer them for modern hardware and software.

There were programs called Nameview and Namedrop that scanned BBS messages for things like surnames of interest, and manipulated those messages to collect them. They worked with Fido Technology Networks, but no one seems to have written an equivalent that works with mailing lists, newsgroups, or web forums.

There were also utility programs that took data from genealogy programs (mainly PAF 2.x) and printed family grtoup sheets on 3×5 or 4×6 cards.

That is FAR more useful than the stupid trick of software developers who tried to make a computer screen look like a card index, which had all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of the cards themselves.

But those utilities were written in DOS, and modern printers don’t work with DOS. So the utilities need to be rewritten to use modern programs and modern hardware.

There was the Tiny Tafel Generator — which not only developed but matched Tiny Tafels. Trouble is, it was written in Turbo Pascal, which doesn’t work on fast machines. You need a slow processor for it to run, under 500 Mhz, I think.

There are a few more there — back in the old days we may have had less than we do now, but very often we could do more with the less we had. So I’m hoping some hackers will have a look at them, and see if they can reverse engineer them to produce new versions.

But the main thing we chatted about was the need for an event-based program to be used as a research tool, not only for genealogists and family historians, but also for general historians, biographers and others. It would differ from lineage-linked genealogy programs in that it would not only include people that were relatives, but friends and acquaintaces, work colleagues, and even enemies. It would be a useful tool for a biographer trying to keep track of  the events in the life of their subject, or for someone writing general history.

The basic outline of the program would look something like this:

Outline for an event-tracking program

Dennis introduced me to a rather nice mind-mapping and concept-mapping program called VUE (Visual Understanding Environment) which drew the above diagram (he has a far better drawing of it), and shows how the various parts of the program would relate to each other.

The main part of the database would be a chronological list of events, and people and organisations assocated with this events. The organisations could be both formal and informal groups — a political party, church, club, school, hospital, business firm, trade union, family or any other human group.

The “people” part would not only be for family members, as one finds in lineage-linked genealogy programs, but for non-related people, like friends, work colleagues, teachers, pupils, godparents, acquaintances and so on. Perhaps it could also be useful in testing theories of six degrees of relationship — that we are only six degrees of relationshop away from knowing everyone else on earth, and that my wife’s boss’s godmother’s cousin’s penfriend’s vet knows me.

One reason for posting this is to try to find out if there are any others who think that and event-tracking and chronology program would be useful, and if so, what you would like it to be able to do.

Sharon Cottam visits her father’s old POW camp

I don’t know if she is related (possibly by marriage?) but I was interested in this item on the BBC, describing how Sharon Cottam had been taken to visit the places where her father, Flight Lieutenant Ted Nestor, was a prisoner of war in World War II.

But whether she is related or not, it makes intersting reading, and is illustrated by drawings and cartoons showing life in a POW camp, and how some of his fellow inmates plotted their escape.

 

Mystery cousins and royal legends

Our Green family, which we have traced back to Canada, has a family legend that William John Green, alias William Goodall Green, was the the son of Edward, Duke of Kent, and his mistress Julie de St Laurent. This legend has been fairly conclusively refuted by Mollie Gillen in her book The prince and his lady, so there is no need to go into that here.

William Goodall Green was in fact the son of Eliza Green, the daughter of James Green, a Quebec butcher, and William, Goodall, a London merchant. He was born in Quebec on 28 August 1790, before Edward Duke of Kent had set foot in Canada.

The legend did, however, become something of an obsession with some members of the family, and gave rise to some other minor mysteries.

William Goodall Green married Margaret Gray, the daughter of John Gray, the founder and first president of the Bank of Montreal. They had 15 children, born between 1815 and 1842, and Margaret died shortly after the last of them was born. William Goodall Green then went to the Cape Colony, in the Commissariat Department of the army, and two of his sons, Henry and Fred, remained in southern Africa. The eldest son, William, lived in Northumberland, England, and is son, also William, was the main propagator of the legend of royal descent.

It was William Goodall Green’s grandchildren who appeared to believe most firmly in the legend, and two of them changed their names as a result. Not only did they change their names, but they also seem to have disappeared, and therein lies the mystery.

Cecil Hollings Shipley Green was the youngest son of Major Edward Lister Green, and was born in Napier, New Zealand, in 1870. He became a bookkeeper at Alrig (wherever that may be), and in 1904 went to America. In 1917 his sister Florence Rutherfurd, then living in British Columbia, Canada, mentioned him in a letter to their eldest sister, Louie, in New Zealand:

I am writing to send you Christmas greetings and to tell you about Cecil, or Charles Stuart his name now is. Just the same initials, C.S. Green. He would like to hear from you. His address is

No 2503041 C.S. Green
No 10 Winnipeg Draft
Railway Construction Corps
Broadway Barracks,
Winnipeg, Canada

He seems happier than for years and has been travelling about a great deal. He may have left for England so put if left, please forward. He has given my name as next-of-kin.

And that was the last (as far as we know) his family ever heard of Cecil Hollings Shipley Green, or Charles Stuart Green, as he preferred to be known.

And then there is his first cousin, William Alfred Goodall Esdaile Green, who was almost his exact contermorary, having been born in New South Wales about 1869.

He joined the Brisbane Volunteer Rifles in July 1887, was appointed Staff Sergeant in Feb 1892 and resigned in 1897. He was then appointed Second Lieutenant in the Queensland Defence Force on 30 July 1897 (1st Queensland or Moreton Regiment). He was a Lieutenant in the 4th Queensland (1st Imperial) Bushmen for service in South Africa, in the Anglo-Boer War, where he served from 18 May 1900 to 12 August 1901.

In 1902 and 1903 he applied for posts in the civil service in Natal and the Orange River Colony, and worked as a temporary clerk in the Public Works Department in Natal from 16 Aug 1902 until 31 Oct 1903, and then in the Treasury until 31 Dec 1904. On 13 Feb 1909 he was staying at 166 West Street, Pietermaritzburg and again applied for temporary employment.

After World War I he changed his name to William d’Este-Stuart-Grey, and that seems to have been the last anyone in his family heard from him.  (Letter from Kathleen Schrader to her aunt Louisa Cowley, see Cowley 1996:194).

Did he change his name to emulate his cousin, or to go one up on him, or did both of them do it quite spontaneously without knowing about the other?

Both chose the name Stuart, which had royal connotations, though Edward Duke of Kent was a Hanoverian rather than a Stuart. Perhaps they both had a rush of royal blood to the head, but it would be nice to know what happened to them.

Sandercock family forum

We started the Sandercock/Saundercock family history forum for people of Sandercock descent in October, and by the end of the month we have had some very useful discussuions.

Several members have been helped to make new family connections, or to solve mysteries with existing connections.

There are now 15 members, representing several different branches of the Sandercock families.

If you haven’t yet joined, please respond to this invitation to do so, and pass on the invitation to others who may be interested. The forum is open to anyone with the name of Sandercock, Saundercock and vatiants, or who is descended from Sandercocks, or married to someone descended from them.

To join, just send an e-mail message to:

sandercock-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

or visit the web page for the group at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sandercock/

Group Email Addresses
Post message: sandercock@yahoogroups.com
Subscribe: sandercock-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Unsubscribe: sandercock-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
List owner: sandercock-owner@yahoogroups.com

The Sandercock family seems to have originated on the Cornwall-Devon border in south-western England, and have spread from there down and around Bodmin Moor. Some of the towns where the family has been established are St Gennys, Poundstock, and Jacobstow in north-eastern Cornwall; Altarnun, Launceston and neighbouring towns in Eastern Cornwall; Cardinham, Braddock, St Tudy and St Teeth on the south and west of Bodmin Moor, and various towns across the border in Devon.

Sander is said to be a nickname for Alexander, and so Sandercock probably originated as meaning “son of Alexander” — Sanderson is another name with a similar derivation. We hope by pooling our resouces, to track the various families back to the original hypothetical Alexander, though of course there is always the possibility that there were several unrelated ones whose children were given the epithet Sandercock.