Amazing serendipity!

Today I was in the Tshwane archives, looking up Devantiers.
I ordered file WLD 1184/74, the divorce of Carol Lynne Devantier and Peter Dudley Devantier, and the Box was marked Illiquid Cases 1974 1183/1194, so the second file in the box should have been the one I was looking for.
But instead it turned out to [...]

Payard, Bettac and Devantier families

We’ve been looking at our Brandenburg Huguenot families again, as a number of researchers have  been interested in these, and some have recently updated their web pages.
One result of this has been to show up a discrepancy in a Payard-Bettac marriage, which needs further research to resolve.
Quite soon after we got interested in family history, [...]

Devantier family

Last year we had a couple of e-mails from Devantier cousins — Deborah Devantier in the USA, and Vanessa Devantier in Brazil, asking about family connections. We couldn’t find any links in our family records, so I passed them on to Torben Devantie in Denmark, who has now confirmed the links, and that both Deborah [...]

Family visit – Pretoria June 2008

Val’s sister Elaine Machin and her son Alan came up from Pinetown for the Youth Day long weekend, and this afternoon we gathered with Lesley Machin and her boyfriend Johnny O’Neill on their farm east of Pretoria. We were joined by Elaine’s other son Greg Machin and his daughter Abby.

In the picture: Johnny O Neill, [...]

The old school tie

Last Saturday I went to the Founders Day Service at my old school, St Stithians College. I’ve put the details and some photos on my Khanya blog, for anyone interested. I went to St Stithians when the school started in 1953, and did matric in 1958, so this is the 50th anniversary of my [...]

Hundermark visit

Simoné and Brenda Hundermark visited us today. Simoné is my (Steve’s) second cousin — her grandfather Simeon Growdon (1876-1942) was my grandfather George Growdon’s (1873-1948) younger brother.
The Growdon brothers came to South Africa from Cornwall in the 1870s with their parents William Matthew Growdon (1851-1913) and Elizabeth Greenaway (1842-1927). William Matthew Growdon worked for the [...]

Visit to KZN

i’ve been in KZN for a few days. I went to Durban for a conference, and took the opportunity to visit some family members. I saw Arthur and Dorothy Benjamin in Northdene. Dorothy is Val’s cousin on the Greene side, and their son Todd was there with his wife Pamela, preparing to emigrate to Australia, [...]