Cousins in Clarens

We recently visited our cousins on the Hannan side of the family in Clarens in the Free State, Peter and Toni Badcock Walters. A few years ago they decided to retire there, and bought an old sheep-shearing shed in the grounds of the Clarens Golf and Trout Estate. Most of the houses on the estate are brand new rather posh dachas for rich city folks, but theirs was one of the orginal buildings, which they converted into a dwelling house, and three self-catering holiday apartments which they let out, and a fourth in an outbuilding, called “The Shepherd’s Loft”. The whole is called Clarens Country House, and you can learn more about it here.

Clarens Country House – the Shepherd’s Loft on the left

While visiting them we stayed in the Shepherd’s Loft, which is above the garage, and very comfortable. The other three apartments were also occupied.

The Shepherd’s Loft at Clarens Country House

Peter and Toni live in about a third of the building, and are also converting part of it into an art gallery.Their kitchen has walls build of sandstone from the surrounding hills, and on some of them are scratched the tally marks by which the sheep shearers kept track of the number of sheep they had sheared.

The village of Clarens, seen across the valley from the Clarens Gold and Trout Estate

Many of the Free State villages and small towns one passes through are suffering from the new highways that bypass them. Villiers, for example, used to boast several cafes that were patronised by motorists passing through between Johannesburg and Durban. But now they stop at the cafes beside the freeways, and Villiers is dead. Now you’re hard put to find a stale pie there.

Clarens, however, has reinvented itself as a tourist mecca. It boasts a number of very good restaurants (and none of the big chains, like Wimpy, MacDonalds, Spur etc), and an independent brewery. There are several art galleries, craft shops, and an independent bookshop. On most weekends the town is crowded with visitors. It’s about 330 km from Johannesburg, 400 from Pretoria. Peter and Toni’s son Craig (alias Knot the Juggler) has recently opened a novelty and magic shop called The Henn’s Tooth. It’s too new to have much atmosphere yet, but give it time, and it may look like something out of Diagon Alley.

Toni & Peter Badcock Walters and Val Hayes

It was good to see Toni and Peter again, and good to see the progress they have made in turning the old sheep shed into a habitable space.

Visit to KZN

We’re about to leave for a holiday in KwaZulu-Natal. We’ll go to church in Brixton, Johannesburg, and after that go to Clarens to see Peter and Toni Badcock Walters (Hannan cousins), and then on to Pietermaritzburg and Durban, where we hope to see more cousins.
I’m not sure how much Internet access we” have, but we’ll try to blog and Twitter as we go.

Holiday trip to Free State and KZN

Last week I was in Pietermaritzburg for an academic conference, but there was no time for family history research. But we hope to be back there in mid-July on holiday, and to visit family and friends. We’re hoping to get together with some Hannan cousins in Durban that we’ve never (in my memory at least) met face to face. We’ll be leaving on 8 July and going to see Peter & Toni Badcock Walters in Clarens, and then on to Pietermaritzburg and Durban.

I’ve written an account of the joint conference on religion and theology, held in Pietermaritzburg last week (JCRT 2012), with some photos, on my blog at

http://tinyurl.com/c88yzpm (part 1)
http://tinyurl.com/7afrf9b(part 2)

 

Swingewood family

This week we’ve been looking again at the Swingewood branch of the family, which we hadn’t looked at for many years, but it seems that quite a few members of that branch of the family have become interested in the family history, and have left messages on the Internet, so we hope to make contact with some of them and share family information.

The connection came about when Marian Winifred Crighton married Joseph Swingewood in Kenilworth, Johannesburg, in 1923.

Marian Winifred Crighton (1903-1967) was the daughter of  Frederick Crighton (1852-1916) and Helene Charlotte Ottilie Zeeman (1879-1929).

Frederick and Helene had four children, two of whom died fairly young. The remaining two, Arthur and Marian, married and had children. Marian married Joseph Swingewood and became Marian Swingewood, while Arthur married Marion Douglas who became Marion Crighton. Most of the information we have on the Swingewoods came from Marion Crighton (nee Douglas), who told us about her sister-in-law’s family, but that was 25 years ago now, so there’s a bit of catching up to do.

Helene Zeeman was Frederick Crighton’s second wife, and she was actually younger than his daughter by his first marriage (he was about 27 years older than she was). His first wife was Josephine MacLeod, and Josephine’s sister and brother also married into the Crighton family:

• William John Crighton married Anna Maria MacLeod
• Annie Crighton married Charles Augustus MacLeod
• Frederick Crighton married Josephine MacLeod

The Crightons were saddlers and leather merchants in Cape Town.

For more about the Crighton family see our family history wiki here.

 

 

 

Vause family

One of our cousins on the Vause side of the family, Sandy Struckmeyer, asked if I could give her some of our information to have in her family tree, so I’ve been checking what we have and what we don’t have on that branch of the family, and seeing what research still needs to be done. From what I can see we have no living relatives with the surname Vause anywhere outside South Africa. All those with the surname Vause today are descendants of Richard and Matilda Vause who came to Natal in 1852, within a month of getting married in Bath, England. Our Vause family seems to have originated in Epworth in the Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire, England. The earliest ancestors we have managed to trace are John Vause who married Ann Gilliot in in Epworth January 1701/1702. Epworth is quite famous as the town where the founders of Methodism, John and Charles Wesley, grew up.

John Vause and Ann Gilliot had five children, and two of them, Susanna and Alexander, died young. The eldest son, John Vause, died in his early 30s, and we don’t know if he married or had children, so all the descendants we know of are from the two remaining sons, Thomas and Richard. Thomas Vause (1704-1757) married Ann Crawshaw or Cranshaw and they had four daughters: Ann, who married George Collison or Collinson; Susanna who married John Brunyee or Brunyea; Sarah who may have married John Holdsworth; and Mary, born in 1749, about whom we have no further information. Richard Vause (1718-1751) married Elizabeth Hill in 1745, and they had three children, the youngest, Catherine, being born after her father’s death in 1751. Catherine married Thomas Coggan in Epworth. John, the eldest, was our ancestor, and married Elizabeth Brooks.

So all our relations from those early generations of Vauses will have descended from Collisons, Brunyees, Holdsworths, Coggans and other families, and it is only the South African branch of the family that have members with the surname Vause. When we first started our family history research, beck in 1974, I was not aware of this, and fossicked around in libraries looking for phone books for Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire and Humberside, and writing to people with the surname Vause to ask if they were related, and now, nearly 38 years later, I realise that they weren’t, unless, of course, they were connected with earlier generations, because we don’t know who were the parents of the John Vause who married Ann Gilliot, and there were other Vause families in the Isle of Axholme. And then, of course, there are the Wyatt, Brooks, Hill and Gilliot families, who all married into different generations of the Vause family, and about whom we know very little. We do know, however, that after the death of her first husband, Richard Vause, Elizabeth Hill married Francis Whitehead, and we have been in contact with cousins in that branch of the family, who have given us information about several generations of descendants.

Oldest living member of the Hannan clan?

My second cousin, Fiona Hannan Smyth (born Reddick) recently posted a photo of her mother Ria Reddick (born Hannan) on Facebook, with some of her great grandchildren.

Ria is the youngest of the children of  Thomas Hannan (1879-1941) and Hannah Carson (1884-1972), and my mother, Ella Hayes, and I visited them in Glasgow in 1967, and we took a few “whozit” pictures of the family gathering.

Back Row: Willie Hannan, Tilda Aitken, Ria Reddick, Stephen Hayes, Joyce Buchanan, Ella Buchanan. Front Row: Ives Duff (daughter of Tilda), Alastair Duff, Ella Hayes (cousin of Willie, Tilda, Ella & Ria), Hannah Hannan (born Carson) & Nellie Hannan (wife of Willie). Glasgow 6 May 1967.

Ria was my mother’s first cousin on the Hannan side and I think she is the only one of that generation still alive. We tried to see her when we went to Scotland in 2005, but she was out when we called.

Ella Hayes and Ria Reddick, Glasgow 6 May 1967

I think the family resemblance can be seen in this photo.

Ria and her husband Hugh went to Southern Rhodesia after the Second World War, and their two younger children, Carson and Heather, were born there. Hugh died in 1963, and in 1965, with the Rhodesian UDI threatening, Ria decided to return to Scotland.

I met her at Heathrow airport with her brother Willie — I had been in the UK just over a fortnight, as a semi-refugee, and had met Willie in London a short time earlier. I wrote in my diary at the time (4 Feb 1966)

When the plane with Ria arrived at about 1:20 we had to go over to another building for them to get the plane to Glasgow (there are 3 terminal buildings at Heathrow — one internal, one European, and one intercontinental) and there we had tea and talked about Rhodesia. Ria said that she had had a Rhodesian passport and citizenship, and felt that she could not stay after UDI, so had got a British passport on the 9th of November, two days before Smith went mad. Two of Willie’s parliamentary colleagues joined us while we were waiting, and Ria showed us a letter she had had to get from the government giving her permission to resign from her job with Shell Oil. Then Willie and Ria and the children left. The kids were quite sweet — a boy of about 15, called Carson, and Heather, about 12. Both had dark hair, like their mother.

All the Hannans seemed to have dark hair, and wherever I got my hari from, it wasn’t from the Hannan side of the family.

Anyway, fastforward again to the present, when Fiona (Ria’s eldest daughter, who didn’t come with them on the plane, and whom I haven’t met) posted this picture on Facebook, of Ria with her great-grandchildren. Fiona writes:

In the photo of Mum with 4 of her great grandchildren are (the 2 older boys are my grandsons, Karen & David Browns sons, Connor David (12 1/2) & Challum Harry (11) & the small boy & baby are 2 of Heather’s grandchildren, Kathryn & Gary Booths kids, Harris (3) & Ava Hannah (1).

Ria Reddick with her great-grandchildren

And they all have the Hannan hair!

There’s more on the Hannan family here.

Tombstone Tuesday: Pearson of Whitehaven

This Tombstone Tuesday I’m adding some pictures of tombstones of the Pearson and Ellwood families of Whitehaven, Cumberland. They relate to the Pearson and Ellwood families featured in the post immediately below this one.

Gravestone of Daniel William Pearson and Sarah Jane Walker in Whitehaven Cemetery

Daniel William Pearson (1855-1929) and his wife Sarah Jane Walker (1857-1959) are buried in Whitehaven Cemetery, Ward 1, Section O.

They were Val’s maternal great-grandparents.

Daniel William Pearson was the son of William Pearson, a butcher of Whitehaven, and his wife Sarah Johnson, who was born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk.

Sarah Jane Walker was born in Sylecroft, Whicham, in the south of Cumberland, and was the daughter of William Walker, a spirit merchant of Sylecroft, and his wife Agnes Duke, who was born in Ulverston, Lancashire (which is now part of the new county of Cumbria.

Daniel William Pearson started is career as a butcher, like his father, and then became Whitehaven’s Sanitary Inspector and Inspector of Nuisances (lovely title, that!) Two of ths brothers, Charles and Henry, were Anglican clergymen, while another brother, John Johnson Pearson, was an apothecary of sorts, and wrote books about his travels in the Middle East.

Gravestone of Margaret Pearson (nee Ellwood), in Whitehaven, Cumberland, England

Our second tombstone is of Margaret Pearson, the daughter-in-law of Daniel William and Sarah Jane Pearson.

Ernest Pearson (1892-1975) was a plumber and electrician of Whitehaven, and married Margaret Ellwood (1892-1958), the daughter of Thomas Ellwood and Mary Carr.

They had three sons, Gilbert, Ralph and John, and a daughter, Edith Margaret Pearson.