Mary Kerwick

One of the ancestors we knew little about was Val’s great-great-great
grandmother Mary Kerwick. She married William James MacLeod, a master
mariner, in Cape Town in 1827, and they had eight children. 

On her death notice (she died on 23 June 1863) it said she was born in “Three
Rivers, Canada” and that she was 52 years and 9 months old. So we put her
date of birth as September 1810, and wondered what had brought her from
Canada to the Cape Colony. 

Since the advent of the World Wide Web more and more genealogical records
have been put on line, and yesterday we discovered her in the International
Genealogical Index (IGI), which informed us that she was the daughter of
James Kerwick and Elisabeth Clouith; born 13 Sep 1810, baptised 25 Sep 1810.
Eglise catholique. Immaculée Conception (Trois-Rivières, Québec). 

That would make her age at death exact, so we’re pretty sure she’s the right
one. 

Now, of course, we’re looking for more information about her parents and
where they came from, and also whether she had any brothers or sisters, and
what happened to them.

Trying to make contact with Sharon Gilmour nee Daniels

We recently received a message via our family tree on TribalPages:http://hayesstw.tribalpages.com/

to the effect that a Sharon Gilmour had visited the site and left a message saying the she was a granddaughter of George Emmett Brennan. We sent her an e-mail message, but unfortunately it bounced as follows:

On 9 Jan 2012 at 6:40, Mail Delivery System wrote:

> This is the mail system at host wblv-ip-mesg-1-3.saix.net.
> > I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
> be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.
> > For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.
> > If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
> delete your own text from the attached returned message.
> > The mail system
> > : host mx3.hotmail.com[65.54.188.94] said: 550
> Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable (in reply to RCPT TO
> command)

So now we have no way of making contact. I’m just hoping that Sharon herself, or someone who knows her, may see this to let her know that we tried to get in touch, but failed.

George Emmett Brennan (1905-1961) married Maude Florence Beatrice Crighton (1905-?) in 1928, possibly in Johannesburg. We visited her on 6 April 1986, when she was living in an old age home in Bertrams, Johannesburg, with her sister-in-law “Baby” Crighton.

2011 in retrospect

During the second half of 2011 we concentrated mainly on the Ellwood family of Cumbria in our research. We found a link to Bruce Morrison’s online family tree, which took our Ellwood family several generations back to Dufton in Westmorland, England, which enabled us to also link up to several other Ellwood families we had previously thought were unlinked. We started an Ellwood family history forum in July, and by the end of the year it had 19 members, most of them known to be related.

In May we went on holiday to the Western Cape, and visited several relations on the way, mostly of the Growdon and Hannan families. In the first part of the year we were mainly working on the Bagot and Cottam families, from Lancashire in England, and also started a Bagot family forum.

We’ve seen a gradual greowth in the number of visitors to our Family Wiki, but still practically no interaction, which is the main purpose of a Wiki — a collaborative effort at building up a family history, but apart from us, only one other person contributed to it in 2011.

Perhaps one of the problems is that most of the visitors seem to have come from the USA, though the families we are researching are mainly in the UK, South Africa, Germany and Australia.

Another historical project that Steve, in particular, has been involved in is a mailing list on the history of the Anglican Church in Namibia. Steve worked in the Anglican Church in Namibia from 1969 to 1972, and had been in touch with some other people who had worked there in the same period, and have been comparing notes.

On New Year’s Eve we were visited by Val’s cousin Enid Ellis and her husband Justin, who have been in Namibia for the last 20 years, and were also there in the 1970s.

Val Hayes, Enid Ellis, Laura, Justin Ellis, 31 December 2011