In and around Cape Town, family and friends

Continued from In and around Cape Town

In Cape Town our days followed a regular pattern: breakfast at the hotel, research in the archives, and then visiting friends and family — at least those who had said they wanted to see us.

Breakfast at the Sun 1 hotel — austere by adequate

On Wednesday 26th August we drove down to Simonstown, following the Old Cape Road.

Old Cape Road, over the cloud-covered hills

Simonstown is an interesting place in that most of the buildings on the main street are rather old, and therefore more interesting than the bland modern ones found in most towns.

Simonstown main street

Simonstown looks like a very pleasant place, but has mainly been a naval base, famed for its harbour.

Simonstown Harbour

But places that sell take-away food, or at least the big chains like Steers, KFC, Nandos et al, like to have their own building designs, so were not visible in Simonstown. We were quite hungry, after having worked right through in the archives from breakfast, so we ended up buying chips in Fish Hoek, which has less interesting architecture.

Fish Hoek main street

We then went to visit my cousin Brenda Coetzee in Muizenberg. The building where she lives had an interesting feature, a storefront church. I have often read about such things, but this was my first time to actually see one.

Storefront church in Muizenberg

Brenda is my second cousin on the Hannan side of the family, whom I knew quite well when we were younger, and she lived in Johannesburrg. She stayed with my mother when her parents were being divorced. But after that they moved to Cape Town and we lost touch until a couple of years ago, and the advent of Facebook, which makes it easier to keep in touch.

John Verster, Steve Hayes & Brenda Coetzee, Muizenberg, 26 August, 2015

Brenda’s mother was Peggy Sharp who married Ted Gascoigne, and they used to live in Jan Smuts Avenue in Parktown and they had lots of apricot trees in their garden. I recall once eating so many apricots that I got sick, and thought that that was the famed apricot sickness. At the age of 8 or 9 the most impressive thing for me was that Ted Gascoigne drove a Willys Jeep station wagon, the first station wagon I had ever seen. It looked something like this:

Willys Jeep station wagon similar to the one owned by Uncle Ted

continued at Visiting more friends and family in and around Cape Town

Meeting Vause cousins at Robertson

Continued from Kamieskroon to Robertson

Sunday 23 August 2015

We attended the Divine Liturgy (in Afrikaans) at Bedehuis Bethanië, and said goodbye to Fr Zacharias van Wyk and Macrina Walker.

After Divine Liturgy at Bedehuis Bethanië — the Last Homely House

Then we drove in to Robertson, 6 km away, to have lunch with Sandy Struckmeyer and her parents. Wyatt and Evelyn Vause, and her daughter Kerry, and Ludwig.

Vause cousins at lunch, Robertson 23 Aug 2015: Eunice Vause, Val Hayes, Wyatt Vause, Steve Hayes, Sandy & Kerry Struckmeyer

We had lunch in the yard, where the weather was a bit warmer than earlier in the day. Sandy is my third cousin, and our common ancestors were our great great grandparents were Richard Vause of Hull (1822-1876) and Matilda Park of Bath (1828-1881). The Vause family came from the Isle of Axholme in north-west Lincolnshire, while Matilda Park’s family was originally from Northern Ireland. How they met and married in Bath is something of a mystery, and within a couple of weeks of their marriage in 1852 they were on their way to Natal on The Lady of the Lake.

Vause cousins Val & Steve Hayes, Sandra & Kerry Struckmeyer, Eunice & Wyatt Vause

They went to Tugela Drift, where they opened a store in partnership with J.R.M. Watson, and Richard Vause named the place Colenso after the controversial Anglican Bishop of Natal. The business failed, and Watson moved to Ladysmith, and the Vause family moved to Pietermaritzburg, and later to Durban, where Richard Vause founded the Natal Mercury newspaper in partnership with John Robinson, and was later mayor of Durban. The Watson family touched ours again later, when Frederick William Beningfield (Val’s 1st cousin 4 times removed) eloped to the Free State with J.R.M. Watson’s daughter Theresa, while another skelm relative, Alfred Dawson Francis, alias Alfred Francis Dawson, eloped with, or had an affair with Watson’s wife.

Wyatt Vause

Richard Vause and Matilda Park had several children, and I am descended from their son Richard Wyatt Vause (also known as Wyatt Vause) while Wyatt Vause of Robertson is descended from their son Robert Vause, who was a farmer at Ixopo in the Natal Midlands.

Wyatt had five vintage cars, including a 1947 Studebaker, which I had known in my youth as the “back to front car” because you couldn’t tell whether they were coming or going. He had a Renault, which had belonged to a man who had been murdered on a farm in the district, and said he had been a Spitfire pilot during
WWII, based in Malta, and had survived all that, only to be murdered at home. He also had a Morris 1100, and I remembered when they had been one of the latest things in 1963, but they are now more than 50 years old. Wyatt told me a bit about the family too.

He said two of his elder brothers, Michael and Brian, had died, and that his eldest brother Trevor was now 90 years old. Michael had died of cancer after his son Philip had been killed in a car crash about 20 years ago. He showed us a couple of family photos inside the house, ane of which showed his uncle Frederick, who had died falling off a wagon at the age of about 3 or so.

Approaching Du Toit’s Kloof Pass

We left Robertson about 3 pm, and drove to Cape Town over the Du Toit’s Kloof Pass, which gives good views over the Paarl Valley. We booked in at the Sun 1 Hotel on the Foreshore, which is convenient for access to the archives, where we were planning to spend much of the coming week doing family history research.

Paarl valley from Du Toit’s Kloof Pass

continued at In and around Cape Town

 

Namaqualand Spring: Lily Fountain and flowers

Continued from Namaqualand Spring 1

Friday 21 August 2015

We woke up in our cottage at Kamiesfroon in Namaqualand, and set off up the pass to Lily Fountain Methodist Mission at Leliefontein, which played a significant part in the Morris and Stewardson family histories. James Morris visited it a few times in the early 1840s when he accompanied Methodist missionaries across the Orange River to Namaland, where they had established a mission station called Nisbet’s Bath at Warmbad. One could see why they spoke of going “up” to Lily Fountain as we climbed up the pass over the Kamiesberg, but like most things in Namaqualand it didn’t look at all like what I had imagined. I pictured it like one of the places in southern Namibia, dry and dusty, but it wasn’t like that at all.

The road up the Kamiesberg to Leliefontein

At the top of the pass we passed through fynbos and wetlands The church, which I think was the oldest Methodist Church in Namaqualand, was smaller than I had pictured it, and it was locked and there didn’t seem to be anyone around, so we took photos of it, and the village, and left.

Methodist Church at Leliefontein

James Morris was staying here early in 1843, and on 7 March 1843 wrote in his diary “A messenger arrived from the Baths with letter from Mr Cook and Mr Tindall with intelligence of Mr Cook’s dangerous state of health and his interntion, if possible, to get to Cape Town as quick as possible, and, as though Providence had been preparing Mr. Jackson’s health for a journey, he had been improving in health ever since my arrival at Khamiesberg, although still weak, the same evening he made preparations for the journey, with horses, to the Great River, and I offered myself to accompany him on my horse.”

Leliefontein church and village

Edward Cook was the Methodist missionary at Warmbad in Namaland (now part of Namibia), and died on the banks of the Orange River before reaching Cape Town. James Morris accompanied his widow and children back to Leliefontein. The Morris and Dixon families spend several days at Leliefontein in December 1843, on their way up to Damaraland to start a trading venture, supplying meat to the British garrison at St Helena. They were later joined at Walvis Bay by James Morris’s sister Frances (Val’s great great great grandmother) and her husband Frank Stewardson.

Leliefontein village

We drove over more high plateaus, with wetlands, then down a steep bit, to a cultivated farm, and then turned west to Studer’s pass, which went down quite steeply in a couple of stages. There were few flowers this side of the mountains, and people  had told us it was too early, and most of the flowers now were on the coastal side of the N7 though at the bottom of the valley as we approached Garies, we saw some vygies opening.

Vygies (mesembryanthemums) flowering on the road between the foot of Studer’s Pass and Garies.

We reached Garies about 12:00, and I looked for an ATM to buy airtime for my Samsung cell phone, but the only ones in town seemed to be FNB, and they did not seem to offer air time, but I bought some at a shop. They also had Flanagans chips, which we had not seen for a long time, so we bought some. At one time they were popular and almust ubiquitous, the then the Lays brand seemed to become more popular, though they didn’t and don’t taste as good.

Garies in the Northern Cape. Since the N7 now bypasses the town, children walk home from school in the middle of the road, though in my day we finished school at 3 pm, not noon.

We then drove back to Kamieskroon on the N7 and passed straight through and made for Skilpad, another place where the flowers were said to be good.

Kamieskroon seen from the road to Skilpad

Skilpad was in the Namaqualand national park, so we had to pay to enter, and the flowers were indeed very good, mostly the orange Namaqualand daisies, and masses of them looking
almost fluorescent again.

Namaqualand daisies at Skilpad, looking almost fluorescent in the sun

There were a few white ones, but a different kind from those we had seen yesterday near Soebatsfontein
— these had smaller petals. There were also yellow flowers, but as they grew closer to the ground they were eclipsed by the orange daisies in the massed displays.

More daisies at Skilpad, Namaqualand

There were lots of 4×4 SUVs going round the park, and we were virtually the only saloon car there.
Did people think it was necessary to drive a 4×4 to look at flowers? Our little Toyota Yaris was dwarfed by these monsters.

More daisies at Skilpad

There was a circular drive with a sitplekkie at the topwhere we ate our lunch of tomato sandwiches, and there was a little bird with a striped face hopping around hoping for crumbs.

Yet more daisies at Skilpad

There was a good view over the surrounding countryside, with its orange patches of flowers surrounded by dark green bush. We then drove slowly down again, reaching Kamieskroon at 4:00 pm.

Cosy Cottage, where we spent three nights in Kamieskroon in the Northern Cape

I had a shower while Val watched tennis and cricket on TV, having been deprived of it since we were forced to downgrade our subscription to DSTV.

Continued at Kamieskroon to Robertson.

 

 

Cape Holiday 2015: a lonely Falkenberg grave

We left for our holiday in the Cape, and intended to travel down the N14 to Springbok, along almost its whole length, but a couple of months ago we had had a phone call from Ikey van Wyk, who said he had discovered the grave of Sarah Whitaker Falkenberg on his farm. We stopped for breakfast at a Wimpy in Ventersdorp, and then drove down to Klerksdorp to join the N12. The road was quite fascinating, as there were lots of unusual trees. They looked like gum trees, but of a kind we had not seen before, with small shoots sticking out in clumps at odd angles.

Tree we saw between Ventersdorp & Klerksdorp

After Klerksdorp the country was completely different, mostly bushveld, the only variety being smaller and larger trees. This was Falkenberg country, at least the branch of the Falkenberg family that we were following up at this stage of our trip. The “stamvader” of the South African Falkenbergs was Christian Falkenberg, who came from Brandenberg in Prussia in 1858 with his wife Dorothea (born Lüthow) and son Friedrich, then aged about 3. Dorothea died in Stutterheim about a year after their arrival.

Bloemhof

A few years later Christian Falkenberg, who was a shopkeeper at Tylden in the Eastern Cape, married Jessie Schultz, Val’s great great grandmother. Young Friedrich would then have been about 10, and he seems to have left home as a teenager and gone to try his luck on the diamond fields. He married twice — to Dorothea Louisa Ferreira and Sarah Whitaker Holt, and the family’s marriages took place in the towns we passed through down the N12 — Bloemhof and Christiana, where Friedrich was a diamond digger in the alluvial diggings in those places.

Christiana — one of a string of diamond-digging towns along the Vaal River

We passed through Jan Kempdorp, and saw the Vaal-Harts Irrigation Scheme, with notices advertising its 75th anniversary. It was one of the things we remembered learning about in school geography lessons. We found Matopi Farm, about 20 km our of Jan Kempdorp on the way to Delport’s Hoop, and Ikey van Wyk kindly took us to see the grave. It was a single grave on the farm, surrounded by an iron railing, and the gravestone was in good condition and quite legible.

Ikey van Wyk showing us the grave of Sarah Whitaker Falkenberg on Matopi Farm, near Jan Kempdorp

It seemed that Sarah Falkenberg had had another child we did not know about, who died in infancy.

Grave of Sarah Whitaker Falkenberg and her infant daughter

I tried to take a photo of the grave on my cell phone for Billion Graves, and, as usual, the program crashed. I put my phone back in my pocket, or so I thought, and took some photos with a camera, and we went on our way, back to the N14, and on to Kuruman. But when we got there, my phone was gone. I asked Ikey if I had dropped it in his bakkie when he took us to the grave, but apparently not, so I must have dropped it by the grave somewhere. R300.00 reward for its safe return!

At Kuruman we stayed at the Azalea Guest House, and went out for supper. The only place open seemed to be the Spur, and it so happened that they were offering two hamburgers for the price of one that night, and since we had ordered two Appletizers, they gave us a free glass.

Azalea Guest House, Kuruman

The story of our holiday travels is continued at Ironveld and Aughrabies, for those who may be interested.