Michell family of Cornwall

We haven’t made any startling family history discoveries for a while, and recently I’ve been working on the Michell family of Cornwall. My great great great grandmother Mary Michell (1791-1873) married Richard Greenaway at Blisland, Cornwall in 1812, and they had nine children.

Mary Michell herself was the daughter of Benjamin Michell (1767-1848) and Elizabeth Lego (1762-1837) — I wonder if there is a rich relative somewhere who made a fortune out of children’s toys! I’ve been following up some of Mary’s siblings, and quite a number of their descendants seem to have emigrate to Ontario in Canada and then skipped over the border to Michigan in the USA. Several branches of the family seem to have changed the spelling of the surname to Mitchell, and even those who didn’t often had it recorded with that spelling by census takers and the like, so Michell was probably pronounced the same as Mitchell, with the emphasis on the first syllable.

So quite a number of Michell descendants ended up in Osceola County, Michigan.

Osceola County, Michigan, was originally called Unwattin, and is shown as such on this 1842 map.
By Henry Schenck Tanner – File:1842 A new map of Michigan with its canals roads distances by H.S. Tanner

The US and Canadian branches of the Michell family lived about 320 miles apart, though both were quite a lot further from Cornwall.

Shirt-tail cousins and El Paso, Illinois

About 40 years ago I made contact with a Growden cousin in New Orleans, USA, who was also interested in family history, and we corresponded  fairly regularly until she died in 1993. She wrote to people with the Growden or Growdon surname all over the world, and one of them was my uncle Stanley Growdon, who told me about her.

Louise Deragowski with her great grand-niece Kristin Marie Siegrist (now Kristin Hammock) , Christmas 1981.

She was Monica Louise Deragowski, born Growden, and eventually, after some research, we found out that we were 4th cousins, and though she died more than 20 years ago, I’m still in touch with some of her nephews and nieces in Louisiana and Texas (she had no children of her own).

In our correspondence she sometimes used expressions that were unfamiliar to me. One that she repeated several times, that she had heard from someone else, was that in their native Cornwall the Growden families “lived so close that they traded roosters”. I should have asked my mother about that — she was a Growdon, and had at one time kept a poultry farm, and even went on a poultry management course at Potchefstroom University. But I forgot to ask her, and now it’s too late.

One of the other expressions Louise Deragowski used was “shirt-tail cousin”. In one of her letters she mentioned speaking to such a cousin. I’d only just made contact with her, and was a bit too shy to ask. But I’ve wondered on and off what it meant, and whether I have any cousins that I could speak of as “shirt-0tail cousins”

At one point an English usage forum in the Internet was discussing cousins, and I thought that might be the place to ask, so I did. One of the American participants said he had no knowledge of the term and said it must be South African. I said Louise Deragowski lived in New Orleans and was from El Paso, Illinois, and had never been to South Africa in her life. I thought that someone from those two dialect areas might be able to explain the expression. But the same participant then accused me of inventing a place with a Spanish name in Illinois, so I’ve given up that as a source for learning anything about English usage. Like many other Internet forums, it seems to be increasingly populated with people spoiling for a fight, and I’m not really any the wiser about the meaning of “shirt-tail cousi9n”.

But that has now set me off wondering a bit about El Paso, Illinois.

Louise Deragowski was born there, and it was her mother’s side of the family who lived there. Her mother, Izetta Louise Porter, was born there in 1890, and she somehow met Arthur Franklin (Frank) Growden, who was born in Franklin Country, Tennessee, in 1887. So perhaps Tennessee is another place one can look to for the origin and meaning of “shirt-tail cousin”. I also wonder whether he was named after the place he was born in. But I doubt that that had much influence on Louise Deragowski’s family, as her father and mother did not get along, and he left them during the First World War, so she never knew him when growing up, and only made contact with him again as an adult. After Frank and Izetta split up he married Flora Myers Butler and went back to Tennessee.

And then at some point Izetta Louise Growden and her children moved from El Paso, Illinois to New Orleans, Louisiana (why?), where most of that branch of the family still live, except for some who moved to Texas after hurricane Katrina (I think).

Louise Deragowski’s grandfather, Arthur Matthew Growden, was born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1861. He went to America to study at the Sewanee Institute in Tennessee. Afterwards became a travelling preacher and evangelist. He went to be a missionary in Papua and Samoa in about 1910, and returned to Tennessee for the last year of his life. His grandson Jim Growden (Louise Deragowski’s half brother) is a Baptist minister in Tennessee.

Anyway, Louise Deragowski, though she had no children herself, was one who, through her interest in family history, drew and held together several of the far-flung branches of the Growden family. The family scattered from Cornwall, and she linked cousins (with or without shirt-tails) from Alaska to New Zealand, from Australia to South Africa. And having a photo of her taken on Christmas day, I thought Christmas day was a good time to post it.

 

Yooper Greenaways

According to Lois Haglund (my step third cousin-in-law once removed — see her blog here) people who live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the USA are called Yoopers. I’ve just discovered some Greenaway relations who were Yoopers, at least for a while.

My great grandmother was Elizabeth Greenaway who married William Mathew Growdon, and they came to the Cape Colony in the 1870s, where he was a platelayer on the Cape Government Railways. That was just after the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley, and there was a rush to build a railway line from every port to the interior.

Elizabeth Greenaway had an uncle, Thomas Greenaway. who emigrated about the same time to the USA, to Quincy, Houghton County, Michigan. There’s another Quincy in Michigan, so the county name is important, and if you Google for Quincy, Michigan, it will show you the wrong one, in Branch County, right at the other end of the state. In fact it seems that almost every one of the United States has a Quincy, and Michigan has two.

Quincy Mine

What seems to have drawn the Greenaway family to Michigan was the Quincy copper mine.

Thomas Greenaway was born in 1829 in St Breward, Cornwall, where he became a quarry labourer. He married Margaretta Bone in 1851, and, according to the 1900 US Cenus, they had 9 children, of whom only 2 were still alive in 1900. We only have a record of the names of 5 of the children, and one of those died young.

In the 1860s the family moved to Gwennap, Cornwall, where Thomas worked as a tin miner, and in the early 1870s the family emigrated to the USA, and he was a miner at Quincy in the 1880 US Census. In 1880 their daughter Mary (a widow at age 19) was living with them, as was their daughter Maggie (10). Also living in Quincy was their son Richard John Greenaway, who had just married Polly Kinsman, and they were staying with her parents. They were also miners.

It is said that Gwennap produced more emigrants than any other town in Cornwall, and so it is possible that several people emigrated together to Quincy.

The Greenaways did not stay Yoopers for long, however, because by the 1900 census they were in Braceville, Illinois, a coal mining town. Thomas had retired by then, as he is shown on the census with no occupation. His son Richard John was also there, still a miner, with his wife and two adopted daughters.

Unfortunately the 1890 US Census didn’t survive, so we have not been able to see what happened in between. In 1900 their daughter Mary would have been 39; did she marry again? The youngest daughter, Maggie (Elizabeth Margaret) would have been 30 — did she marry and have children? We haven’t been able to find out.

The move to Braceville was perhaps not a wise one, as we can discover from this site.

Braceville thrived until the summer of 1910 when the miners of the Braceville Coal Company went on strike. Fed up with the whole affair, the coal company simply closed and within just a few months the town was all but abandoned leaving behind an opera house, a large frame school and many empty businesses. Of these today, there is no sign other than a few slag heaps along the old highway.

Did the Greenaways stay, or did they move on again? Did they leave any descendants in any of the places where they lived, so that there might be cousins living there today? We don’t know.

 

Stewardson family breakthrough

In the forty years we have been researching our family history, the Stewardson side of the family has been one of the longest-standing “brick walls”, as family historians like to say, referring to the inability to get further back than a particular ancestor. In the case of the Stewardsons, the brick wall is more like a dam wall, because once it has broken, down comes the flood.

We discovered quite early on that Val’s great great grandmother was Kate Stewardson, who was born at Rooibank near Walvis Bay (now part of Namibia) in about 1847-48. Her parents were mentioned in several books, but for 30 years we were unable to discover their first names. The author of one book even made up names for them, Ian and Norah, which somehow carlessly slipped into some historical records published by the Namibian Archives. Eventually, after 30 years, we found, in a Methodist baptism record in Cape Town, that they were Francis and Frances, or Frank and Fanny, and also that Frances’s maiden name was Morris. We have described the story of that search more fully here.

Thanks largely to FamilySearch, the online genealogical research tool of the Mormon Church, we were able to learn more about the origins of the Morris family. FamilySearch have placed online indexes, and sometimes original copies of the registers kept by other denominations, and by this means we were able to trace the Morris family back to the village of Donisthorpe, on the border of Leicestershire and Derbyshire in England.

Donisthorpe village, home of the Morris family, on the border of Leicestershire and Derbyshire in England

At the time there was no church in Donisthorpe, so the Morris children were baptised in the nearby village of Over Seal in Leicestershire.

Family tradition, which was also found in published sources, was that the Stewardsons originally came from Scotland, and we had assumed that Frank Stewardson had come to the Cape Colony and met Frances Morris there, and married her before moving on to Damaraland. But no amount of searching Cape marriage records, in the originals in the Cape Archives, on microfilm in the LDS (Mormon) family history centre in Johannesburg, or later online when some of the records became available on the web, revealed this marriage.

Another useful online resource that became available was FreeBMD, which is the birth, marriage and death record indexes for England and Wales. The handwritten, typewritten and printed indexes have been transcribed by volunteers, and are almost complete for the 19th century. And there we eventually found the marriage record of Francis Stewardson and Frances Morris. We received the marriage certificate on 2 May 2015, and that broke the dam wall.

They were married in Donisthorpe on 8 Oct 1838, and the entry was No 1, so theirs was the first marriage after civil registration of births, marriages and deaths began in England in 1837. His father was Samuel Stewardson, and his occupation was listed as Servant. Her father was Thomas Morris, and his occupation was listed as Butcher. The residence of both parties was given as Donisthorpe. The witnesses were Thomas Proudman and Elizabeth Morris.

View over the Amber Vaslley from Coxbench, where members of the Stewardson family lived in the 18th century.

Thanks to the availability of online records, mainly through FamilySearch, we were able to follow up the father’s name, and it appears that the Stewardson family went back a few generations in Derbyshire, mainly in the village of Coxbench, in an area called Amber Valley.

Not only was Frank Stewardson’s father named Samuel, but so were his grandfather and great grandfather. He also had a brother Samuel and a couple of cousins named Samuel as well. Unlike the Morris family, where several members came to the Cape Colony, Frank seems to have been the only Stewardson to have done so.

One family tradition/rumour/legend did prove almost true,  however. About 30 years ago a cousin, Bernard Lindholm Carlsson, said that his brother, Ernest Gay Carlsson, had done some research into the family history and maintained that the correct spelling of the name was Stuartson. Some of the entries in the parish registers at Horsley (near Coxbench) spell the name as Stuardson, but that appears to be the idiosyncrasy of a particular clergyman, and  in all other cases the Stewardson spelling was used. We were never able to make contact with Ernest Gay Carlsson to see what he had discovered, though we tried several times to do so.

Anyway, after 40 years the Stewardson drought has truly broken, and we are now busy trying to sort out all the Stewardson relations and seeing where they fit into the family tree. And, thanks to the availability of online records, one discovery leads to another, and what would have taken three years to discover 30 years ago takes about three days now.

 

Proposed trip to Western Cape: August 2015

In August 2015 we are hoping to visit the Western Cape to do some family history research, and also to see living relatives and friends.

Since we are now both retired, it will probably be the last chance we will ever have to go on such a holiday trip, and to visit the Cape Archives for research.

If you would like to see us when we visit the Western Cape in August/September, please fill in the form below with your contact information.

We are hoping, in particular, to find out more about the Morris, Stewardson and Dixon families, and ones related to them. Members of all these families were traders in what is now Namibia from 1840 onwards, They would trade manufactured goods (cloth, knives, axes & guns) for cattle, ostrich feathers and ivory. They would drive the cattle overland to Cape Town for market, replenish their stock-in-trade, and return by sea to Walvis Bay.

So we hope to travel down the N14 to the Northern Cape, with stops at Kuruman and Aughrabies Falls. The N14 joins the N7 at Springbok, and we hope to spend a few days at Kamieskroon, exploring that area, which the old-timers passed through on their way between Damaraland and Cape Town. One of the places that has been mentioned in their journeys is Leliefontein, the Methodist mission station, and one member of the Morris clan, Thomas Morris, is said to have lived there at one time.

Greyton, Western Cape. May 2011

Another Morris, Abraham, also lived in the area when he was on the run from the Germans. He was one of the leaders of a rebellion against German rule in South West Africa in 1904. Sorting out the relationships between the various members of the Morris family is difficult, and a lot depends on compiling a chronology to show which members of the family were in which places at what times.

The area, called Namaqualand, is also famous for its wild flowers in spring, so we are hoping to see some of them too.

The families that livedf in or passed through Namaqualand are not the only ones we are interested in, of course. We’ll be looking up others — Green, Tapscott, Decker, Falkenberg, Crighton, MacLeod/McLeod, Growdon and many others in the archives as well, and, we hope, in real life too.

Devil’s Peak, Cape Town, 2011

When in Cape Town we usually stay at the Formula I Hotel (called something else now). It’s reasonably cheap, and very conveniently placed for going to the archives. The problem is, it’s very inconvenient for just about everything else — it’s in a semi-industrial area, so there is nothing to do there in the evenings, and nowhere in the vicinity where one can even get something to eat. But we hope that after the archives close at 4:00 pm we can visit family and friends, so if you know us, and wouldn’t be averse to a visit, please contact us and let us know (see form below).

While in the Western Cape, or possibly on the way home, we hope to pay another visit to the Orthodox Centre at Robertson, and perhaps also to the Volmoed Community at Hermanus, to meet John de Gruchy and put the finishing touches to our book on the history of the Charismatic Renewal in South Africa, which we hope to have ready for publication by the end of the year.

We are planning to return via the Eastern Cape and Free State, though with less definite ideas about the route. Quite a lot will depend on what we find in Cape Town, and whether we need to look at the Methodist Church archives in Grahamstown.

I’ve been twice up the N7 from Cape Town to Windhoek, in 1971 and 1972, but on both occasions I passed through Namaqualand in the dark, so neither of us has ever actually seen it before.

If you would like to meet us when we travel to the Western Cape in late August/early September, please use the contact form below so we can get in touch to let you know when we will be around and arrange to meet. Please note that whatever you type in this form will be seen only by me — it is not public! It will help us to see who we should try to get in touch with on our travels.

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Three Agnes Ellwoods: Tombstone Tuesday

About four years ago someone sent us a descendant chart showing the descendants of Edmund Ellwood (1700-1789) and his wife Elizabeth Robinson (1700-?) of Dufton, Westmorland, England. It actually went back a few generations to an earlier Edmund, but the main descendants shown were those of Edmund and Elizabeth. It is mainly a list of names, with a few dates, but no places indicated.

Unfortunately we don’t seem to have kept a record of who sent it to us, but we were told that it originated with a Peter Ellwood, whom we haven’t managed to make contact with.

Since retiring last March, Val has been working her way through it, trying to flesh out the outline with dates, names and places, and trying to prove the various links. In the course of doing this she has discovered several errors and omissions in the list, and also several errors and omissions in various online family trees.

She has mainly been working on the descendants of Edmund and Elizabeth’s eldest son Samuel Ellwood (1726-1796), who married Hannah Barrow at Cartmel in Lancashire in 1752. Samuel was a shoemaker, as were some of his descendants. Samuel & Hannah’s eldest son John seems to have gone back to Wesmorland for a wife, and married Jane Coulthred at Underbarrow in Westmorland, and they then had four children at Cartmell in Lancashire, but we have only been able to trace the descendants of one of them, Timothy Ellwood (1769-1867), who married Mary Withers in 1801. We are not absolutely sure of these links, but on a balance of probabilities they seem to be correct. If anyone has any better information about any of them, please let us know.

Timothy and Mary had 12 children, and it is mainly their descendants that we have been trying to follow.

The two eldest sons, John and Thomas, each had a daughter Agnes Ellwood, and each Agnes married in the 1850s, and emigrated to the USA soon afterwards.

Gravestone of John Turner and Agnes Ellwood in Towanda, Kansas, USA

We’ve been able to find out what happened to these descendants mainly through the very useful Find-a-Grave web site. Agnes Ellwood (1831-1908), daughter of Thomas Ellwood and Elizabeth Taylor, married John Turner in 1852, and emigrated to the USA in about 1857, living first in Illonois, and then in Towanda, Kansas. You can find their details on the Find-a-Grave site here. They seem to have several children, some of whom are also buried in the same cemetery, and they can also be found on the Find-a-Grave site.

Agnes Turner had a cousin, 15 months younger, Agnes Ellwood (1833-1896), the daughter of John Ellwood and Agnes Harrison, who married John Jackson Tallon in 1855, and almost immediately afterwards emigrated to Illinois in the USA. Unlike the Turner family, the Tallons seem to have stayed in Illinois a while longer, at least long enough for Agnes to be buried there. And again, Find-a-Grave comes up with the most useful information.

It was at this point that we discovered a lot of online family trees for Agnes Ellwood Tallon, on the soon-to-be-closed Mundia site (no links, as they won’t work after September). And every one that we looked at linked to the wrong Agnes!

They all linked to a third, unrelated Agnes, the daughter of John Ellwood and Mary Shepherd, who was born about 1835 in Oddendale, Westmorland, England. The “real” Agnes Ellwood married John Tallon in 1855, and was living in Illinois in 1860. In the 1861 English census the “false” Agnes Ellwood was still unmarried, still living with her parents, working as a dairymaid. In 1868 she married James Coulthwaite in Casterton, Westmorland, and they had a son John Henry Coulthwaite, who had a large family, and his mother Agnes was still living with them on the farm in Westmorland in 1911.

The Ellwood family seems to be a good one for showing the danger of online family trees, and of copying them without checking. We gave another example of this in our blog post on Jane Ellwood and the perils of online family trees.

Gravestone of Agnes Ellwood who married John Jackson Tallon. Hieronymus Cemetery, Armington, Illinois, USA

But the truth about the “real” Agnes Ellwood who married John Jackson Tallon was there on her gravestone all along. She was born in 1833, not 1835, and so is much more likely to be the Agnes Ellwood, daughter of John Ellwood and Agnes Harrison, who was baptised in Colton, Lancashire on 10 February 1833 than she is to be the Agnes Ellwood who was born in Oddendale and baptised on 14 June 1835 in Crosby Ravensworth, Westmorland, daughter of John Ellwood and Mary Shepherd.

We have gathered quite a lot of information on this branch of the Ellwood family, and would gladly share it with other researchers, as a lot of other researchers have helped us. If you would like to have more information please ask, letting us know how you are linked to this family. Unfortunately, while there are many helpful family historians out there who are willing to exchange information, there are also a few “data leeches” who take whatever they can get and give nothing, so we will only give full information to those who can demonstrate their own link to the family. You can ask either in the comments, or on the Ellwood family forum here, or by using the form below:

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We’ve been busy

We haven’t reported much here for a while, but it’s not for lack of research. We’ve actually been busier on family history research in the last couple of months than we have for a long time.

Val has been going through a family tree on the Ellwood family that someone sent us a while back, trying to verify and extend the descendant lines, mainly from Samuel Ellwood, son of Edmund Ellwood and Elizabeth Robinson of Westmorland, England. Samuels descendants seemed to live mainly in the Cartmel area of Lancashire, and spread out from there.

I’ve been chasing up some loose ends on the Cottam and Bagot families of Lancashire and will write more when I’ve checked some of the them.

Ancestors of Marie Payard

For some years now we have been uncertain about the ancestors of Marie Payard (b. 1785 in Briest, Brandenburg, Prussia). Her parents are given as Isaac Payard and Elisabeth Bettac, but the problem is that there were two Isaac Payards and two Elisabeth Bettacs. See our earlier post on the Payard-Bettac marriage.

Now we have come across a web site that indicates a more likely set of ancestors, and shows the older, rather than the younger Isaac Payard and Elisabeth Bettac as the parents of Marie Payard. This means that we would lose the Berthe, Devantier and Gombert ancestors that we thought were in the family tree.

The Ückermark Huguenot familties were so intertwined that it would probably turn out that many of the Devantier descendants are still related, but the relationships would have to be recalculated. The older Elisabeth Bettac was an aunt of the younger one, and the older Isaac Payard a cousin of the younger one, so they have many of the same ancestors. The younger Elisabeth’s grandparents were Jean Micheè Berthe (1695-1748) and Judith Devantier (1701-1748) while the older one’s parents were Jacob (or Jacques) Bettac (1710-1779) and Elisabeth Veillard (1716-1793). If anyone reading this has any of these in their family tree, please get in touch with us.

 

 

 

Anglo-Boer War photos

For as long as I can remember we have had a couple of photo albums that belonged to my grandfather, Percy Wynn Hayes (1874-1948). As they are now more than 100 years old, the photos are beginning to fade, and the albums’ bindings are beginning to disintegrate.

So the time has come to make digital scans of them, before they fade any more. The problem is that a series of images on a hard disk don’t tell you very much, and so I’ve been putting it off.

But now I have begun using the Evernote notetaking program, and it seems to be the ideal tool for this kind of thing.

I scan the photos in tiff format with the program that came with our printer/scanner, and then edit them with Irfanview to try to compensate for some of the fading. I then make a smaller, compressed jpeg copy (keeping the tiff one for archival purposes).

I press Ctrl-C on the jpeg version in Irfanview, to copy the image, and Ctrl-V in a new note in Evernote, and the picture is there. I give it a title, and some tags so that I can find it again. Then I type underneath the picture anything that my grandfather wrote in the album. He often didn’t.

Here’s one of the pictures:

He didn’t write anything under that picture, so I’ve just given it the title “Five mounted soldiers”. But at least it is preserved, and can’t fade any more. And even the reduced jpeg copies, copied into Evernote, are bigger than the pictures in the original album.

So I’m quite chuffed with Evernote. It can do lots of different things, but one of the things it excels at is compiling a digital photo album.

If you’d like to see how Evernote prints a report (ie an album) of the first few pictures I added, click here to see the Evernote.pdf file it produced. You just select the “notes” you want included, and then print the album, which you can then send to other family members, etc. That way everyone can share grandpa’s photo album.

When I’ve finished scanning them, I might donate the originals to a museum somewhere. My mother sometimes threatened to do that, but I’m glad she didn’t, because back then we didn’t have the technology to make decent copies that we could keep.

Elusive Namibian families

Yesterday (10 May 2013) we spent most of the day in the Windhoek Archives, looking for elusive family connections, most of which we failed to find.

Namibian National Library and Archives, Windhoek

Frank Stewardson and his wife Frances Morris went to Walvis Bay in the 1840s, and had four daughters and three sons. The sons, William, Charles and James, disappear from history without a trace. We have no idea whether they married or had children, or when and where they died.

The daughters, however, married and left numerous progeny, and several families in Namibia are descended from them.

1. Elizabeth Stewardson married Oskar Lindholm, and there are several descendants in Namibia
2. Catherine (Kate) Stewardson married (1) Fred Green and (2) George Robb, and there are descendants in South Africa, Canada, Britian and New Zealand, though none (that we know of) in Namibia.
3. Frances (Fanny) Stewardson married Axel Wilhelm Eriksson and had four children, whose descendants live mainly in Sweden, Denmark and the UK. She also had a daughter, Emily Jacoba Stewardson,  from an adulterous affair with Clement Stephen Stonier. Emily married Jacob Dennewill, and several of their descendants live in Namibia.
4. Charlotte Caroline Stewardson married John William Gunning of Walvis Bay, and had several children. Some of their descendants are in South Africa, but two of their daughters,  Charlotte Annie and Catherine Elizabeth, are said to have married Dixons, and those are the ones we were particularly looking for. For more on this see our post on Gunning for the Dixons.

We found out quite a bit about the Dixon family, but not the bits we were most keen to find.

Werner Hillebrecht, the archivist, was very helpful, and suggested several published sources that might be able to help — some journals of Swedes in Namibia, including Axel Wilhelm Eriksson, have been translated and published in English.

He also asked about my diary from the time I lived in Namibia (1969-1972). I had sent part of it to the Archives 20 years ago, and he said that there was very little material from that period. I had asked them to let me know if anyone wanted to consult it for research (so far no one has), and he wanted to know if I still wanted that condition attached to it. I said yes, while I’m still alive, because then anyone who consults it can contact me to ask questions about anything that is unclear, or on which they wanted more information.

We did manage to find out quite a bit more about the Dixon family. Daniel Esma Dixon was born in the Cape, though his father Peter Dixon also lived in Namibia for a while. Daniel married Maria Cluitt, who was born in  Pietermaritzburg, and they had thirteen children.

The family lived on the farm Ubib, in the Karibib district, and Daniel Esma Dixon left the farm to his four (or six) sons, on condition that they did not sell it, but kept it for their descendants. Only the two eldest sons were of an age to have married the Gunning girls, but we found no mention of their spouses anywhere. The eldest, also named Daniel Esma Dixon, was said to have gone to Angola, where he died or disappeared. The second son was James Thomas Harwood Dixon, but there was no mention of his spouse.

We found out a bit more about the Dennewill descendants, however.

Jacob Dennewill was an Alsatian from Dosenheim, and he and Emily Jacoba Stewardson had ten children. They farmed at Ongariwanda in the Omaruru District, and several members of the family are buried in the cemetery there.

We were able to add to our knowledge of this branch of the family from an interesting source — alien registration cards.

Relationships are not mentioned on the cards, but it appeared that this one referred to Wolfgang’s mother:

At first we wonderdd whether there might be two different Dennewill families, but there was more information on the back of the cards, which said that they went to the farm Ongariwanda, where Wolfgang was accompanied by and staying with his parents, and Charlotte’s husband was Wilhelm. But there was no card for Wilhelm. But Jacob and Emily had a son Wilhelm Otto Friedrich Dennewill, born in 1914 (the same year as Charlotte) on the farm Ongariwanda, near Omaruru (so he would not have been an alien), so we concluded that he must have gone to Germany before 1914, married Charlotte, stayed there for two world wars, and returned to Namibia in 1950.

Unlike most archival records, the photos on these ones show what the people looked like.

Cell phones are very useful in the archives, both for taking photos like this, and for scanning written documents. We scanned a few documents in old German handwriting which would have taken too long to decipher in our limited time in the archives, but we can take them home and work them out with the aid of a dictionary.

And, according to PAF, Wolfgang DENNEWILL and Valerie Muriel Katharine GREENE-153 are 3rd cousins 1 time removed.  Their common ancestors are Francis STEWARDSON-874 and Frances MORRIS-875.

The story of our Namibian journey continues here.

You can see an index to all these posts of our travelogue of Namibia and Botswana here.