Genealogical Society of South Africa
Durban and Coastal Branch
Volume 24 Issue 4/2008
Message from the Treasurer
Would members kindly
bear in mind that our 2009 subscription is due on 1st January 2009. If you do not intend to renew your
membership please could you let us know as soon as possible.
Membership
fees may be deposited in ANY branch of Nedbank in South Africa * our banking
details are :
Account Name : The Genealogical Society of South Africa
Bank : Nedbank
Account No. : 2144 092 346 (BROADWAY)
NB: Members banking via INTERNET must quote the
Code No. 114405 as well as our account number. Please notify the treasurer of your renewal either by post,
telephone (evenings) or by e-mail.
Should you require any
further details, kindly contact Shirley at : therichardsons@telkomsa.net
****
Family Name Database
Just a reminder that our Family Name database,
together with the names of the researchers, is always on view in our
library. There are a number of members
researching the same family name so please check if you are one of them.
****
Report Back
16
August 08 : “Visit to Ike’s Book Store”
During our visit to Ike’s Bookshop
in August this year, a very popular book store which houses many Afrikaaner and
old classic books, we were introduced to the history of the store by Prof
Vishnu Padayachee, Prof of Economics at the KwaZulu Natal University and owner
of the store. Below is a summary of the
history of Ikes :
“JOSEPH DAVID (IKE) MAYET opened the doors of
“Ike’s Bookshop” in Chapel Street, Durban, on the 8th day of the 8th
month, 1988. In so doing, he became the
first South African “Africana and antiquarian” book-dealer of colour. The new South Africa was yet to be born, but
the struggles that would make it a reality were to be found all around Durban,
as they were in many other parts of South Africa.
He started in Chapel Street
is a small back-alley in Overport, Durban, and at that time, in terms of the
erstwhile Group Areas Act, was an area designated and reserved for South
Africans of Indian origin. Yet, by the
late 1980s, a rich mix of South Africans of all colours and classes lived around
the bookstore. Small, old-world
dukawallah shops, wood-and-iron shacks, new post-modern homes, crumbling
buildings, high-rise apartment block, shebeens and brothels all competed for
space and favour.
At the age of 62, it
was there that Ike set up shop, not more than 100 yards from his two-bedroomed
flat. His life, in many ways,
represents the trials and ironies of Twentieth Century South Africa. His father had inherited what was then a
small fortune – his grandfather, Ahmed “Paraffin” Mayet, accumulated his wealth
from the sale of paraffin fuel to poor, mainly black South Africans – but by
1926, when Ike was born, nothing was left of the “family silver”.
In 1939, Ike contracted
osteomyelitis (a form of polio).
Penicillin was not readily available in South Africa at the time, and he
spent nearly three years at St Aidan’s Hospital. It was there that his love of books and reading developed. In 1941, Indira Gandhi, daughter of
Jawarahal Nehru (India’s first post-independence Prime Minister) and herself a
future Prime Minister of India, stopped in Durban on her way to England. She was taken by some members of the former
Natal Indian Congress to visit St Aidan’s Hospital, where much to her surprise,
she found a youngster reading Homer.
That young man was Ike Mayet.
In 1948 the Nationalist
Party won the general election and began to put in place the strategy of “grand
apartheid”. Ike had a choice to make, one
he made effortlessly in the end. In
appearance, Ike could easily have passed as white. His maternal grandparents, and Irish-Scottish alliance, came from
St. Helena, an island made famous by Napoleon’s incarceration in the 10th
century. Ike’s paternal grandfather,
Ahmed Mayet, was a native of Kathor in the Surat District of western
India. The villages in this district
were the prime source of the flows of Indian trading and merchant families who
came to Natal from about 1872. Ahmed
married Katrinka Barger, one of four wives, who had come to South Africa as a
child with her parents, Lutheran missionary workers of Dutch and German
descent.
Ike and most of his
family could have applied successfully to be classified white – a wise move,
given the privileges this would have bestowed upon them during the era of
apartheid in South Africa. However,
they insisted on retaining their Indian/black identity, and went through the
next 40 years on the “wrong” side of the racial tracks, suffering all the paid
and indignity that apartheid could throw at black people at the time. Despite training generations of younger
white men in the engineering trade that he entered in the mid-1940s, Ike was
never able to make the kind of progress that he should have, and many soared
past him through the occupational hierarchy.
When he finally retired
from formal work in 1981, in part due to the complications caused by his
earlier battle with osteomyelitis, Ike decided to try his hand at
bookbinding. In this venture, he had
the support and encouragement of Durban’s “grand old man” of books – Mr Ernest
Rabjohn of Adam’s Books. In the
mid-1980s, Ike undertook the major task of restoring a vast quantity of rare
books in the Gandhi Library at 140 Queen Street, in the heart of Durban’s
“Indian Quarter”, where Mahatma Gandhi had worked as a lawyer and activist 100
years earlier. There Ike honed his
skills as a binder and rapidly moved from simple binding work to specialist
restoration and preservation of books.
In 2000, when Ike
decided to close the bookstore, two of his friends, Vishnu Padayachee and
Julian May (both professors of Economics), who are devoted to the tradition of
bookselling, felt that it would be a shame for Durban to lose one of its most
treasured booklovers’ outlets. They
purchased the store, and formally re-launched it as “Ike’s Books and
Collectables” at its present location at 48a Florida Road. The new venue was
officially opened on the 18 January 2001 by the acclaimed South African author
Professor J M Coetzee, who in 2003 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
It was Ike’s
indomitable spirit, his steely determination, his principles, his adventurous
nature, his unmatched sense of humour, along with his immense stature as a font
of historical information and urban trivia that formed the establishment and
character of the original Ike’s bookshop.
The bookshop celebrated
its 20th anniversary on 8 August 2008.
Ike Mayet died on 31
January 2002.”
Ike’s Books and Collectables is
open Mon-Fri : 10am -5pm and Sat : 9am-2pm.
****
8
November 08 : “Ghost in your Genes”
Because
of the present hot topic of DNA and genetic research, we decided to have
another showing of the BBC production “Ghost in your Genes” which revolves
around the question of whether experiences that your ancestors had, could be
inherited by you, and could thus have an influence on how you perceive the
world you live in. This is investigated
from a genetic point of view.
Unfortunately the showing
was a late decision so it was not well attended. We will be showing this production again next year for those who
missed it.
****
Bulletin Board
v
Share your precious old
photographs
Share your precious old photographs of old
Durban and South African towns with one and all. Here is a website where members of SA Genealogy forums can share
photographs with each other. It was
created specifically because Yahoo, which host's the forum, has a limitation of
30mb for files and photos and clearly the need has proven to be for more space
than that. See this website for
photographs taken during the Anglo Boer War.
Visit : http://public.fotki.com/SAgenealogie/dorpe-1/durban/
(This site is publicly accessible for viewing by all, however you need a
password if you would like to contribute and add photos of your own. This can be obtained through the website.)
v
Natal Marriage Indexing
Project
You may be interested to know that the Natal
Marriage Indexing Project team have just past 150,000 names transcribed. Well done - this is a tremendous effort!! Thank you!!
There is still time to volunteer your services ! If you are interested please contact Adrian Rowe on roweam@telkomsa.net.
v
“Salt on the Sails” :
(1858-2008) :150 years of “The Royal Natal Yacht Club”
by Dr Sally Frost
For
those sailing enthusiasts who are interested this book tells the story of
Africa’s oldest sports club, its famous people and boats. The Durban Regatta
Club was formed in 1858 just 23 years after the fledgling township of D’Urban
was established. In 1891 the Club was
granted a Royal Charter and became The Royal Yacht Club.
Should
you be interested in purchasing a copy of this edition kindly contact me at kdee@mweb.co.za for further details. The book is now available at a cost of
R495,00. This edition is a 532-page coffee table book with over 1000
illustrations, is hard covered and in full colour.
v
CDbooks-r-us.com :
“Freebies”
Please note a "freebie" section has been created on the cdbooks-r-us.com website. Through the efforts of a number of proofreading-volunteers, the following booklets and pamphlets are now available:
* A Sketch of the OFS (± 1.2mb)
* With Steyn and De Wet, by Philip Pienaar of the Transvaal
Telegraph Service
(± 380kb)
* Private John Jackson's Boer War Diary (± 70kb)
* Johannes Meintjes 1923-1980 (± 4mb)
* Uniondale 1901 - A memento of the Anglo Boer War (± 275kb)
* The Anti-British Crusade (± 97kb)
To download the above, or to simply read what each book/document contains,
please visit the freebies page: http://www.cdbooks-r-us.com/freebies.php
v
Lloyds Register on
Immigration
Did you know that between 1815 and 1929 11.4 million
people left Britain for overseas destinations, part of a European wide
phenomenon. Emigration was related to
the growth of the international economy and emigrants invariably moved to
places where they would expect to find an increase in their incomes. Main destinations for British and Irish
emigrants were America, Canada and later Australia, via the Cape.
Liverpool was the primary port for emigration, some
60% of emigrants set out from there. In
the 100 years, between 1830 and 1930, over a million emigrants passed through
Liverpool to start new lives abroad.
This led to the development of several small Liverpool
shipping firms especially James Baines/Pilkington + Wilson and Gibbs. The Black Ball Line and the White Star Line
were to dominate the Australian sailing route.
v
GSSA Cemetery Project
Here is an update recently received on the GSSA Cemetery Project :
·
At the end of this month Cemetery Project will have over 300,000 names
in their database. What an achievement
!!!
·
The scanning of the Braamfontein information has been completed, as
well as the scanned information for Delmas and Somerset West.
·
Google Earth - Work has started on developing the access page for the
GoogleEarth implementation.
v
Ancestry24
A visit to the www.Ancestry24.co.za
website is a must, especially for those who are researching Cape records. They also list a number of important
accessions in the Natal Archives from which genealogical information can be
obtained, among them :
-
the Robert Noble Acutt Collection,
-
the Kit Bird Collection,
-
original deeds of transfer of land purchased
from Adam Kok by the Boers, Philippolis, 1866-1875,
-
the Henderson Collection,
-
a list of rebels during the Second
Anglo-Boer War,
-
the Murder at Holkrans by A.L. Pretorius,
-
the Robins Collection,
-
information on the Addison Family,
-
the Sir John Akerman Collection,
-
a tentative list of Natal settlers,
1843-1858,
-
the Colenso collection,
-
Military graves in Natal,
-
A collection which contains, among other
things, lists of immigrants who became citizens of the Transvaal Republic
during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902).
Please visit their website for more information.
v
eGGSA Website
Please visit http://www.eggsa.org/transcriptions/transcriptions_e.htm
to view the following transcriptions :
…Cambridge Crematorium, East London, Cremation
Registers 1959-1996 transcribed and indexed (up to 1984 so far) by Brian
Barrett,
…Church Registers of the Cape Town Nederduits
Gereformeerde congregation 1665-1695 transcribed by Richard Ball,
…The Death of Landdrost Anders Stockenström and his
party, as described
in the report from Graaff-Reinet to the Governor at the Cape,
Cape Archives document CO 2580 No. 4,
…Muster rolls of the free settlers at the Cape of Good
Hope :
transcribed by Richard Ball.
****
Diary Dates : 2008
And finally …..
06 December Tour
of the Coedemore Castle, ancestral home of Sir Kenneth Stainbank, followed by
afternoon tea.
A
separate notice has been circulated with further details. Please let one of the committee know of your
attendance so that final arrangements can be made.
“Lost in time - Found in Pietermaritzburg”
By Val Ward
Here is an amazing article which
recently appeared in the Natal Witness dated 6 October 08, written by Val
Ward of Pietermaritzburg, a finalist in the “True Stories of KwaZulu-Natal 2008”
competition.
Val Ward is passionate
about digging up and writing about, the past. She is a trained medical
technologist, archaeological assistant and family historian. For accuracy she has written her own death
notice for the Master of the Supreme Court, only the date and place have to be
filled in !! Thank you Val for letting
us share your story.
“We met in the Natal Museum 30 years ago, never imagining that we were
anything other than colleagues. Iris
was head of the education department and I was a research assistant in the
archaeology department. I remember in my
first week Iris Bornman coming into the workroom and introducing herself. I
appreciated that. We have both retired
in the past 10 years and have kept in touch.
I have been tracing my
family tree extensively since I retired 10 years ago. I also have a 1965 photograph of my chromosome pairs. So I felt it would be interesting to know my
genetic ancestry. Then in October 2007,
I jumped at the opportunity to find out by having my DNA taken. The result was long in coming back and they
eventually came out in March 2008. I
was delighted to learn that I belonged to the Haplagroup U2, and this group was
established about 50 000 years ago in eastern Europe. Brian Sykes in his book The Seven Daughters of Eve suggests this was in today’s Greece, and
he even romanticises that the clan lived in a cave above a gorge near Mount
Parnassus.
Iris was very excited
about this story. She read the
book. She wrote to the lab and asked if
she could have her mtDNA done. Her
sampling equipment arrived by post and I helped her swab the inside of her
cheeks. She deposited the money and
couriered the sample to the lab in Johannesburg. We would wait four months for a result.
Meanwhile, I searched
back in my family genealogy beyond Christina Gertruida Scheepers and her 1820
British settler husband Edward Wainwright.
Over several weeks I paged backwards through several genealogies I found
that my first South African maternal ancestor was Elizabeth Malherbe, daughter
of French settlers Maria Grillion and Gideon Malherbe who had arrived,
independently, in 1655 in the Cape. I
was thrilled, but wondered if eight generations back was not a bit too
close. After all 320 years is only a
fraction of 50 000 years.
Much to our surprise Iris’s
result came back after six weeks. There was great excitement. She was Haplagroup U2e and there were four
South Africans on the database that matched her mtDNA. We compared the variations in our results
and they seemed almost identical. We
wondered why I was only U2 while she was U2e.
We then searched for Iris’s maternal genealogy using De Villiers and
Parna’s Genealogies of Old South African
Families as well as South African Genealogies published by the Genealogical
Institute of South Africa. The first
suggestion that we were related came when we found that we both had the surname
Cordier in our female line. Mine was
Suzanna and Iris’s was Martha Maria.
These Cordiers were sisters and the daughters of Elizabeth Malherbe who
had married Phillipus Cordier. Our
common South African ancestor Elizabeth Malherbe was born in 1697 and died in
1783. We were delighted and terribly
excited.
To make sure that we
were related Iris wrote to the laboratory.
She told the lab that we had compared results and had found a common
maternal great-x-six grandmother Elizabeth Malherbe. Iris asked if I wasn’t
also U2e and perhaps one of the South Africans who completed matched her
maternal DNA. The next day there was a
reply. The lab had looked at my result
and found that I was indeed U2e but this level of analysis had not been
reported to me. The e-mail also
informed us that we were related.
My direct South African
maternal line goes back eight generations.
These women lived in the Cape and the Eastern Cape. My mother came to Durban in 1931 to train as
a nurse and she stayed. Iris’s maternal
line also goes back eight generations and these women lived in the Cape, the
Free State and the Transvaal before setting in Kenya in 1911.
Durban is my birthplace
and although I lived overseas for a few years, I have not lived anywhere in
South Africa other than in KwaZulu-Natal.
Iris was born in Kenya, the daughter of South African settlers. She came to South Africa with her parents in
1962. She lived in Durban from 1962
until she came to Pietermaritzburg in 1973.
I came to Pietermaritzburg five years later. We met when I joined the Natal Museum in 1978.
Iris is not only an
ex-colleague from the Natal Museum and a friend, but after 30 years we have
found that we are seventh cousins as well.
We are both celebrating this distant relationship and amazing story that
had been lost in time but was found in Pietermaritzburg. “
During the early part of next year we will be having a talk on the subject of DNA which I am sure will be of interest to many.
****
Committee Members 2008
Chairman
Jacques Benadie, P. O. Box 2337 Pinetown, 3600.
Phone: 031-708-3746 E-Mail: jaqb@telkomsa.net
Treasurer/Membership
Shirley Richardson
Phone:
031-266 1753 E-Mail : therichardsons@telkomsa.net
Secretary/Newsletter
Judy Letard, P O Box 1000, Mount Edgecombe 4300
Phone: 031-508 7304 (w) Cell: 072-146-7922
E-Mail: kdee@mweb.co.za
Librarian
Paul Bower, P O Box
1156, Hillcrest 3650
Phone : 031-765
6512 Cell: 082 973 0221
E-Mail: mtu.bower@daimler.com
Octogenarian
Annelise Peters
- Ph: 031-208-2910
KINDLY NOTE THAT YOUR NOMINATIONS ARE SOUGHT FOR THE
POSITIONS OF CHAIRMAN, AND AT LEAST COMMITTEE MEMBERS FOR 2009. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN VOLUNTEERING FOR
ONE OF THESE POSITIONS PLEASE COULD YOU CONTACT ME AT KDEE@MWEB.CO.ZA.
THANK YOU!
****
Our Venue for Meetings
Family History Centre,
Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints,
144 Silverton Road.
Entrance in Montgomery
Road
Phone: (031) 202 3024
Our meetings are held at 2.30 on the 2nd Saturday of every
month. Our AGM is held on the 3rd
Saturday in January.
For the record, the F.H.C.
is also open at the following times:
Tuesday 10 am – 12 noon.
Wednesday 1 pm – 4 pm
Thursday 9 am – 12 noon and 6.30 pm – 9 pm
Last Saturday of every month from 10 am – 4 pm
Or by appointment phone –
cell 083 661 4457
****