Barends – Gillman Family – Family history, (dis)organised

The “raven haired beauty”

Charlotta Fredrica Serrurier (18 Feb 1823 – 29 July 1884)

In researching my direct paternal ancestry, I had come across the gravestone of my 2x great grandfather Charles Samuel Barends (1848-1936) in the Dutch Reformed Cemetery below Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. Or rather I found an image of the gravestone on the website of the Genealogical Society of South Africa. Fortuitously I was in Cape Town on holiday soon after, and found that the graveyard had recently been totally cleared of overgrown vegetation and drug-dealing vagrants (having been a no-go area for decades) and on the day I visited, I found the gate padlock broken open. And there I found not only Charles Samuel’s gravestone (broken in the tree clearances), but standing alongside, the headstone of William Haynes Wade Barends, and his wife Charlotta Fredrica Serrurier.

I thought I must have found another generation to add to my family tree – my 3x great grandparents. I knew of William Haynes Wade from a newspaper clipping in my possession, reporting on his funeral. At that stage I had no paper trail connecting father and son, but now the sharing of the plot and the existence of the clipping amongst the family papers seemed pretty conclusive. The tombstones gave me names and dates to research further.

Who was this Charlotta Fredrica Serrurier?

Using the names and dates on the gravestone, I soon found that she had married William Haynes Wade Barends on 22 October 1851 at the Dutch Reformed Church (1) – the Groote Kerk on Adderley Street in Cape Town, and I began to find baptisms of the rest of their family of ten children in all (of whom five survived into adulthood). Some were baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church, but I could not find a birth record for the person I assumed was her son, my great great grandfather, Charles Samuel Barends. And I could also find no records regarding her origins – in particular no baptism.

A little on-line research into the Serrurier name then revealed the remarkable body of genealogical research done by Dr Robin Pelteret on a renowned Cape Town Serrurier family. But a name on her gravestone alongside my 2x great grandfather was not enough to connect me and Charlotta to those Serruriers.

The “raven-haired beauty”

But then I read further in Dr Pelteret’s research, and came across an astonishing reference, regarding an unnamed “raven-haired beauty”, of whom no written records were known, but who was remembered within Serrurier family tradition. Dr Pelteret had heard the information first hand from an elderly Serrurier descendant in the 1980’s:

“There was rumoured to be a liaison between Petrus Johannes Denÿssen and an (undocumented) “raven-haired beauty”, the sister of Lodewyk (Louis) Serrurier Snr. (1816 – 1899)” … “The oral history relating to the sister is as follows: unknown female – said to have been an extremely attractive woman. Married beneath her social standing. He, a basketmaker, had his little factory in the basement of the St. Stephen’s Church, the “Old Theatre” or “Komediehuis” in Riebeeck Square, Cape Town. Later, she went on to live with Judge Denys of the OVS “after whom Deneysville is named” (sic). She produced 2 daughters : a daughter who married a “tobacco man”; and another daughter who married a tug-master known as “Captain”. The latter couple produced a daughter who reputedly married into wealth.”

I should recap what we already knew on the Barends side: my 2x great grandfather Charles Samuel had inherited a business from his father which occupied a basement workshop under St Stephen’s Church, Riebeeck Square for at least 80 years ending in 1930. Charles Samuel had taught himself coopering, but also produced traditional woven reed baskets and chair seats.

So with a shiver down my spine I realised the two families’ oral histories combined in that moment to identify the elusive “raven haired beauty” remembered by the Serruriers. She was without a shadow of a doubt Charlotta Fredrica Serrurier, daughter of Jan Fredrik and Charlotte Serrurier, and granddaughter of the founding father of the South African Serrurier’s, the Rev. Johannes Petrus Serrurier, the senior minister of the Groote Kerk in Cape Town for over four decades from 1760 to 1804.

I subsequently heard from Dr Pelteret that he had spent many hours in the archives trying to track down the nameless mystery sister, without success. The incredible co-incidence of our two oral histories colliding in this way was astonishing. Without Dr Pelteret’s record, I would have had almost no way of connecting Charlotta to her brothers and parents.

The Denyssen Connection

At almost the same time, I discovered the Death Notice of Charlotta Fredrica Barends in the Cape Archives, and this shed new light on the second part of the Serrurier family story. Alongside the names of her surviving children with William Haynes Wade Barends, were three other names: Henry Denyssen, Charlotta Louisa Denyssen and Clara Christina Denyssen.

Charlotta had not later gone off and married a “Judge Denys” – nor had a relationship (one hopes) with the Hon. Mr Justice Petrus Johannes Denyssen: in fact she had previously been married to (as I have since discovered) his younger brother Hendrik Justinus Denyssen, whose family included distinguished lawyers and indeed a judge. Her story had just become even more interesting.

And then there was the final twist. As told in an earlier post, a distant cousin sent me the baptism record he had found for Charles Samuel. And it was not from the Dutch Reformed Church at all – and it predated her marriage to William Haynes Wade Barends by 3 years. And no father is mentioned. Everything pointed to my 2x great grandfather not being a Barends at all.

But lets go back to the Serruriers and the Denyssens.

The Serruriers were a French Huguenot family who escaped persecution in France, fleeing to Hanau in Germany where my 5x great grandfather Johannes Petrus grew up, the son of Louis Serrurier, a protestant minister. To quote from Dr Pelteret:

He enrolled for theological training at Leiden University in 1753; and was ordained in 1759. He was appointed whilst in Amsterdam as pastor to the Dutch Reformed Church, Cape Town, and assumed duty in 1760. The family lived at 26 Longmarket Street and (anecdotally) at the corner of Venus (later Queen Victoria) and Wales Streets. He remained at the Groote Kerk for 44 years, and was revered for his powerful preaching skills. Duties of historical note include : burying Governor Tulbagh in 1771; conducting the inaugural service of an enlarged Groote Kerk and preaching the first sermon from the magnificent pulpit built by the cabinet-maker Graaf between August 1788 and December 1789 to a design by Anton Anreith; the dedication service of the Dutch Reformed Strooidakkerk, Paarl in 28 April 1805, and the pulpit in the Sendinggestig, Long St., CT. He retired in 1804, living an active further 15 years. The estate was valued initially at a substantial 293,600.18 rixdollars.

www.pelteret.co.za

As was not unusual in the period, he fathered a dozen or so children, of whom Charlotta’s father Jan Fredrik was number five. Along with his brothers, Jan Fredrik was sent to Europe for his education, and married his first wife Marie Jeanne Gosset in Amsterdam and had three children there between 1792 and 1797. Returning to Cape Town (possibly already a widower but accompanied by at least two of the children) he married Charlotte (surname unknown) and had at least four more children with her (2):

Lodewyk (“Louis”) Serrurier Snr (b 1816)
Samuel (“Alexander”) Serrurier (b 1818)
Charlotta Fredrica Serrurier (b 1823)
Johannes Petrus (“John Peter”) Serrurier (b 1823)

Jan Frederick had his fingers in various business enterprises, and owned 23 acres of what was later to be called “Fresnaye”. He lived at 12 Wale Street and died in Newstreet, Cape Town, a “Gentleman” on his Death Notice (3). He had meanwhile remarried twice and had at least one more child.

So Charlotta and her brothers would have grown up amongst the elite of Cape Town in the early days of the English Colonial administration. Her father was already 55 years old when she was born, wealthy, and a member of a large and well-known family. Her grandfather died just before her birth, and left a considerable fortune to her father, not to mention a highly respected name.

The old Groote Kerk in 1824, before rebuilding in 1840.

Around 1839, when she was just 16 or 17, she married Hendrik Justinus Denyssen. It seems theirs was a very suitable match between the children of two socially elite families. Henry was the son of Daniel Denijssen, a former Fiscal (or Attorney-General) who came out to the Cape from Holland, later practising as an advocate. Hendrik Justinus’ elder brother Petrus Johannes followed their father into law, studying in England, and later becoming a Judge.

Baptism entry for Hendrik Justinus Denyssen: “Vader Den Wel Edele Heer en Mr Daniel Denijssen”

The 1913 Sale catalogue when the De Wets house was bought for the nation, after the death of Hendrik Justinus’ aunt’s grandchildren.

Charlotta’s father and Daniel Denijssen were at least close business associates and probably friends (4). Daniel’s social position and connections were about as elevated as Cape Society allowed. One of the leading legal figures in the Cape, he married Magdalena Elizabeth Smuts, whose sister Margaretha Jacoba was married to Hendrik Justinus de Wet, the President of the Burgher Council at the Cape. As a widow, she was godmother to her nephew – and it was in honour of her husband that he was named Hendrik Justinus. The De Wets lived in what is now the Koopmans-de Wet House museum in Strand Street.

I say “married ”, but no record of the marriage between Henry and Charlotta has yet been traced and I cannot trace the baptisms of his children with Charlotta either. This is unusual for the period, but might mean that they attended the Lutheran or Methodist churches, whose registers are not available on line yet. It is interesting that their wedding would have taken place during the period of the Groote Kerk’s demolition and rebuilding, when services were held in the Lutheran Church. However, the three children born to the couple took his name, list their parents on their Death Notices (5), and it is extremely unlikely that a couple of their social standing would have had three children out of wedlock.

Where did it all go wrong for Charlotta Fredrica?

These were emotionally and physically demanding years for a young girl just emerging from her teens. An arranged marriage (probably) at age 16. Three children in three years between 1840 and 1844. Her mother dies around this time. Her father remarries and has a new baby in 1848, loses his third wife and then marries for a fourth time in February 1849, before dying in 1850. Her brother Louis lost no less than three wives between 1840 and 1850.

In the midst of all this, Charlotta gives birth to a son, William Edward Barends in 1847 whose baptism is as yet untraced, and then a year later she baptises a fatherless baby son, not in the Dutch Reformed Church to which her family were so intimately connected (and her grandfather had been the minister) but across the road in the newly established English Church of St George. (6) It is only three years later that she marries William Haynes Wade Barends, whose surname both those sons were to carry.

How and why did William Barends enter her life?

William is clearly not of her social class (or even race). His great grandfather was a German immigrant bricklayer who had married into the free black community. His grandfather Jan George in turn had married the daughter of a Swiss immigrant and a woman of Cape ethnic origin. And then his father Godlieb Andreas had lived for most of his life and had his children out of wedlock with a freed slave from Bengal, marrying her only on his deathbed. Godlieb may not have mixed with the Dutch settler elite, but neither was he in any way working class – he had once even been well-off. He was well educated, had an extremely elegant handwriting, worked in a clerical role, lived in a large well-furnished house, owned slaves and a couple of horses, along with a substantial book collection. However, he went insolvent at about the time of William’s birth, and it is not clear how well Godlieb managed after the insolvency, but he had five children and seemed to have brought them up respectably. (It is interesting that Charlotta’s uncle assisted with the administration of his insolvent estate.)

William Haynes Wade went to work for his uncle by marriage in a general store – Van Driel’s in Bree Street, along with his half-brother Haynes Wade Battersby (his mother’s eldest son from a former relationship). So he was in steady employment and had prospects.

Was he in fact a “basketmaker” as the Serruriers remembered? He certainly was. In a newspaper interview published in 1934 to mark his 84th birthday, Charles Samuel says: “My father was the first basketmaker in the town, the only one”. Later they employed the basket weavers and certainly by the time he died he had established a reputation as a well known and highly regarded General Dealer, and his son Charles Samuel later took over the business. Apart from coopering and baskets, he must have sold furniture, as he goes on to say “There’s nothing left here now … I have sold most of my antiques to Mr Rhodes …”

Why did Charlotte, an attractive widow from a very good family, marry William Barends? From this distance, it is impossible to know, and we can only speculate. The Serrurier legend (though wrong in so many respects) retains (as does all oral history) a kernel of emotional truth – she married “beneath her” and the shock value of that kept her story alive down five generations.

Did her husband abandon her and the children just at the time her father and mother died? Was she forced to find a man who would give her a home? Was her only hope to marry “beneath her”, a man willing to accept her children, and provide for her? Divorce was not unknown at the time, and it is possible that she divorced Hendrik Justinus Denyssen – but she remained in close contact with the children, and it is curious that such a powerful family within the legal profession would have allowed her this – unless Henry himself had run off first!

Or is the story much happier? Did she fall in love with William, bear his children and ultimately marry despite the social differences? And of course this begs the question, was William the father of the two boys born three and four years before their marriage? What prevented the couple from marrying earlier? Perhaps the divorce took a while?

Whatever the circumstances of the marriage and the birth of the two boys, the Barends, Denyssen and Serrurier families continued to have close ties, with various members of the family standing as godparents to the children, and then the grandchildren (7). So perhaps the social differences were not so great after all. Certainly, her two brothers were hardworking “shopkeepers” of a sort and probably respected William’s hard work and success.

What happened to Hendrik Justinus?

Before writing this piece, I had assumed the mostly likely explanation was that Hendirk Justinus had died after the birth of his 3^rd child. But as I was writing this, I made another discovery. When Charlotta Fredrica’s daughter Charlotta Louisa marries Johannes Brink in 1863, she is under age (20 when age of majority was 21) so her marriage has to have her parents’ permission. On her marriage certificate, in the “by whose permission” column, it gives “by her father”, which I had assumed must mean William Barends as step father. But I have just found the original marriage banns record, where it says more explicitly that permission was obtained from “Vader H Denyssen”(8).

This seems to prove that Henry was still alive in 1863, but the children had lived with their mother in Stuckeris Street. So he must have divorced Charlotta Fredrica after all. He seems to appear again in 1868 as a witness to his son’s marriage in Knysna – the first name at “In de tegenwoordigheid van” looks to me like “HJ Denyssen”. (See further note 9 below.)

A Modern Family?

William provides a good home for Charlotta and her young family of five children, and together they have eight more, including four who died in infancy(10). And he gives his name to William Edward and Charles Samuel. Recent DNA evidence points to Charles at least being his son. Charlotta’s first three children keep their father’s name of Denyssen. In all Charlotta gave birth to at least 13 children, who in turn provided her with 66 grandchildren.

Charlotta’s eldest son Hendrik Justinus (or Harry as he has become) Denyssen marries an English girl in Knysna and has a large English speaking family – 14 children in all. Her Denyssen daughters marry into the old Dutch community, but her Barends children marry English settlers – one even returns to England with her husband and has a large family in London.

So we are left with an extended, and quite modern family, and interestingly one which was rapidly anglicising along with the whole Colony. And so Charlotta Fredrica Serrurier’s baptism of Charles Samuel in the English church of St George presages a sea change for this scion of the old Dutch Colony – and for the Cape as a whole.

Notes

(1) The French name Serrurier was often spelled in a Dutch corruption to Serrunje as here in the Marriage Register.

(2) Her brother Louis (note how all adopted English versions of their Dutch baptismal names) ran an immensely successful wagon and carriage making business in Keerom street (on the site of the current Supreme Court building) and made a fortune at the time of the Great Trek. He was later godparent to one of Charlotta’s daughters and left her a legacy. He is buried in the same cemetery as his sister.

Her brother Samuel Serrurier (“Alexander”) was sexton to the “Scotch Church” (St Andrew’s Church, Cape Town) in 1867. He was a well-known coffin-maker and undertaker but died impoverished: he was owed a good deal of money on plots he had purchased on behalf of clients in Woltemade Cemetery, Maitland and who died without settling their debts.

Her youngest brother John Peter emigrated to England and died in Devon unmarried as a civil servant in the Commissary Control Department

(all this information about the Serrurier brothers comes from Dr Robin Pelteret’s work)

(3) MOOC 6/9/51 No.287

(4) Both were Founding Directors of the South African Association for the Administration and Settlement of Estates in 1836 – the worlds first Trust Company. (Source: “The Cape of Good Hope Government Proclamations from 1806 to 1825, as Now in Force and Unrepealed; and the Ordinances Passed in Council from 1825 to 1839”)

(5) The younger Henry Denyssen’s Death Notice lists his father as Henry Justinus Denyssen and his mother as “unknown” scratched out and “Serrurier” inserted.

(6) The Baptism entry for Charles Samuel in St Georges is unusual. Where a couple is married the minister at that time would have recorded “Charles Samuel son of William Haynes Wade Barends and his wife Charlotta Federica Serrurier” (Women were always referred to by their born surnames in the Cape at this time, even after marriage, following a Dutch tradition). Where the couple are unmarried, but the father is known and acknowledged, the practice at the time was to write: “Charles Samuel, surname Barends, son of Charlotta Frederica Serrurier, reputed father William Haynes Wade Barends”. There are a number of examples of this in the same Register. Only where the father is unknown Or unacknowledged does the entry read like this one: “Charles Samuel, son of Charlotte Fredrica Serrurier”.

(7) There are many examples. Charlotta’s brother Lodewyk (Louis) Serrurier and Harriet Coles stood as witnesses to the baptism of Elizabeth Antoinette Barends in 1852 and Lodewyk Hendrik Barends in 1856.

In 1865, Charlotta Louise Denyssen and her husband Johannes Brink (from a family connected by marriage to the Serruriers in earlier generations) stood as witness to the baptism of William and Charlotta Frederica’s daughter Charlotta Johanna Barends (her namesake and half-sister).

In 1864, Charlotta Fredrica stands godparent to her grandson Daniel Brink, alongside “Henry Denyssen” – and this may be her son or her ex-husband!

In 1870 William Edward Barends stands godparent (alongside his other half-sister Clara Christina) to his niece Clara Wilhelmina Brink, daughter of his half-sister Charlotta Louisa Brink.

(8) Other entries for minors in the same register list permission given by for example “stiefvader”, “ouders”, “vader”, “grootmoeder” – so listing a name is unusual and stepfather would be listed as such. Her address however is Stuckeris St in what later became District 6, which was William and Charlotta’s address.

(9) There are a number of references to a Hendrik Justinus Denyssen in the Cape Archives which I have been unable to investigate due to the recent lockdowns. The most interesting is an auctioneers firm Van der Byl & Denyssen in the Swellendam district, operating in the mid 1840s – 1860’s who were responsible for the development of Malgas (Malagas) on the Breede River. There is a Hendrik J Denyssen who fathered a few children in the 1860’s in Knysna – who could be either the father or son. And there is another Denyssen family from Malgas with a Hendrik as the Paterfamilias who could be our Hendrik Justinus. Perhaps he too remarried and lived a new life.

(10) I have found baptisms for the following who I assume died young and are not listed in their parents will or Death Notices:
Lodewyk Hendrik (1856)
Frederick Alexander (1858)
Henrietta Wilhelmina (1860)
Charlotta Johanna (1865)

Gillman Origins

Our family knowledge of our Gillman origins was fairly limited and almost entire oral: there was a William Gillman and his wife Ann King who came out to South Africa from England with three grown sons in the middle of the 19^th century, settling in Kalk Bay where they ran an hotel. Sometime in the 1870s they went up north to Namaqualand for the Copper boom. That was it.

Even this limited information came, I believe, via the wife of the youngest of those three sons (Charles’s wife Annie Wolstenholme), passed in turn to her grandson Charles Gillman’s wife, my grandmother Helene de Villiers, who passed it to her children and to me. Annie had lived the last 15 of her 99 years with my grandparents on their farm in Namaqualand and most of my grandmother’s Gillman family knowledge came from her.

Two years of research has filled out the story somewhat – but the details are still sketchy. The number of people in the story, though, has expanded exponentially, with William and Ann’s ancestors, and many descendants.

This post sets out what I have been able to find out about William and Ann’s family before they emigrated. I will follow up with their nine (not three) children and 24 grandchildren in a subsequent post.

Charles Gillman and Ann Hurrell – William’s parents

William’s parents were relatively easy to find in the Cape Archives – William’s Death Notice from 1878 reveals he was born in London in August 1804, to Charles Gillman and Ann Hurrell. He died on 11 June 1878 in Springbok, Namaqualand. His Death Notice was signed by his widow, Ann.

This discovery was a start, and has allowed me to track down his parents, assuming a date of birth of around 1780 for both.

I found the record of an Ann Hurrell baptised on 4 November 1780 at St Giles in the Fields, daughter of James and Ann Hurrell, which is almost certainly our Ann, as we know they are both from St Giles. This is not a full baptism entry, just a simple list of the children baptised that year, on that day. It just says “4 [November] Ann Hurrell of James and Ann”:

Charles Gillman married Ann Hurrell on 12^th February 1805 at St Giles in the Fields, London. Both are “of this Parish”.

Before a wedding, Banns had to be published for three consecutive weeks before the ceremony – to allow for the community to register objections! Here is the entry recording the Banns:

I haven’t traced the original Marriage entry, but a copy made at the time to send off to the central records office. Where a document at the time required a signature from someone unable to write their own name, they were asked to make a mark (usually a cross) on the page, which is then labelled as that person’s mark, (and sometimes the mark is even witnessed by a another person). In this case Charles makes a mark, and it is described as such. This mark tells us that he was illiterate, even to the extent of being unable to write his own name. Ann however appends her own signature. (This transcript faithfully copies the original, even down to the “X”.)

The Church of St George the Martyr, Bloomsbury

William was Charles and Anne Gillman’s first child, born 12 August 1805 and baptized at St George’s Bloomsbury 11 January 1806. St George’s is a couple of hundred meters north west of St Giles, and all their subsequent children were also baptized here.

St George the Martyr, Bloomsbury, Parish records

Then follow Eliza (born 24 October 1808, Baptised 2 April 1809 – last name on the list below),

Mary (1811),

and Jane (1814) .

Tragically Ann Hurrell dies on 31 July 1818 aged just 34 while giving birth to her next child, Ann, with baby Ann following days later. Charles, an illiterate labourer, is left to raise his 13 year old son and three young daughters alone.

Burial register of St Georges Bloomsbury 1818

From at least Jane’s birth they are living in Lambs Conduit Passage, in Holborn. Charles is described as a labourer in 1814 (Jane’s baptism entry) and a servant in 1838 (William’s marriage entry). I cannot find him on the 1841 Census, and I have not as yet been able to identify Charles’ parents. There are however a John and Mary Gillman who are having children in St Giles in the 1780’s who could be his parents and a James Gillman running a pub in Eagle Street just round the corner from Lambs Conduit Passage. But no direct links found … so far. More broadly, there is also a John Gillman baptized at St Botolph without Aldgate in the 1600’s (where there are also Hurrells). There are well established Gillman families in a number of areas outside London, the nearest being Canterbury and Norfolk, and also Gloucestershire. So it is possible that the family were longstanding residents of St Botolph or came to London during its rapid expansion in the 18th century.

Holborn from Richard Horwood’s map of 1813

William’s wife, who my family oral history remembered as Ann King, was in fact Anne King Currell

Thomas Currell and Ann Carter – Ann King’s parents

Anne King Currell (born 4 September 1816, baptized 26 January 1817) was the sixth of seven children of Thomas Currell (1776-1856) and Ann Carter (1778 – 1869).

Thomas, born in Deptford, the dockland area on the south side of the river, was a “biscuit baker” in the East End of London, around Stepney and Wapping, with close association to the churches of St Dunstan in Stepney, and St Georges in the East, Wapping and of course the wharves and docks of early 19th C London. From this we should assume he manufactured “ships biscuit” or hard tack – the essential bread substitute on long sea journeys.

St George in the East, between Stepney and Wapping

Thomas and Ann were married in 1801 at St George in the East, with her sister Susan Carter as one of the witnesses.

St George in the East Parish records 1801

Thomas and Ann had at least 7 surviving children: Elizabeth Currell, born 1803 ; Thomas Currell, born 1805; Henry Currell, 1807–1874; Thomas William Currell 1810–1896; Robert Currell, 1813–1876, Ann King Currell 1816–1899; Susannah Currell, 1819–1902.

Here is Thomas’ baptism entry (2^nd entry from the top) 18^th August 1805:

Currell – 18^th[August] – Thomas, Son of Thomas Currell, Baker, by Ann, Knight’s Court, Born 6^th August

Two of the other children were also baptized on the same day in January 1817: Robert born in 1813 and my 3x Great Grandmother Ann King born 1816:

The last baptism record I have found for Thomas and Ann’s children is Susannah’s, in 1819.

The Currells in Wapping in the 1800s

The new London Dock (shown below – the picture is at right angles to the map that follows) was recently completed, and the Currell’s addresses show them occupying housing later demolished as slums between these new docks and the river.

The addresses on the Baptism records are shown below on a contemporary map. Thomas and Anne lived to a good age, living at Willow Tree Court for at least a decade between 1841 (along with their son Thomas) and 1851 (with their son Robert, also a baker, but apparently a merchant seaman when in his 20’s and 30’s). Thomas died in 1856 and Ann went to live in Cinnamon Street round the corner with her grandson Henry (Thomas’ son), where she died in 1869. The Currells seem to have been in the Stepney/Limehouse area for at least a couple of generations, and Anne King’s brothers later lived in Poplar. (This part of Wapping is unrecognizable today, with the docks built over and most of the street layout changed by wartime bombing and subsequent regeneration.)

The Carters from Great Baddow, Essex

Ann Carter herself came from Great Baddow in Essex (just outside Chelmsford) and it was her mother Sarah King who gave Ann King Currell her middle name. Sarah had married Stephen Carter (1745-1795) in 1768 in Great Baddow and the couple went on to have at least six surviving children.

Stephen was the son of Giles Carter (b 1724) and the charmingly named Love Allen (1722-1777) (daughter of Josh and Mary Allen of Roxwell in Essex.) Giles and Love had at least eleven children between 1745 and 1761.

William Gillman and Ann King Currell –
the progenitors of the South African Gillmans

William’s mother Ann Hurrell dies when he is 13, and we next come across him when he marries Ann King Currell on 11 June 1838 at the church of St Botolph Bishopsgate while living at 19 Bakers Buildings – just behind the church – and as it happens directly under the entrance to Liverpool Street Station on Liverpool Street today

Anne’s brother Thomas William and his wife Mary Anne are the witnesses to their marriage. (Thomas William was also a baker and he and Mary Anne had 8 children and they lived into their 80’s.)

As we can see, William’s occupation is given as Mariner. Here we find the probable reason he married so late at age 34. In all likelihood, following the standard practice of the day, he would have gone to sea at 14 or so, soon after his mother’s death. Presumably, therefore he had been at sea for two decades by the time he married. We can speculate what his career involved. What kind of sailor was he? Not an officer, certainly, with his background. What we do know is that paperwork in the Cape Archives shows that he wrote in a very practised handwriting – not what we would expect from the son of an illiterate father and a 20 year career as a rough sailor. His job on board must have involved writing – could he have been involved in provisioning the ships? It is interesting that William’s daughter Annette married a hotel-keeper, William Henry Cogill. His father, William Cogill , was William Gillman’s contemporary, and we know he started in the Royal Navy as a purser’s steward and then became an innkeeper in the Cape, just like William went on to do.

Did William sail for the East India Company to the East Indies? Did his ship put in at Cape Town or Simonstown? Did he put aside a nest egg from 20 years of wages to set up in Cape Town with his new wife? These secrets may lie hidden in the merchant seaman records at the Public Record Office – but that will have to wait for another time.

We can never know how Anne King Currell and William Gillman met, but it seems likely that while working as a sailor his ships docked in Wapping where her father ran his bakery. Did William source his ships biscuit from Thomas Currell? Or did William work with Robert Currell on the same ship? However it happened, he must have beguiled Ann with tales of his plan for a new life in the glorious Cape!

They marry in 1838 and almost exactly a year later their first child Annette Gillman was born in 1839 and christened on 19 June 1839 at Saint Dunstan and All Saints Church in Stepney, with their address as Ratcliff – just up the road from Wapping. Within another year William and his little family are living in Cape Town. This must have been the plan.

A summary of William and Ann’s family is included below.

Next post: The Kalk Bay Gillmans: did the Plan work out?

PS: Thanks to my uncle Mark Gillman for his comments and suggestions on the first draft.

Missing links

Why begin with Ouma Gaas?

No particular reason at all. When working on my family tree, there was a huge gap above my mother’s paternal grandmother, as no one seemed to know who her parents were and where she had come from. I had traced back hundreds of years on other branches, but here was a huge blank space. So I was determined to get to the bottom of it, as was Uncle Mark Gillman, who had himself done a great deal of family research previously and knows more of the family and its history than anyone. So this is the story of just that search, trying hard not to get into too many diversions. Between Mark and me, we have mapped out the entire family going back many generations, but this is just about our search for a missing link.

Ouma Gaas was a mysterious figure on the periphery of our English speaking Cape Town family. She was the 2^nd wife of my mother’s grandfather William John Gillman. She had left my great grandfather early on in the marriage, at a time when divorce was rare and frowned on, and some fragments of the shame of this early divorce hung about. Her grandchildren knew her in a limited way: when they were children she lived on the farm Groot Gaas a few hours away near Kamieskroon in Namaqualand, and would visit her son Charles and his family on their farm near Springbok. For most of her grandchildren’s young adult life in the late 1950’s and 1960’s Ouma Gaas was a relatively distant figure living with a new husband far up north, while they had returned to Cape Town (though she did visit her daughter, my Great Aunt Gladys at times), and when she came to Cape Town in the 1970’s, she was largely bedridden. My memory of her is as a large and slightly scary old Afrikaans lady in her 90’s lying in her high single bed in a dark back bedroom at her daughter Gladys’ home in Cape Town, where I would be told to go in and stand on tip toe to give her a kiss.

Ouma Sannie was born before birth registration was required in the Cape, and as she died with no estate, there was no death notice. Neither Mark nor I have been able to trace ANY paperwork from family sources. Uncle Mark had employed a researcher to trace documents in the Cape Archives more than a decade ago, and knew that she had remarried in 1922, and that she might have had another daughter before that.

In the last decade, internet research resources and genealogy research websites have grown exponentially. So it didn’t take long to begin finding references to her. In fact the first bit of information revealed two new husbands, and confirmed her full maiden name – Susanna Johanna van Wyk – and her birth, 7 August 1887. Before long her second husband’s will turned up and their Cape Town address, a few doors down the same street in Observatory that my mother moved to 20-odd years ago!

But still no clue as to her origins, apart from the farm Gaas.

So I started the other way round. It was standard practice amongst Afrikaner families at the time to name children after their parents and/or grandparents, and my one great uncle (Ouma Gaas’s 3^rd son) had the unusual specific combination of Abraham Erasmus, and this name cropped up again in a grandchild. Another great uncle was named Josef, so a family with this combination would be a good start. I started sifting through ALL Abraham Erasmus van Wyk’s – and unsurprisingly they were (more or less) all from the Kamieskroon area of Namaqualand near Gaas. It wasn’t hard to find the van Wyk’s from the farm Koets, next door to Gaas. And there was Abraham Erasmus Johannes Cornelis van Wyk (and his son Abraham Erasmus Johannes Cornelis van Wyk …. With an uncle Josef Jacobus … and a few other Abraham Erasmuses in the near vicinity for good measure.)

The name seems to have started with this AEJC’s grandfather, Abraham Erasmus van Wyk, whose parents both descended from a pair of Smit sisters, Gezina and Marta (ie his two grandmothers were sisters). Their father was Erasmus Schmidt, so this AE seems to be named after his two grandmothers’ father. The first appearance of a van Wijk “Abraham” seems to be in honour of Abraham Vivier, this first Abraham van Wijk’s maternal grandfather, and was then passed down the eldest in that branch. This was our Abraham Erasmus’s great great grandfather, so seems too far back to be the immediate source – so possibly a later cousin in that branch of the tree was being honoured or remembered.

On an interesting side-note, Gezina Smit married Wilhelm Botha, whose grandfather was Schalk Willem van der Merwe (also an ancestor in the de Villiers branch of our family), and whether in fact or in wishful-thinking mythology, one can trace his ancestors on-line back to King Alfred of Wessex (Alfred the Great) and to Charlemagne!

My DNA tests also showed that the descendants of these van Wyks are approximately my 4th cousins. So we were definitely in the right zone.

None of them were recorded as having a daughter named Susanna van Wyk on any of the existing online family trees. But this just means no-one had yet added her and I knew no other descendants had been searching for her and recording her genealogy. So her absence wasn’t necessarily meaningful. The next step was a process of elimination- find those where she definitely was not a relative using the documentation I was able to find.

The main contender immediately hit the dust, as his Death Notice of 1911 is available scanned and indexed on-line. This lists all the deceased person’s children – and he had many – but no Susanna Johanna. But he did die on his farm Grootchaas! So here was an early link to the farm we knew as Groot Gaas – the trail was warming.

The uncle Josef was too young to be the father. Uncle Mark had identified his son, AEJC Jnr as a likely contender. He was having children at the right time, and various of his descendants had filled out online family trees indicating over a dozen children. But no sign of Sannie, and frustratingly no Death Notice available to confirm his children.

Uncle Mark and I trawled the on-line sources for clues, and I also meanwhile immersed myself in the history of the area, the farms, the families, cemeteries and topography. And then came the chance to join uncle Mark on a trip he had planned to Namaqualand – for him to revisit old familiar sights, and for me to see the family farms for the first time. And for both of us the chance hopefully to find out more!

Unexpectedly, the search for Sannie had thrown up the previously unknown fact that my great grandfather William John had been married before – to another van Wyk. So the Gillman connection to the farms Gaas and Koets and the van Wyks actually starts with the tragic story of Helena.

Helena Maria Gloudina van Wyk

I found Helena through her gravestone, a photograph of which turned up on-line. Helena Maria Gloudina was born in 1884, the daughter of Charlotte (Tollie) van Wyk, the 2^nd wife of Gerrit van Wyk who owned the farm Koets.

In 1903 Helena married William John Gillman in the NG church in the little settlement of Bowesdorp.

He was a shopkeeper (“Winkelier”) in Nababeep (a mining town just north of Springbok) and they went off together to live there, and she died just 5 months and 7 days later of TB.

Her mother Tollie and William’s mother Annie Gillman remained friends for life – I found Annie witnessing Tollie’s will 25 years later. And subsequesntly I discovered Annie’s mother was a cousin of Tollie’s mother: everyone in Namaqualand in the 19th C seemed to be related.

Thanks to Mark’s sleuthing we visited the grave in the old van Wyk farm cemetery hidden under a tree alongside a koppie just outside Kamieskroon, where she lies with her parents and siblings.

Koets farm cemetery just outside Kamieskroon

She sleeps in Jesus free from sorrow
For us a great loss, for her a reward (treasure)
Beloved by all who knew her
And the family who loved her

Koets and Groot Gaas

1904 Map showing farm boundaries and names

The farm variously known as ‘Ouss, Oess, Oest or Koets (also known as Populiersbosch), was granted to Gert Johannes van Wyk (1805 – 1857) in 1844. He divided it amongst his 5 children. The name begins with a Nama “click” sound that was first written as an apostrophe (‘) before Oess (‘Oess) and later became a K.

Abraham Erasmus Johannes Cornelis, the eldest son, took Groot Gaas (Grootchaas) which on the map above is situated about where the words “bosch” of Populiersbosch and “Koets” are written under the name “Bowesdorp”. This was the portion with the largest arable section of “lande”, the best water source (“Ga-as” is Nama for “agter fontein” and the spring is set right back in the valley under the Sneeuberg) … though perhaps the stunning view from the house would not have been relevant then!

The view from Groot Gaas homestead across the valley to the “kroon” of Kamieskroon

Amazingly, Uncle Mark managed to make contact with the current owner Jacoba Swart, and we were able to visit the house and even took her out to dinner. The house is now isolated at the end of a long road up the valley, but according to Koba, the old Post Road to Bowesdorp from Garies went straight on past the farmhouse and over the nek down into Bowesdorp, and hence the old telegraph poles still follow this route rather than the new N7 main road. Oom Hannes Genis remembers the road being just about still usable with a horse and cart in the 40’s. It is now a forgotten track.

Why did the farm end up with Sannie and not the sons? Abraham took a mortgage on his 1/20th portion of the farm Koets in 1907. In 1909 the larger farm was formally and officially subdivided amongst the children of Gerrit van Wyk and in 1910 the mortgage was transferred to the actual smaller subdivided farm Groot Gaas (as opposed to the theoretical “share”). When AEJC died in 1911, his widow Hendrina Johanna Wilhelmina Goosen van Wyk took on the mortgage but by 1928 couldn’t pay the capital sum when it fell due and was forced to sell. She explains in a statement to the Master of the Supreme Court (who was checking up on the administration of the estate) that the will of Gerrit van Wyk required the farm to be sold to one of his descendants. And thus it was bought by his grandson Johannes Jacobus Baptesta van Wyk, the son of the younger Gert van Wyk and Ouma Tollie (and the brother of Helena Maria Gloudina van Wyk Gillman).

Abraham Erasmus JC’s eldest son Gerrit farmed Ellenboogsfontein (aka Nieweplaats) which is to the west of Kamieskroon. Could this have been part of the original Koets? His will also dates the subdivision to 1909. On the map above you can see that Nieweplaats and Koets form a roughly circular or diamond shape together, and it does appear they were split down the middle.

Gerrit Van Wyk (1839-1914) took the portion where Kamieskroon is today. After the death of his first wife Janetta Susanna Debora Kotze he remarried Charlotte Maria Margaretha van der Westhuizen in 1876 (They, you will recall, were the in-laws of William John Gillman). She was the “famous” Ouma Tollie – the “widow Charlotte van Wyk” – who the local history books tell us sold part of Koets to the Bowesdorp Town Elders in order to build Kamieskroon on the land, around 1922. Charlotte Street in Kamieskroon is named after her. After the sale to the town elders, Charlotte’s son still owned a portion on the south side of the town – and apparently annoyed the townspeople by claiming rights to drive his flocks through the town streets! (We assume this was the Johannes Jacobus Baptesta who bought Groot Gaas).

Klein Gaas (later called Windhoek) and Haas Rivier (all part of the original farm Koets) had been passed to Gerrit’s daughter Maria Gloudina on her marriage into the Genis family (and ultimately a portion came to Joseph Gillman through his wife Minnie Genis). They remain with the Genis descendants to this day. Mark Gillman made contact with the current descendant on Windhoek – though he is now retired and his son runs the farm. Mark also arranged for us to visit the 90 year old Hannes Genis (at his old age home in Picketberg), the only son of 9 children who grew up on Haas Rivier with 8 sisters and is my great Aunt Minnie’s youngest brother.

Despite having a wonderful week visiting all the places in Namaqualand with family connections, Uncle Mark and I made no real progress on confirming who Sannie’s parents were. The only definite clue was Oom Hannes Genis saying he thought Lettie Joyce was her sister.

Lettie Joyce was Johanna Aletta Van Wyk (born 1893) the youngest daughter of the Abraham EJC van Wyk Senior who died in 1911. She worked in the Bowesdorp Hotel and married a police constable from Bowesdorp called Hugh Edward Joyce on 5^th December 1921. From a book of Bowesdorp reminiscences by Abe Shapera that Mark found and gave me we know she lived on Groot Gaas at that time, presumably with her widowed mother. Aletta is on her father’s death notice – but not Susannah. Was Oom Hannes wrong?

Then in the Cape Archives I found William John’s divorce petition which stated that in 1912 his wife “returned to her parents residing on Groot Gaas where she has been living ever since” (dated 1917). Of course AEJC Snr died in 1911, so was this proof that her father was AEJC junior?

On my return home, I tried again on-line. I discovered all the records of the NG church have been scanned, but not all have been indexed. The unindexed scans don’t come up in searches. But you can page through them like a book. So I started going through page by page. And before too long found this:

***PS who are the witnesses?***
Cornelis Albertus Arnoldus van der Westhuizen (1858- 1909) born on Ellenboogsfontein married Jeanetta Debora van Niekerk (1864-1925) in Bowesdorp. They farmed on Grootvallei. (My guess is this is Charlotta’s brother). Janetta’s brother was Izak Jacobus Marthinus van Niekerk (1859 – 1934) married to Aletta Elizabeth van Niewkerk. The Agenbags and Stones were other local farming families. Willem Jacobus van Wyk was Susanna’s half brother, and his wife was Aletta Mostert

So what is going on? This is NOT our Ouma Gaas’s birthdate (given as 7 Aug 1886 on her grave). But it is really close. And here is proof that AEJC van Wyk snr and his 2^nd wife Hendrina Johanna Wilhelmina Goosen DID have a daughter named Susannah Johanna and this daughter ISN’T on his Death Notice. And she was baptised within 9 months of the date we have for Ouma Gaas’ birth.

Could the date of birth be wrong in the register? On her final marriage certificate her birth is given as 7 August 1887 – yet another variant. My grandfather Charles (Sannie’s son) always complained that the government recorded his birth in 1908 as 5th May, while he always celebrated on 5th March – a mistake had been made when recording his birth. So mistakes do happen. Her grave marker would have been commissioned by her daughter my Great Aunt Gladys, so that must have been the date the family celebrated. The most likely explanation is that the doopregister simply gets it wrong, and the family never got to see the entry. It would have been written up later and the Register carried around with the itinerant minister (he wasn’t based in Bowesdorp at the time but moved around continuously). She was baptized at the same ceremony as her cousin – Charlotte’s son Cornelis, so perhaps her baptism was delayed in order to share the same ceremony and party! Would the Dominee not have known the difference between a 3 month old baby and a nine month old baby though? The witnesses are her half-brother Willem and his wife Aletta.

Combined with the known and provable connection to Gaas, and Oom Hannes’s memory of the two sisters from Gaas, Sannie and Lettie, I think the proof is enough. Her omission from the death notice is strange but not unique and must be an oversight. Death Notices are incredibly useful but notoriously unreliable, as they are often completed by people assisting the family at a difficult time. I have since identified another child NOT on the Death Notice – Hendrik Jacobus born 31 January 1885 and baptized 22 March 1885. Now this could be the Hendrik Johannes already on the Death Notice, but the 2nd name misremembered – which would show it was done from memory and perhaps the widow signed in state of distress and didn’t check. When Sannie’s first husband William Gillman died, his second wife listed none of Sannie’s children on his death notice! So a death notice is not an absolute proof of anything.

So now we know her family – and these van Wyk’s are well documented in the genealogical records.

It all begins with my 8^th Great grandfather: (by the way, the “sz” after the middle name is a patronymic – ie is an abbreviation for “szoon” or “son of” – “Gerrit William’s son”)
a. Willem van Wijk born in Gelderland about 1655. His first wife was Catharina Hillebrandts. Their son:
b. Gerrit Willemsz van Wijk born around 1738 married Elizabeth Viviet in 1722. Their eldest son was:
c. Gerrit Gerritsz van Wijk born around 1723 married Martha Smit. Their eldest son was:
d. Gerrit Gerritsz van Wijk born 1758 died 1835 married Gesina Helena Botha. Their 3rd son was:
e. Abraham Erasmus van Wijk born 1885 married Martha Magdalena Mouton. Their eldest son was:
f. Gerrit Johannes van Wijk born 1805 married Gesina Maria Aggenbach. Their eldest son was:
g Abraham Erasmus Johannes Cornelis van Wijk born 1828 died 1911 – Sannie’s father.

So now we know who she is and where she came from. Let’s go back to her story.

After Helena died, William John inherited a pretty good estate that her parents had provided, and a year later he married her first cousin and neighbour, Sannie van Wyk.

It seems from the Register that they were married on the farm Gaas itself (t’Kaas), and not in the church. By now William was Assistant Field Cornet for the Onder Kamiesberg area, a sort of honorary quasi-military/assistant magistrate/district commissioner role for the local government.

The divorce papers show they lived in Nababeep for six years and had four children: Aunty Gladys in 1906, my grandfather Charles Abraham in 1908, William Allen in 1909 and Uncle Abe (Abraham Erasmus) in 1911. She left William in 1912 when four weeks pregnant with uncle Josef. One can only speculate on the cause of the separation but Sannie took the infant Uncle Abe with her, leaving the other three with Grannie Gillman so that Abe and Josef were separated from their siblings for quite a while.

The three older children Gladys, Charles and William Allen remained with their grandmather Annie Gillman (born Wolstenholme) till her husband died in 1917 after which she moved to Cape Town with them and lived in some poverty until they were a bit older, when she returned to Namaqualand and they started work in their teens. (Her story deserves a book in itself).

Sannie must have gone to Cape Town about the same time as Annie. During the First World War, Namaqualand went into a deep recession with the effective closure of the Copper Mines during this period, along with severe droughts. Uncle Mark had traced a record of her as the mother of a Jacoba Gysberta Gillman (or Truter) and bizarrely the Cape Archives threw up a Jacobus Gysbertus Gillman born 22 January 1920 and died aged 4 months on 16 May 1920. Another mystery. Both names appear in different records but I can’t believe there were two children. There are baptisms in the NG church of a girl, naming the father as Jacobus Gysbertus Truter and (separately) fostering papers for a boy handing the child to her neighbour. There is also a Death Certificate for a girl, and a “Notice of Death under the Children’s Protection Act” for a boy. Some paperwork gives the surname Truter, some Gillman, but the mother on all paperwork is certainly Susanna Gillman. Both children are born and die on the same day as each other. I can understand twins being born on the same day but what is the chance of them dying on the same day 4 months later?! We have not traced any marriage with a Truter.

2^nd husband: Angelo Frederick Faddel

Then just 18 months later in 1922 in Cape Town still she marries a recently widowed man Angelo Frederick Faddel with a bunch of young children. She lives with him at his home 28 Arnold St, Observatory until his death in 1937.

William Allen Gillman (Mark’s uncle, youngest brother of Charles) with his trophy for winning the Cape Town 50-mile walk – about 1930

Willam John Gillman himself remarries in 1926 and has two further children. During this all this time we have to assume that uncle Josef and uncle Abe are with Sannie, and there are records of her daughter Gladys and son William Allen living at her address.

Tragically, her son William shoots himself age 22 at this address on 22 August 1932.

I know from personal conversations with my great aunt Gladys that they were very poor at this time and the Gillman children largely looked after themselves. Obviously Gladys remembered the suicide as a great shock.

Mysteriously, Angelo Faddel then buys Groot Gaas in 1932. He was a train driver on the railways, and had a large family to support, and a house in Observatory to pay off. Where the cash came from we have no idea. There was a deep recession on in Namaqualand, so prices might have been low. But in 1936 he writes a will and leaves the farm to Sannie, and the house in Arnold Street to his children. Aunty Glady’s new husband Mick Stein is appointed Executor. Angelo dies a year later and Sannie moves to Groot Gaas.

Charles Gillman – On his mother’s farm Groot Gaas, near Kamieskroon, Namaqualand – Sep 1939

Meanwhile my grandfather Charles Abraham Gillman (Sannie’s eldest son) who had been in Cape Town since the First War, developed TB and was told to move somewhere drier. So he returned with his wife (Helene de Villiers, my Ouma) and baby daughter Anne to Namaqualand and in due course purchased a portion of his maternal grandfather’s farm Biesjesfontein outside Springbok. This (I discovered only in October 2019 through documents in the Cape Archives) had belonged since the 1860’s to John Wolstenholme, Annie Gillman’s father, and the farm became known as “Bloustasie” (or “Blaaustatie” in some records) from the trading post or shop made of blue-tinted zinc which he ran there alongside the road into Springbok. Documents from the time describe him as a Brewer, so I think the Bloustasie was famous not just for dry goods! Again we don’t know how my grandfather found the money for the purchase (it seems to have been owned by others in between, so we don’t believe it was inherited through his grandmother). But he raised his family of 7 there, and ran a herd of dairy cows and a dairy that served the whole area including Springbok. Grannie Annie Gillman came to live with the family along with two of her sisters and so was able to die aged 99 on the farm where she was born.

This is where Sannie comes into the memory of people still alive. First my mother and her siblings knew her from her visits to Bloustasie, where she came up by bus from Gaas. She was then known as Sannie Faddel and the children called her “Ouma Gaas” (the farm she was living on at the time) to distinguish her from Helene’s mother “Ouma Ladysmith”.

Sannie seems to have moved from the farm to Kamieskroon town in the late 1940’s. Oom Hannes Genis from Haas Rivier, remembers her just after the 2nd War living in a house in Kamieskroon, and he stayed with her while attending confirmation classes. We don’t know if the farm was sold or let out at the time. Old man Genis remembers an unmarried brother living on and working the farm.

3rd husband: David Josephus Strauss

In 1950 she seems to have been living in Lutzville when she married David Josephus Strauss a widower from Vanrynsdorp. This barely lasted a year, and she was again divorced, living in Nababeep we assume with her son Josef who was by then living there and working for the copper mines, married to Minnie Genis.

4^th husband: Another van Wyk

Then comes her final marriage in 1953 to “Gerhard Johannes van Wyk” born 16 September 1885, a foreman on the mines in Pella.

Gerhard Johannes van Wyk Age 69, born 16/9/1885

Who was this man? Was he related? In researching this I came across a startling coincidence:

Sannie’s eldest half-brother (Abraham’s son by his first wife Lotte Gagiano) was Gerrit Johannes van Wyk – born 37 years before Sannie in 1849. He married Johanna Christina Gloudina van Niekerk. Their 5^th child was Gerrit Johannes van Wyk born 16 September 1885, baptised 24^th January 1886. Born exactly the same day, month and year as Sannie’s last husband. The Gerrit in this baptism entry was the therefore her half-nephew:

Gerrit Johannes van Wijk born 16 Sept 1885

What are the statistical chances of two people in the same region with the same name sharing the same exact day, month and year of birth? (Name spellings at this time could be all over the place – often formal Dutch forms were used in church records eg for this name “Gerhardus” but more informal forms were used in real life like Gerrit, Gerhard and even Gert. The same name could be, for example, Gloudina, Glaudina, Glodiena – and all in official documents for the same person). Actually this coincidence is not as unlikely as one might think, as Gerrit Johannes was a common name in the van Wyk clan. But nonetheless, more research is needed to sort this one out!

I don’t know when Gerhard van Wyk died, but sometime in the 1970’s Ouma Gaas returned to Cape Town to live her final years with her daughter Gladys. And it was Gladys who arranged her return to Kamieskroon for burial … in the back of a station wagon borrowed from Uncle Mark, and driven by her son and grandson (Uncle Abe and Norman) while Uncle Mark, Dawn, Charles and Jane followed on behind. The Station wagon broke down en route, coffin in the back and all! A dramatic life, even after death!

Next instalments to be written up:

The Gillmans of Kalk Bay.
The Wolstenholmes of Biesjesfontein

Out of the box thinking

It all started with a box. Or at least an antique English 18^th century travelling writing chest, or more correctly writing slope, which my father’s sister rescued from the cellar of my Great Aunt Edna’s house in Camps Bay and kept on display in her living room for four decades. Finally, when the family home was sold, it returned across the seas (though by air this time) to London and my living room.

I had been fascinated by it as a young child, with its hidden drawers and compartments, but most especially by the 19^th and early 20th century newspaper clippings which had been carefully stored there. These were mostly birth and marriage notices of our Barends ancestors. Engraved in an elaborate copperplate script on a brass inlaid plate on the lid was the name S H Barends. Who he was, remained a mystery.

St Stephen’s, with its row of workshop spaces in the basement

What did we know? The Barends family in Camps Bay were all the descendants of a Charles Samuel Barends, my great great grandfather, and the chest had presumably come from him. Inside were some clippings from the Cape Argus about his retirement in 1930 age 82. For 50 years he had run a shop in the basement of St Stephen’s Church, on Bree Street in Riebeeck Square, which he had taken over from his father, and he was described as Cape Town’s “last Master Cooper”.

A balie (water bucket) made by CS Barends sold for over R10,000 at auction in 2018

His workshop produced brass-bound teak barrels and buckets, as well as woven reed baskets and chair seats.

He had taken his children every summer to camp in the pine forest near the beach in Camps Bay before the first world war, when almost no one lived there.

Camps Bay in 1910. The camping area (still known as “the Camp” in the 1970’s ) was amongst the stone pines behind and to the side of the hotel.

In due course some moved there permanently, including his eldest son (my great grandfather Arthur John) and his youngest son Harry. The house “AJ” bought in 1920’s remained in the family for just under 100 years, and became the nucleus of a Barends enclave of seven neighbouring properties occupied by his descendants over four generations.

AJ Barends’s bungalow, “Floreal”, in the late 20’s. My brother and I, our father and our grandfather all were born and grew up here (my brother and I for a few years only, and then back for summer holidays every year)

Our family name, however, was somewhat of a mystery. Self evidently (as we thought) Dutch in origin, the family had been English speaking as far back as anyone knew or remembered, and all marriages we knew of had been into English families. How had this change of mother-tongue happened, and what were Charles Samuel’s origins? There was a clue in the box: a newspaper report from 1900 of the funeral of a William Haynes Wade Barends, well known in Cape Town for his shop in the basement of St Stephen’s Church. We can assume this was Charles’s father. But that is as far back as we went.

One by one the older inhabitants of Cape Town are passing away ….

Here was my first genealogical challenge.

Using the genealogy apps that have proliferated over the past decade, and searching the web more broadly, the unusual combination of William Haynes Wade brought up a gravestone that had been photographed and entered into a database set up by the Genealogical Society of South Africa.

The gravestone was originally erected by William for his wife, and so this showed her to have been Charlotte Fredrica born Serrurier, and the headstone gave her full dates of birth and death. Charlotte’s story must wait for another time, but all this data opened up the rest of their family of eight children, of whom Charles Samuel was the eldest. But all of this gave no clue as to William’s parents. Searches for Death Notices and baptisms on my usual genealogical apps led no-where.

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Meanwhile I was drawn back to the writing chest and its nameplate. The two initials seemed to be SH, but I wasn’t entirely convinced of this, and began to research 18^th C engravers scripts. After a few dead ends I finally came across the exact template script, and it was absolutely clear that the initials were in fact G. A. Barends. (A quick look will show how much the A resembles an H to modern eyes, and the G is barely different from a modern S, but very different from the C in that script).

A quick cross-check on the Cape Archives index on-line revealed a Godlieb Andreas Barends with a number of important records available (but not on-line). It was time to come off-line and get my hands on the actual hard copies. It needed a trip to the Cape Archives. Would I be able to link this GA to William Haynes Wade and thus to my chest?

It’s hard to describe the thrill of making such a connection in the presence of original manuscript records, even in the rather nondescript environs of the public reading room of the Cape Archives. I put in a request for the Death Notice of William Haynes Wade Barends. And there was his father: Godlieb Barends. Had I found the original owner of the writing chest?

I then requested the records of his insolvent estate from 1817. Godlieb (I will use this spelling, but it also appears as Gottlieb and Gotlieb) was a minor official working for the Dutch East India Company in a clerical position. But in the early 19^th C he had borrowed rather too much to support his relatively affluent (it seems) lifestyle, and had to declare bankruptcy. The paperwork is fascinating, but particularly the inventory of items sold at a public auction on the 7th of July. It doesn’t take much fluency in Dutch to recognise what a “Schryf Kisje” is – a (small) writing chest. One of his most valuable items (after his horses and slaves). Of course the record proves it was bought by one Thomas Drury – but somehow he must subsequently have bought it back, or perhaps his son did. His mother (Wed. Barends – “the widow Barends”), for example, bought his shaving chest (“Een Scheer doos”), presumably to give back to him!

The other important document relating to Godlieb in the archives, is a “Memorial” (the term used for a formal request to the governor) requesting a special dispensation to marry his long-time partner and the mother of his children on his deathbed, without waiting for the usual formality of reading the Banns publicly in church over a few weeks. His wife was Jacobina Petronella Dianas of Bengal – a freed slave, or daughter of a slave. And until his deathbed, she had merely been his “cohabitee”. But his final act was to give the status denied her during his lifetime. And in Directories subsequently she is listed as the “Widow G.A. Barends”.

Requesting her Death Notice at the Archives confirmed William Haynes Wade as her son. Her death notice omits her parents and actually gives “Bengal” as her place of birth, but this might be an assumption based on her name. William Haynes Wade, it turns out, was mixed race, and described as such on his death certificate.

Once Godlieb and Jacobina Petronella Dianas were identified, his parents and grandparents were waiting to be uncovered: research amongst early settlers and their relationships with slaves has been published a decade ago, and this family had been well researched and written about. In particular Jackie Loos has researched the family and their extended circle for her Cape Argus columns “The Way We Were” and her book, Echoes of Slavery.

Godlieb’s father was Jan George Barends, and his father in turn was the progenitor of our family in South Africa: Johann Godlieb Barends

Johann Godlieb Barends was not Dutch after all, but a German master bricklayer brought to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to help build Cape Town. He came from Zerbst, Saxony-Anhalt, in modern day Germany and arrived at the Cape in 1749. We don’t know when he was born but at a guess around 1700 – 1710. His name seems originally to have been something like Bahrens or Bärens (these are variations in his actual VOC documentation), but was adapted to the more familiar Dutch form “Barends” on arrival at the Cape. (The family seemed to record themselves in this form, but other officials wrote the name variously as Barents, Barendse, or Barendsz).

We know about Godlieb through his indentured contracts with the VOC (mason 1751-53, loaned out 1753-63, master mason 1763-71) and his Estate Papers from his death in 1784 where he is described as “baas metselaar” or master mason. (Ref. Cape Archives MOOC 8/49.49). He was survived by his widow and three children.

On 28 May 1758 he had married Elisabeth Pieterse (also known as Anna Elisabeth of the Cape) and their eldest son Johan George (also known as Ian or Jan) was baptised on 17 August 1760.

“Van de Caab” was not a surname but an indication that the mother was “from the Cape” or born locally – almost invariably of mixed race and possibly Khoi.

Jan George married another member of the Christian free black community, Johanna Catharina Sesselaar (Swiss father and Cape mother) and they had three children: Godlieb Andreas, Jan George and Antoinetta Barendina. And it is Antoinetta who sort of closes this circle, bringing us back to that newspaper clipping about William Haynes Wade’s funeral. She married Roelof Hendrik van Driel who owned and ran Messrs Van Driel and Co, a General Dealer in Bree Street, in the basement of St Stephen’s Church, Riebeeck Square, where her young nephew William Haynes Wade Barends came to work. In due course he took over the shop, and later passed it to his son Charles Samuel, who ran it till his retirement in 1930, when he gave his grandfathers’s old schryf kisje to his son Arthur in Camps Bay.

And yet … is the circle closed at all? During my internet research I came across an eight year old post on a genealogical forum:

May 13, 2011 Dagse Vriende, Is daar iemand wat die Barends mense navors? Eh het ‘n Charles Samuel Barends (*5 Aug 1848, +26 Okt 1936), getroud met Sarah Caroline Jeary (*14 Apr 1857,+9 Nov 1935). Bly in die 1860 – 80’s en moontlik later in Stuckeris Str, Distrik 6, Kaapstad. Sy SK gee nie sy ouers se name nie, en ek hak nou by hom vas. Enige informasie sal welkom wees. Groete Johan Oberholzer

[Hello Friends. Is there anyone researching the Barends’? I have a Charles Samuel Barends married to Sarah Caroline Jeary. Lived in the 1860 – 80’s and possibly later in Stuckeris St District Six Cape Town. His Death Notice doesn’t give his parents names and I am stuck here with him. Any information would be welcome. Best Johan Oberholzer.]

Before long I found myself corresponding with the husband of a previously unknown 3^rd cousin and descendent of Charles Samuel. And he had in the intervening years tracked down a baptism record for Charles Samuel, and it turns out Charlotta Serurrier baptised him three years before marrying William Haynes Wade.

I will not digress further into her story here, but in short she was from a very prominent Cape Town family, by family tradition a “raven-haired beauty”, previously married with three children. Her husband disappears from the record after the birth of their 3^rd child. When that child is three, she sneaks from the Dutch Reformed Church where she and her children were baptised (and her grandfather had been the minister) across the road to the newly established English Church of St George and has a fatherless baby baptised. Three years later she remarries a man of mixed race, William Barends (his father Godlieb and her uncle were acquainted so they may have been childhood friends). He provides a good home for her and her children, and gives her five more (plus another two who died in infancy). And he gives his name to Charles Samuel and William Edward who was born the year before Charles Samuel. Her first three children keep their father’s name of Denyssen, only William and Charles Samuel becomes Barends’. The relationship must have been going on for some years before the marriage. I had wondered if the sons born before the marriage were not descended from the Barends’ at all. But a recent DNA match with a distant cousin descended from William Haynes Wade’s grandfather has confirmed the descent from Johan Gottlieb the mason from Germany.

A close up of text on a white surface

Description automatically generated — Charlotte Fredrica Barends (born Serrurier) Death Notice 1884

Curiously, my DNA results bear this out: I do have some Bengali genes that must have been Jacobina’s: 0.3%. Specifically, Bengali!

[I have edited and updated the original post to include new DNA information discovered recently].

Notes:

Spelling of names is always variable this far back, and I have adopted the most commonly found versions. William Haynes Wade’s own son misspelled his fathers middle name on his gravestone, assuming a Dutch “Heynes” for what is an English “Haynes” – and there’s another whole tale in that name)
The “raven-haired beauty” story comes from Dr Robin Pelteret who interviewed a descendent of the Serrurier family. http://www.pelteret.co.za
Jackie Loos’s excellent “Echoes of Slavery – Voices from South Africa’s Past” was published by David Philip in 2004.
Estate Papers and Inventory of Johan Godlieb Barendsz, dated 7 Aug. 1784, MOOC 8 49.49 http://databases.tanap.net/mooc/main_article.cfm?id=MOOC8%2F49%2E49&freesearchkey=Barendsz
Godlieb’s memorial requesting dispensation to marry can be found at the Cape Archives under the reference: KAB; Source: CO; Vol. No.: 3961; Ref. No.: 117. It (rather movingly) reads:

1833
To Sir Lowry Cole
The memorial of Godlieb Andreas Barends humbly showeth:
That your Excellency’s Memorialist is now labouring under serious indisposition from which he is not likely ever to recover and having for nearly 28 years cohabited with a woman named Jacobina Petronella Dianas by whom he has a large family is desirous of marrying her before his death.
That memorialist uncertain whether he will live long enough to have his banns published in the usual manner before his marriage humbly prays your Excellency will be pleased to grant him a dispensation of the same.
Memorialist, as in duty bound, will ever pray,
GABarends

(The opening and closing form of words is traditional to these Memorials or personal requests to the Governor)