Harrismith found

I was going through photos trying to find ones of Uncle Ronald when I came across 2 photos from Harrismith. There are people there and I am hoping that my cousins that lived in Harrismith may be able

to identify the ladies in the photo. The photo must be around 1956 or 1957 as my sister is the baby in the photo. My mother is in the centre, but who are the other ladies. Please leave a comment if you know who they are.

Do you recognise Harrismith or have I got it all wrong?

I can't work out who they are as in 1957 

Yvonne would have been 32 and Henrietta would be dead. Ellen would still be alive. 

The other photos are just here as I needed to find some and found these.

William, Suzie, Johanna, George and Annie?

Kathy, Jeneatta, Valerie, Vivien, Felicity and Rosemary

Les, Rosemary,George and Ronald

Hope you enjoyed the photos. Leave a comment with any thoughts.

Have an excellent day!

Henrietta is back

With all of the asking around I raised the ire of the Booyens clan as a whole.
Snippy emails were received from great children of the peoples who's photos I shared, asking as to how I had the photos. I think they felt that stalking was once more being practiced. This stalking was extreme as it was inter-generational and caused photos to be taken in the 1800. I know no bounds when tracking down relatives.

 It turns out that Henrietta's father was a bit of a rebel and married his 5 daughters off to English men. The surnames collected by these girls included, Ward, Gray, Welch, Cole, Churchill and Mathews. There is a whole blog about the family. Click here and have a read. It is extremely interesting. The Booyens are from good Viking stock.

Her name on her father's death notice is Hendrina Susanna, I gave this great consideration as to whether we needed to change her name to Hendrina. I thought about it for a while and realized that she was Hendrietta Welch for about 3 times as long as she was Hendrina Booyens. So she will stay Henrietta.

Finding this information has had a great tie in for me. Firstly we have photos of Ann Ward. She looked awfully chummy with my grandmother. Well mystery solved,

they were cousins. I also found Ann's wedding photo. I now need to see which of the other photos are of cousins. Once again I am suffering from Jessie's lack of documentation. It seems so silly to think that one should add names to Photo albums, especially as we have brains that are flooded with memories when we look at the pictures contained in them. The problem arises when other people are trying to make sense of our lives through the medium of photos that document our lives.

The second portion is that although Henrietta had tried to become totally English: she changed her name and her love of reading. She still had it ingrained in her to name her children after family members. We have Robert after James'

grandfather. Then James after his father. The solving of the mystery came with Weston Mathews, I always thought the Mathews was strange as surely it should have been Mathew, but no, it is Mathews as this is the surname of her youngest sister's second husband. Now I just need to solve the puzzle as to where the name Weston came from. I seem to recall the surname Weston somewhere along my sleuthing.

Hope you all have a wonderful day and just think this may have been written in a different language if our great great grandfather was not so full of it. 

Onward to the search for Henrietta

Thanks to Maureen, we are close to solving the Henrietta problem.

The Grays have been found and relatives have been extracted.
I am going to show all of the Booyens' family photos that I have so that I can ask all and sundry if they recognize these people.
Here is Henrietta's page.
 Here are the photos.
Firstly Henrietta

This photo is the two below this photo. Their great grandson says no, but I think they are the same. What to do you think.

Mr and Mrs Booyens

Dorothy Moolman Booyens

Pieter Booyens

and then lastly I don't know who this is but Jessie liked him.

Please leave a comment if you recognize any Booyens person.

Beth and Dora Found

So much excitement.  After a whole lot of time, I have solved the Beth and Dora question.

I had the photo in the collection and could not work out who they were. Today I came across a marriage certificate for Elizabeth and after a bit of filling in, there she was. The daughter of Elizabeth, named Dora.

This is also born out by the fact that Elizabeth and William are buried at Umzinto with Emma. What a lovely bossy lady she must have been.

They are just not us

I heard about a museum that had amazing stuff about the family. I tried to do a road trip, down to the museum to see this stuff. Once initial enthusiasm had passed, i just phoned and emailed the museum and was eventually able to receive the info via mail.

It was so exciting. I looked at the photos and was sure that they looked like family. Then after reading the attached docs, I realised, I was just stalking people with the surname of Welch.

Have a look, it is pretty interesting the fact that they have, even if they have nothing to do with us.
I suggest you download the docs to have a read, it may work better.

Here is the info and pictures. There are two pages after the photos describing the photos.

Hope you enjoy!