Updating the Vorster Line

When I came across the vorster.net website in the corona year, I discovered my paternal grandmother wasn’t the first wife of my grandfather. Neither was my father’s oldest brother my paternal grandfather’s first child.

I remember staring at the screen, unsure what to feel first – surprise, sadness or curiosity. The latter won, as I went on a quest to check whether this information was correct, and various genealogy websites confirmed it.

I’d asked my father about it, and he said he’d never known. It seemed strange, but there might be good reasons for it:

• In the time my father was a child, parents weren’t open with their children about anything in their own lives, feelings or anything really.
• My father was 8 years old when, at the end of 1949, he ended up in an orphanage, where he stayed until the end of 1957. While there, he saw his father only twice a year during two of the four annual school holidays.
• During the research Susan and I did for our family tree and about our ancestors, we found that my grandfather’s first wife and first son probably died during the trek back from Angola to South-West Africa (now Namibia).

In 2020, I purchased a genealogy program and started transferring information from the vorster.net website. One by one, I entered all the information, starting with our progenitor, Jan Vorster. Of course, by then, I had already entered my father’s information, that of his parents, his siblings, and the generation coming after that.

My full intention was to get the information on the website updated too.

As said, all of this was in the corona year of 2020, and every evening, I worked tirelessly on transferring the data, as my desk was in the middle of our living room. In December 2020, our youngest daughter moved out. My desk got a new home upstairs, in her old room. That was when my work on the family tree and the genealogy program came to a standstill, as I chose spending my evenings with my husband.

Until this year, when Susan and I decided it was time to tell the stories from our family, and consequently created this website.

I sent a message to the webmasters of vorster.net to inquire about how to add information on their site. It was easier than I’d expected.

On 27 October 2025, I set the first step on the quest to have our family recognized as part of the Vorster… dare I say… clan.

I hadn’t expected the change to be done quickly, but when I checked the website the next morning, there it was – two more wives added to my grandfather’s profile, and eight more children.

When I saw my father’s name on the screen, it felt like lighting a candle in a forgotten room.

This was only the first step in updating the information on vorster.net. Those eight children all had children of their own, and grandchildren, and maybe some even already have great-grandchildren. Getting all the information will be quite a challenge, as I am in contact with only one cousin on my father’s side.

But I – and Susan too – like a challenge.

To me, adding the information of the next generation feels like I had finally gotten them recognition. All but one of them had been ‘hidden away’ in an orphanage when they were children. Seeing their names on the site that holds our entire ancestry feels like finally letting the world see them too.

For too long, their stories lived only in the shadows. Now, their names shine among the others — as they always should have.

They deserve it!