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I’m sure you all remember the Covid lockdowns — how we had to stay in and couldn’t go to restaurants, museums, the zoo, or anywhere at all. During 2020, I had many long chats with my father, who passed away in April 2021. Those conversations — and the unsettling stories from his side of the family — sparked my interest in researching my paternal family tree.
I already had my maternal family tree, as a friend at the time had researched it for me. My mother was born in the Netherlands, my father in the north of South West Africa, which was under South African administration after the Second World War. Finding information on my mother’s side of the family wasn’t that difficult, as Dutch record-keeping goes back to around the sixteenth century.
It’s my father’s side that is much harder to trace.. My father, his siblings and parents never even had a birth certificate. No, clergymen at the local church recorded births, as well as baptisms and marriages, in a book by hand.
When I started researching my paternal family tree, I often spoke to my father to verify the information. I remembered much of it from childhood stories, but I wanted to be sure I recalled them correctly. That was how I came across the website with the entire family tree of the Vorster family. I located my grandfather — father of my father — and discovered that he had been married before he met my grandmother. They even had a child, but both his first wife and their baby died on their trek back from Angola. That’s part of the history my daughter is researching.
I asked my father if he knew about the first wife, but he had never heard of her. It came as quite a surprise to him. What bothered me most was that there was no mention of my father, his siblings, or my grandfather’s third wife and their twins. Nor of their children and grandchildren. There are even great-grandchildren now, and we all deserve to be included — we’re all part of this tree too.
I’ve made it my mission to ensure the tree doesn’t stop where it currently does. Everyone who came after deserves their rightful place. This means contacting relatives for the details I need: full names, birth dates, and the same information about their offspring.
I have already contacted the website owners, and am in the process of updating the information. With this, I am uncovering so many fascinating details.
But it’s not only my father’s side that keeps me busy.
My mother had often told us how her family had sailed from the Netherlands to South Africa when she was eight years old. For some reason, the year 1953 stuck in my mind, but we couldn’t find any records to match it online. Then, after weeks of searching through 1953 records, I found a photo I had taken in 2022. It was of a form my mom had filled in, and there she had written that they emigrated in 1955.
That was when the penny finally dropped.
My mom was born in 1947. Adding eight years to that could never make 1953.
So, with this revelation, the search started again.
I love these searches. I feel like Alice in Wonderland, falling down the rabbit hole again and again. There’s something magical about finding proof of events that happened long before I existed. About seeing the stories my parents had told coming to life in old documents.
Not everything can be found online, though. I’ve enlisted Wendy — that’s what we call ChatGPT — to help me track down information. When she couldn’t find something, she even provided email addresses of the relevant authorities and drafted the text I could send. Yes, I can search for the information myself, but what takes me an hour to find, Wendy can usually uncover in under five minutes.
One word of caution when using AI — it can make mistakes. That’s why I always ask for source links — so I can verify everything myself. And while I’m doing that, I’ll be drumming my fingers, waiting for the owners of the Vorster family tree to update our details, and for answers to the many queries I’ve sent out.
I feel energized by this search and look forward to sharing what we’ve found, as well as telling the stories from both sides of our remarkable family.