The Missing Son

I grew up knowing that my father’s oldest brother – Uncle Ouboet – had four children. From old to young, they were Pieter, Anna and Ria (twins), and the youngest, Bennie. When I first started on our family tree in 2021, I asked my father about it, and he once again confirmed the information.

It was in that message that he mentioned that the wife of his oldest brother was the daughter of his mother’s second husband. That turned us in the right direction, and we found my grandmother’s husband.

How?

By following the naming pattern our ancestors mostly used, we found the name of her second husband. This is because the second child of my Uncle Ouboet and his wife, Anna Schoeman, had the same names as his maternal grandfather.

Solving that mystery made us stumble upon another – the one of a child absent from family memory.

The fifth child

My uncle didn’t have four children. No, he had five – Pieter, Anna, Ria and Bennie, and then a son born in 1954, between Pieter and the twin girls.

But why did my father not know about that child? And why does my aunt – the only living sibling of my father – not know about him either?

The baptism evidence

The image below clearly shows the baptism of five children of Petrus Johannes Vorster (Uncle Ouboet) and Anna Dorothea Schoeman (Aunt Anna):

• Pieter Jacobus b. 01.03.1953
• Christoffel Daniel Wilhelm b. 16.04.1954
• Anna Johanna Dorothea b. 18.09.1956
• Maria Magdalena b. 18.09.1956
• Barend b. 04.01.1961

My daughter and I ran through some scenarios that could declare the baptism of a fifth child. What if he died young? He was ten when he was baptized, but maybe he died shortly after, which is why my father spoke of four children? But then surely he would’ve mentioned that?

That was when I remembered a photo I had of my uncle, his wife and their four kids. The photo was from when we lived in Uis, Namibia, when I was still a baby of about nine months old. That then, was in 1967, three years after the baptism. This fifth child not being in the photo supported the idea that maybe he passed after the baptism and before this photo was taken.

The competing theories

Another scenario we briefly considered was that Christoffel Daniel Wilhelm Vorster, born in 1954, might be the same Christoffel Daniel Wilhelm who was the child of my grandmother and her second husband, and possibly born out of wedlock. Back then it was a grave disgrace, so maybe they wanted to hide him, and maybe his date of birth as we found it on geni.com (1945) was an error? I mean, 1945 and 1954 – anyone can make a typing error, right?

Of this latter scenario, one thing kept on bugging me – what a newly discovered family member mentioned about Stoffel and Saartjie – the two children of my grandmother with the Schoeman man. She said they were both baptized in Windhoek, and even gave me the same date of birth shown on geni.com – in other words, 1945.

This confirmed to me that Christoffel Daniel Wilhelm Vorster (1954) and Christoffel Daniel Wilhelm Schoeman (1945) were definitely two different people, the second being the uncle of the first.

I was back where I’d started: who is or was Christoffel Daniel Wilhelm Vorster and why didn’t Uncle Ouboet’s siblings know of his existence?

The online search

My daughter and I had already done some searches on different genealogy sites, but we just couldn’t find any trace of him.

That was when, in a kind of desperation, I turned to Google and simply typed in: Christoffel Daniel Wilhelm van 1954.

Imagine my surprise when the results returned a link to a Namibian Government Gazette. I clicked the link and used Ctrl-F to search for ‘Vorster’.

There he was… the full name, the same date of birth…

Susan turned to our friend, Wendy – our name for ChatGPT – to analyze this entry in the government gazette:

• 2044/2023 — This is the estate number (reference number) assigned for this estate file in 2023. To request documents from the Master of the High Court, you can use that number.
• Windhoek / 16 April 1954 — The entry states “Windhoek” immediately before the date of birth; this usually indicates the place of residence/registration or simply the place associated with the listing; the date of birth is 16 April 1954.
• 54041600243 — This is the identification number (ID number) of Christoffel Daniel Wilhelm Vorster. It begins with the date of birth (54 04 16), which corresponds to 16 April 1954; this is the standard format for South African/Namibian ID numbers.
• Swakopmund, September 30, 2023 — this is almost certainly the place and date of death.
• F.M. Oehl Trust cc, Unit 7, 32 Schanzen Road, Klein Windhoek, Windhoek, Namibia — this is the executor/estate practitioner handling the estate.

Upon asking Wendy to find more, she discovered unverified posts on Facebook of a Christoffel Daniel Wilhelm Vorster (69 years old) which referred to a suspected suicide in Ocean View, Swakopmund.

To say we were shocked would be an understatement.

We continued our search and found this:

We instructed Wendy to search for the family of Christoffel Daniel Wilhelm Vorster, which was when she found his wife. Several publications, such as newspapers, flipbooks and legal notices, listed Jacomina Johanna Elizabeth Vorster (ID 56112200260) as deceased, and in them mentioned Christoffel Daniel Wilhelm Vorster as the surviving spouse.

Online sources confirmed the passing of this couple.

We returned to the Facebook message of the alleged suicide, now concentrating on the comments section.

One person asked whether the deceased was ‘Stoffel’ who had been married to ‘Meinsie’, and another confirmed it. The coincidence that he was called the same as his uncle didn’t escape us. We searched for and found both their profiles on Facebook.

Diving into their profiles revealed more:

• Stoffel spoke of his younger brother, Bennie, who he said died far too young in 2001, only 48 years old, after bypass surgery and a consequent blood clot.
• Someone also spoke of his brother, Pieter, in the comments under a photo of Stoffel and his wife.
• Stoffel committed suicide about a month after his wife died of cardiac arrest. They said he didn’t want to live on without her.
• In the comments, we saw the names of his two sisters – Anna and Ria.
• In comments on Stoffel’s photos on Facebook, both of the twins referred to him as their brother.
• We discovered the names of Stoffel’s two daughters – Adele and Madelyn.

The comments we perused didn’t confirm to us that Stoffel was the biological son of Uncle Ouboet and Aunt Anna.

Blood brothers

When answering a question someone else had posed to Stoffel, he called Bennie his blood brother. To me, it was a strange way to refer to one’s biological brother. It also sparked a personal memory from back when we lived in Windhoek from 1978 to 1981. My best friend, Susan – my daughter is named after her – and I used a blade from one of those metal pencil sharpeners to each make a small cut in a finger, and then mixed our blood together. After that, we called ourselves ‘blood sisters’.

Blood brother can refer to two or more people not related by birth who have sworn loyalty to each other. This is in modern times usually done in a ceremony, known as a blood oath, where each person makes a small cut, usually on a finger, hand, or the forearm, and then the two cuts are pressed together and bound, the symbolism being that each person’s blood now flows in the other participant’s veins. – Wikipedia

Instinct tells me that Stoffel was not the biological son of my Uncle Ouboet and his wife, Aunt Anna; that he was not the biological brother of Pieter, Anna, Ria and Bennie. Instinct tells me that my father’s generation didn’t talk about adopted children.

However, instinct is not enough. Facts are.

Silence surrounding adoptions

My uncle was a young adult in the 1950s, while my father was a teenager. My father was a young adult in the 1960s, while by then all ‌of my uncle’s children had already been born, including Stoffel. After all, they were all baptized together in 1964.

In Western societies back in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in communities shaped by the church, and because of post-war survival thinking, people often wrapped adoption in silence. Talking about adoption could raise uncomfortable questions: infertility, illegitimacy, scandal, poverty, or loss.

Silence was a social balm. They believed the silence was kindness, but ironically, this often resulted in the opposite when the truth surfaced decades later, whether through paperwork or DNA, or a family member accidentally revealing the truth. That said, my father and aunt may genuinely only have known about the four children, and since adoptions weren’t openly spoken about, that might be the reason Stoffel Vorster wasn’t in the image from 1967.

Not talking about adoption was not an exception in that generation. No, it was often the rule.

From mystery to mystery

Just like we have solved the mystery of my paternal grandmother’s second husband, we also want to solve the mystery of this missing son. For this reason, we sent messages to his two daughters, but even after two months and despite sending a second message to each, the messages remain unanswered.

In the meantime, we have turned to other platforms for information, but are still no closer to solving this mystery. Even though the previous generation thought it was kind not to mention an adopted family member, we don’t believe the same. He was and is part of our family tree.

We will not stop until we know the full story. It needs to be told…