Our Stevens family is descended from two very distinct lines - the Stevens / Horsman ancestry of Horace Dainton Stevens which is very English (Wiltshire / Somerset / Yorkshire) and the Ellis / Delport family of Magdalena Maria Ellis which has a very Afrikaans background.

Magdalena Maria was born to Robert Ellis (Scottish background) and Maria Catharina Susanna Delport, the latter the daughter of Lucas Petrus Marthinus Delport and Isabella Elizabeth Els. As is very common of an Afrikaner Isabella Elizabeth Elsis a descendent of a few of the original Cape settlers - Dutch, German and French. The original Els settler in South Africa was Johannes Martin who was born in Stendal, Germany circa 1744 - a rather late settler given the mass Dutch settlement was in 1652. Johannes Martin married Anna Maria Pieterse (Pietersz) whose grandfather was Andreas Pietersz, born in Lubeck, Germany and who settled in South Africa. Andreas had 3 children with Christina van de Caep (van der...

Goodness gracious!

Today I turn 40 years old - and how fast those 40 years have passed by. I'm back to researching the family tree again now that we are settled in the Netherlands. I've made a little bit of progress on the Schultz tree from Prussia - my ancestors who lived a few miles from the Black sea in a small farming hamlet called Gross Luckow. You can't even call it a cillage it is so small. I shall plan a trip there - it's around 850km from where I live and not easily accessible by train / plane so a good drive it'll be.

I recently popped by the Walloon Church (Waalsekerk) in Amsterdam which since the 1600's has been a Calvinist church, which welcomed the French religious exiles (Huguenots / Protestants) and which to this day holds a weekly service in French. Jan Nel (Jean Neel) was baptised in this church in 1687 before his parents whisked him off to South Africa that same year. He was the progenator of pretty much all the...

Hi Guys

Lucy and I are emigrating yet again, this time to the Netherlands. The big move will happen on the 27th of January 2011 - and will see us relocate to Amsterdam on a "permanent" basis.

With love

Mal and Lucy

To all my Brown relatives,

I've made some good progress in tracing the ancestors of the Graham Hazle branch of your family. I've been curious for ages as to where the "Graham" comes from as a common middle name for many generations. I've finally found it!

John Hazle married Margaret Graham in 1792 in Scotland. Graham as a middle name does not appear in the next 2 generations but then becomes a regular occurence for a number of generations. Clearly George Douglas Hazle had enormous respect for his grandmother.