Hi Carole W. Thank you, I greatly appreciate you taking the time to reply to try to help me & I apologise for not replying sooner (& this lengthy reply). I understand I am asking for the impossible here with so little information to go on.
I have no documentation for John, just that my late Granny, Myrtle, told my brother he was from Motherwell, Scotland.
I am fairly certain John married before emigrating to South Africa but I have no details of his wife.
I am unable to download the certificate or view any information that requires a subscription/pay for view, because it is prohibitively expensive.
I know he was living & working as a master builder in Bloemfontein in the late 1800's, (where he & his partner built the railway station building), as the Cape to Bloemfontein railway was built in 1890, & from his 1901 pass; which he was required to carry to allow him passage to the brickworks during the Anglo-boer war. It may help to know the duration/type of apprenticeship he would have had to serve to become a master builder in Scotland but I have no idea where to find this out.
My mother, (Myrtle's daughter), says as far as she is aware all John's children were born in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
A few of them returned to the UK or went to Rhodesia, although it is difficult to find any information not knowing their married names.
I have no idea when or how old John was when he died, or dates for his children's births etc, other than my granny's. But I have just found Doug Stevenson's daughters, whom I hope can give me more information. My mother recently heard from her cousin Jimmy, James Stevenson's son, so hope he can tell me more too.
Finding any information in South Africa is extremely difficult as they don't have a system like the UK's Free BMD. (Apparently there used to be a website called Ancestry24 but it was bought by Ancestry UK so no longer exists).
Just finding a reference is proving nigh impossible. Most of the birth dates, (which I have deduced as being at least 2 years apart from each other), were before mandatory registration dates. Mandatory registration of births, marriages, deaths was instituted at different times in South Africa depending on where one lived. The Cape colony dates differed from Natal, Orange Free State etc.
If one is fortunate enough to find a reference, from this one must get the details as to where the record is held, type of document, Volume, Folio etc & order the record for a fee.
This I was told can take 6 months to a year to obtain. Now exacerbated by the queues for the new ID card system. In order to ensure one is attended to, & get 1 of the 300 tickets to gain entry to the Department of Home Affairs at 7am, one has to be there at 4am.
Even locating newspapers of the period is difficult, as not all have been listed or scanned & posted online. I don't know where to look for church records as I don't know what denomination John's family were. Although I do know they couldn't speak Afrikaans, so unlikely Dutch Reformed Church in SA, maybe Church of England?
I will add any information I find out. Thank you.
