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« on: Thursday 06 October 22 08:52 BST (UK) »
Hello everyone.
I posted here a few years ago about my family in South Africa but I know a little bit more info now, so I thought I’d do another post, to see if anyone can uncover anything I’ve missed, as it’s still a bit of a dead end!
My great-grandmother was called Johanna Magdalena Zacks (or Sacks, Zaks, etc.) She was known to family as Ma Jean.
She was born in 1906. One document has her birth place as ‘Lynesburg’ but I’ve struggled to find this place. I wonder if it’s actually ‘Laingsburg’ or something? She died in Salt River, Cape Town, in October 1971.
Her bother was Gert Isaac Zacks, known to some family members as ‘Uncle Bertie/Boetie’. He was born in Cape Town in 1904 and died in Cape Town in 1979.
We were always told she came from a Jewish, possibly Russian or Eastern European family. I recently did a DNA test and I am 6% ‘Jewish Peoples of Europe’ so that makes sense. My mum, a granddaughter of Johanna, did a DNA test and got 17% ‘Jewish Peoples of Europe’ and for her, it pinpointed ‘Jews in Southwest Latvia, Lithuania, & Northwest Belarus’, ‘Jews in Southwest Latvia & Lithuania’, and ‘Jews in Southwestern Lithuania’.
We know that Johanna married a man whose surname was Wasmuth and she had three children with him between 1926 and 1930: Theodore (AKA Trevor), Kathleen Maud, and Fredericka Hildegard (AKA Freda).
However, so the story goes, Mr Wasmuth was not very nice to Johanna, and another man stepped in to help her. He was my great-grandfather, Albertus Lodewicus Antonie Stadler. His father had exactly the same name as him, his mother was called Gertrude Antoinette Palm (she later married another man named Joseph Cohen).
Johanna and Albertus never married (perhaps she left Wasmuth but they never divorced?) but they had four children together between 1935 and 1942: Antoinette Henrietta Gertrude, Albertus Lodewicus Antonie, Gloria Jean Patricia, and Jean Susan Gloria. She had another child, Carol (father unknown), in 1948.
Sadly, Albertus was lost at sea when his fishing trawler went down in a storm off Cape St Francis on 18/19 July 1942.
It does not look like Johanna ever remarried, and after Albertus, she continued to use the name Wasmuth, signing her children’s marriage stuff as either J. Wasmuth or M. Wasmuth. When she was buried, she was listed as ‘Johana Magdalena Wasmuth’.
But I don’t know who this Wasmuth chap was, I have not found a document for their marriage that fits.
There is one marriage in March 1926 between a Rudolf Frederick Gustave Wasmuth and a ‘Jannet Angelina Sacks’ (age 21, so a birth year of circa 1905) which is the right timeframe, but that name is dodgy… This woman signs it J. A. Sacks too.
And I have no idea who Johanna’s parents might be?
If anyone can find any info that I might have missed, I would be truly grateful! Thank you.
Russell
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