Missing piecesInvestigations of my family history, which illuminates huge themes and burning issues—race, class, migration, globalisation, war and peace. “Missing pieces” is both about the making of white South Africa and the making of me. |
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In 1908, my 16-year-old grandmother sailed with her parents on the Saxon mail ship from Southampton to South Africa. They were part of a late wave of unemployed miner families seeking work in the new gold mines. My St Ives grandfather emigrated one year later. I have often wondered what they were expecting of their adoptive country, and what values they brought.
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Gravestone of Eliza Jane Pearce, Perranuthnoe, Cornwall. Photo Lesley Lawson, 2025.
After trawling through the archival data on my Pearce and Roach forefathers I find myself trying to understand broader patterns and their significance. The first is the impact on families of the high infant mortality that defined my working-class ancestors.
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Great-grandmother Eliza Jane Pearce, circa 1908.
There is pocket containing notes and keepsakes at the back of the bible that once belonged to my great-grandfather James Pearce. I have kept them as they were—letters and photographs treasured by my mother and grandmother. And most surprising, a tattered grave receipt for Eliza Jane Pearce dated 1894, Barrow-in-Furness cemetery. My great-grandmother Eliza-Jane was beloved of my mother and the subject of many conversations, but I knew for certain that she died in Durban, South Africa, and at quite a great age.
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Mine ruins outside Barrow-in-Furness. Photo Christina Howker Ravan, 2009
After my mother’s death, I found a tattered bible among her possessions inscribed by my great-grandfather James Pearce of Barrow-in-Furness. I recognised it as the volume my grandmother Mabel Roach would diligently read on a Sunday. (Goodness knows how, with its microscopic font). But of her father, she never spoke.
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Theses plates were part of a set of Devonshire mottoware that graced my childhood home for as long as I can remember. I knew they had belonged to my grandmother, but it was only recently, through my family history research, that I understood their significance.
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Cornish tin miners, late 19th century. Photo Wellcome Collection
Apart from my parents, my maternal grandmother Mabel Roach (nee Pearce) is the only ancestor that I have actually met. * In that sense Granny Roach is not one of the missing pieces of my family story. But my discoveries during this research throws a whole new light on her persona.
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This is the only photograph that I have of any of my St Ives ancestors: great-grandfather John Roach, born in 1849 to Ann and John Roach. Like all John Roaches before him, he was a man of the sea.
I never heard tell of him: my grandfather (his son) died long before I was born, and my grandmother was a person of few words. But this photograph found its way into our family archive, such as it was.
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In days gone by, pilchards were the “silver darlings” of St Ives, supplying “meat, money and light all in one night”. Meaning a healthy diet, oil for lamps and reliable incomes. Throughout the 19th century, the pilchard catch drove the St Ives economy, providing fishing jobs and other industries that served them—the boat builders, coopers, rope and net makers. Women were central to the salting and curing of the fish, the majority of which were exported to Italy in sailing ships. The local folk described the journey as “going to the burning mountain” and were said to drink a toast to the Pope at the end of each fishing season.
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Research on the lives of my ancestors began as a quest to find a place of belonging in my adopted home of England.
In African culture one is taught to honour one’s ancestors. But as a young white South African I found it more comfortable to edit them out of my own narrative. So it was that in 2008 I began researching my ancestry with almost no knowledge about my forebears.
Going back and back and back through the generations was like being a child looking up at the clear night sky and wondering at unknown galaxies, the meaning of human life...