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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Hermanus Bosman’s journey
Dutch East India Company (VOC) ship in Table Bay, 1769. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
My paternal grandmother Joey was a direct descendent of Hermanus Bosman (1682-1769), progenitor of the South African Bosman family. But the 1707 arrival of my seventh great-grandfather in the Cape colony happened through misadventure rather than intent.
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Huguenot monument, Franschhoek, 2026. Photo Lesley Lawson
Not so long ago I discovered the name of my mystery paternal grandmother, and through her, my Cape Dutch ancestry. Johanna Petronella Bosman (aka Joey) was a direct descendant of Hermanus Lambertus Bosman, and Joey’s mother a direct descendant of Willem Jan Klerk—both officials of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) who had arrived in the Cape in 1707 and 1793 respectively (See previous post, Ancestor Portraits)
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Mum’s living room, Durban 1983.Photo Lesley Lawson.
There were three water colour paintings in my childhood home, said to be of our ancestors. They hung together in the dining room, two portraits on either side of an enormous yellow mansion. I loved the oval wooden frames that held the couple in their fancy dress costumes. But the faces, not so much.
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Little is known about Grandad Lazarus and his family after their arrival in South Africa, but I have caught glimpses of them in the South African archives. It seems that they settled in Boksburg, a small town east of Johannesburg with a growing population of Jewish immigrants.
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Steerage passengers on a steamship, 1890.
The disappearance of my paternal grandfather from our childhood went without a mention, and it was only when my brother began investigating my father’s family line in 2009 that I learned more about him. A sketchy biography in the South African Jewish Yearbook of 1926 provided his birthdate and sufficient detail for further research.
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May 5, 1943: just married! My parents’ wedding album shows them posing proudly in a lush Durban garden—dad and his best man in their starched army uniforms, mum and bridesmaid resplendent in their white net gowns. But beneath the glamour, this album is the cipher of family secrets.
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Hector Lawson
Mum said never to ask Dad about the war. My brother and I once found some medals in a dusty old box but we never mentioned it. There was also a battered album with postcards of crumbling African cities and faded photographs, taken in the desert by my father.
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Mabel, Jean and Samuel Roach in a Durban garden, circa 1925.
After his diagnosis with phthisis, Grandfather Samuel’s first thought must have been to take his family away from the mines and the polluted environment of Johannesburg.
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By 1906, large numbers of Cornish miners were leaving the Witwatersrand and returning home to England with miners’ lung disease. In some Cornish villages dying men could be seen lying on their mattresses outside the houses, taking fresh air in their final days.
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Miners underground at Langlaagte Deep, Crown Mines, 1920s.
Photograph Wikimedia Commons.
I first became interested in the lives of miners during the heady struggle days of the 1970’s when I lived in a disused mining village in Crown Mines, to the south of Johannesburg. The gold mine had recently closed, and Langlaagte Deep village was slowly emptying. Friends and I rented the cottages that had been built for white miners in the early 1900s.
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Miners departing for South Africa, Redruth station, 1905. Kresen Kernow archives.
In 1909 my grandfather, Samuel Roach, would have been one of the men on this same station platform en route to the rich gold reefs of South Africa.
An old sea captain told English writer Bernard Hollowood “of a Friday the platforms’d be packed with a great crowd of people, laughin’, cryin’, shoutin’ and so on. Then the train would steam in slowly and there'd be a great rush for the special carriages labelled “Southampton”. Then there'd be kissin’ and shakin’ and she’d move out, leaving the womenfolk and the children wavin’ and sobbin’.”
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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...