Johann, I'm curious, do you know if anyone has done a numerical analysis - as opposed to a percentage analysis - of the ethnic origins of the various waves of settler arrivals prior to 1900? Kind regards Delia Robertson On 2011/11/17 10:45 AM, Johann Hanekom wrote: > I have to agree with Keith about this - you only need to look at the VOC > shipping lists to see how many of our ancestors were German. Apart from > Colenbrander there are other sources documenting (and also complaining) > about the vast numbers of non-Dutch employees of the VOC.

On 20 Nov 2011, at 5:27 PM, DRobertson wrote: > Johann, > > I'm curious, do you know if anyone has done a numerical analysis - as > opposed to a percentage analysis - of the ethnic origins of the > various > waves of settler arrivals prior to 1900? > > Kind regards > Delia Robertson I'm curious, too, but what I wonder is why anyone thinks it important (hereditary diseases apart). "Ethnicity" is a somewhat woolly term, and does not exactly coincide with descent, as it also involves some environmental and societal aspects -- at least, in the popular understanding. Moreover, percentages are inevitably inexact, given that each fraction we are considering is a number divided by a power of 2, whereas percentages are divided by a power of ten. Starting with yourself and your spouse, and supposing that both of you have both parents of "pure" ethnicities, whatever that means, you immediately use up all the whole numbers in percentage terms (100%, 50%, 25%), even before you go back one generation more. That's the mathematical side of the problem; the geographical side is even worse, as anyone with any association with South Africa well knows! The country's political history means that very few families accepted as "European" have an entirely true history, with many ancestral ethnicities firmly suppressed and kept even from the family so as not to suffer the consequences of a "leak" by an unwary child. Thus, taking my family as an example, I have three grandparents born in Scotland and one in South Africa. The three Scots came respectively from Ayrshire, Aberdeen and Fife stock. All three would undoubtedly have a rich mixture of Celtic and Norse ancestors, as the Vikings were active on both the North Sea side of Scotland and around the Irish Sea. (Dublin is actually a Viking-founded City, though it has a Celtic name meaning "Black Pool", after a tidal phenomenon in the River Liffey at the point where the Vikings landed.) The remaining grandparent, born in South Africa, had a name that was clearly of German origin (Haarhoff), and the stamvader appears to have come from somewhere in Northern Germany, joining the VOC at Texel, as a knecht, early in the 18th Century, and there is a Marais somewhere in all that lot, too (French Huguenot). And Germany itself was a linguistic rather than a political term in those days, with its borders gradually developing as a result of successive post-war settlements over several centuries, and with "Germany" as a single political entity only coming into being after the Franco-Prussian War, and it gets worse as you progress eastward in Europe. Then there's my wife, surname Beelders. Good Dutch-sounding name, that -- except that the ethnic identity, while it undoubtedly included some Dutch, was well diluted over a long period in the Swartland. And, when you consider the fact that we inherit our fathers' surnames, and that there is almost always, in a new settlement, a greater or lesser preponderance of males (equally in South Africa, with mainly free settlers, and Australia, with the early influx of convicts -- males having been a majority of prisoners then as now), it is to expected that there would be a steady dilution as these men took up with women from among the locals. The main variation on this is in ex-slave populations, since female slaves were taken for domestic service as well as males for field work and other heavy labour -- I've not studied slavery in detail and my acquaintance with it comes mainly from fiction -- and this would of course affect the "Malays" in the Cape and the blacks in the United States. (And in the United States, to the extent that free men took slave women, the child would normally bear the mother's surname, which in turn might well be that of her owner.) My wife's mother was named Fulton, a very common name in Scotland, which was indeed where her father came from (Edinburgh -- but his father's family hailed from Berwickshire and the Tweed Valley, while his mother was a Cornish woman, both traced back, to the 18th and 17th Centuries respectively), so you see it is already getting complicated. And this is without allowing for adoptions resulting in a change of name, irregular unions and so forth, yet we've already lost count of ethnicities. I'd hate even to contemplate calculating the proportions for my only grandchild. I guess the moral of the story is (again excluding medical considerations) that what really shapes us is the social and economic environment we come from, at least as much as, if not more than, the "racial", national, "ethnic" or what have you make-up of our ancestors. That is where the real stories lie. And I guess that from that you can guess that I was a member of the old Liberal Party of 50+ years ago! (But I've lived in Australia for over 50 years now.) Andrew Rodger rodgera@audioio.com