For some time now I have been considering tracing my family. However this may be particularly difficult because I only know my mothers side and in saying that I only know a limited amount. The reason for this is that my mother was very secretive about her background. For many years my mother told me she was English and as a child I had no reason to doubt this. She never talked much about her life as a child or her school years and I never asked. I knew she had a sister living in Kent UK and one sister was in Durban and later moved to Sydney and subsequently died.

It turns out that my mother came from South Africa, she did say Orange Free State but who knows it could be timbucktoo. She also said that she came from a big family – 6 or 8 children and one of her brothers was not so good, I can’t remember her telling me much more about her siblings. I do remember a story my mother used to tell me about the death of her parents…. her mother died first and a year later almost to the same day, her father woke up and said his wife came to visit him in the night – said it was his time. There was a picture on the wall of both of them and the picture fell to the floor and the glass broke – that day her father died of a massive heart attack. My mother also use to say to me, “Pauline my mother said – a mother always keeps a family together – when she dies the family falls away from each other” and I do think that is true. 

My mother passed away in Aug 1999 – we were estranged for 17 years, although we did keep intouch via mail and I was meant to meet her in the Sept of 1999 – clearly it was not meant to be.

One day a couple of years ago I was going through some of my mothers papers in my filing cabinet and came across my grand parents names.  I thought I would do a google search of their names and low and behold their gravestones appeared before my eyes – dont you just love google and so the search began. It is quite time consuming and with a name like Botha it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. This year I joined ancestry.com, that has been helpful – to date I have found all 8 siblings and have a date of birth for 5 of them. I dont think any of them are still living, I can’t be sure of this and I think my mother was the youngest, but now I have hit a wall – I dont seem to be progressing any further – need some clues of how to move forward.

 ue