“I am a flower of the open field and a lily of the steep valleys, like them whose bloom is brief, I to shall fade away.” Watercolor by Wendy Harty, 2023, Jeane’s daughter.

Four hundred years ago, people didn’t use last names. As they gathered into villages and left the hunter gather era, their identification changed. Sometimes they used the place where they lived as an identifier. Thus, my 12 the grandfather, was called Hendrick Roelof Schenck Hendrisckse Van Nydeck 1446-1520. Isn’t that a handle? Schenck meant cup-bearer, the “se” meant son of Hendrick, Van meant of and Nydeck was the name where they lived.

My eleventh great grandmother was Neeltje Evertson Lambertsdotter 1524-1570. Can you guess her father’s name? Lambert Evertsz Hendrickse, born 1501 at Ultrecht, Pays-Bas which would today be Holland. Neeltje did not have the Hendrickson name that my great grandmother, Samantha, would use as a last…

A button was lost near Bathurst in the Eastern Cape. Not any old button, but a rounded brass button that had once shone brilliantly on the tunic of a soldier. How it was lost will remain a mystery. So many things go missing when armed forces are constantly on the move during a war: buttons, buckles, stirrups, cap badges and so on.

Over a hundred and twenty years later the button was found by Theo van der Walt, who has developed an eye for such treasures from the past.

He looked closely at the embossed design on the button and made out the figure of a horseman and the number five. Could it have come from the Light Dragoons, he speculated, and turned to members of the Eastern Cape branch of the South African Military History Society for assistance in identifying the origin of the button, made from gilded brass.