Looking back



One of the oldest documents I came across on my search, a death notice dating back to 1895

If I’ve been quiet the last two weeks, I apologise profusely. Simply put – I was a woman obsessed. I was unable to do anything but give attention to my obsession; even the children missed our usual playtime in the evenings while I fed my obsession… well… rather obsessively.

 

I am relieved – seriously – to have moved beyond the obsession. Relieved for myself, for my children and for my life. I can finally go back to normal and my kids have an evening-playmate once again.

 

Let me tell you the story of what obsessed me so…

 

The beginning of last week I decided to help my father to find out more about his family; beyond his own parents, he knew very little of his family history. What started out as a visit to a cemetery in Benoni on Johannesburg’s East Rand quickly awakened in me my love for history, for investigation and research, and my lifelong rather irritating compulsion to give a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves.

 

We walked that graveyard in the icy morning air, our hands freezing and our breath making little foggy clouds in front of our faces, looking for my father’s grandfather, who we only knew was referred to as ‘Ted’ Dye. What we found was an unmarked grave of a man called Edward August Dye. August I tell you! My first thought was, “What a funky middle name!”

 

Had his grave been marked by a headstone, our journey would most likely have ended there and then, but we couldn’t be sure. Was this Edward the Edward? How would we know? I couldn't just let this man, who lived a life, married, and had children, dissapear into obscurity under the earth - unmarked, unknown. He was my great-grandfather, his genetic make-up is present in me today, and present in my children as well. I just had to know, I had to give him a voice and try to tell his story. I  became a woman obsessed!

And so I started to dig. I spent days at the South African National Archives in Pretoria, calling up mostly death notices and estate files that were at times over a hundred years old, searching for more information on Edward August Dye and his relatives.

 

My father standing on his grandfather's unmarked grave - Edward August Dye

In awe I opened each new file or box and gently leafed through pages that were hand-written, stamped and officiated by people long gone to their graves. And I fell in love with the tragic story of my family’s journey. In my head, it read like a saga, with each new twist and turn spurring me on to find more, go further and give resonance to people whose history has all but forgotten.  

And the pride I felt when I was able to sit my father down and take him back five generations was a good feeling. A really good feeling.

What I realised on my journey – other than the fact that I am an obsessive person which I knew already, let’s face it – was how difficult life was for families back then. Times were hard, husbands died young, mothers who were equally as young were left with hungry and needy broods of children, and there was hardly two pennies to rub together. Mothers ran away, children were sent to orphanages, and in turn they had families who they abused because they used alcohol to escape their horrible childhoods. Cycles started which are still apparent in my own generation of cousins and their children – cycles of bad choices and addiction.

Then I look at my children and I heave a sigh of relief that the cycle stopped with my childhood, when my mother refused to raise my sister and I in such dysfunction. When she packed a few boxes in her beat-up car and stole us away from the madness. Where we lived in small apartments, eating only what my mother could afford to put on the table; and it was all ok because we were safe from the madness that had started generations before – death, running away, abandonment of babies and addiction-fuelled abuse.

I realised on my journey that cycles within families do not dissipate on their own over time like the most terrible hurricanes or tsunamis; instead they continue to destroy and hide the good in people until someone packs a couple of boxes in their beat-up car, standing in the eye of the storm, and says ‘not my children’.

And so, because of my mother’s bravery I can look at my children and see that I am doing a good job. I am giving them the love, attention and most of all security that my ancestors never enjoyed when they were just young children. The cycle has stopped, on my small branch of the family tree at least.