About

Collecting the Data

The Forgotten Highway Route Project delves into community histories along the Forgotten Highway Route.

The research’s first component was to compile church records in selected towns, and in specific congregations. For this exercise, we started by using two sets of data: Baptismal records of the Danielskuil congregation “VG Church”, now called the Uniting Reformed Church of South Africa; as well as the Griqualand West baptismal records of the London Mission Society (LMS) at its important historical base at the Moffat Mission, Kuruman.

Many more congregational, church, cemetery, and town-based data will be added!  This is a crucial source of rich original data about ordinary people and their often obscure lives. But these ordinary people were our ancestors, either genetically or socially.

Why is church data so important?

Many community members were not recorded in the early days – except by their churches. This includes baptismal, membership and burial records. We can discover people’s birth dates, places where they lived, their parents, children, and spouses. 

This enables people to find specific ancestors. The entries also provide brief descriptions of their historical and spatial context.
 

Placing your ancestors in context

The baptismal data-base generally provides two dates for each person: Birth and baptism.

Most often, baptism happens within a few years of birth. However, there are cases of people being baptised in their late teens, or in their adult years, or even in old age. This means that some people are born in a certain kind of period, and are baptised in a very different kind of world.

As you try to place your ancestor in historical context, keep this broad historical overview in mind for the Griqualand West region generally, and the town of Danielskuil in particular.

1890 - 1902: Growing poverty, culminating in the widespread destruction and local social divisions of the Anglo-Boer War 
1903 - 1933: Slow economic recovery although widespread poverty and low wages
1933 - 1936: Dramatic economic decline during the Great Depression
1937 - 1940: Economic recovery
1940 - 1947: Economic deprivation during the Second World War
1948 - 1975: Apartheid, racial divisions, growing economic prosperity and mining investment, and migration of many people into Danielskuil.
1975 - 1994: Economic decline and political repression in the last years of apartheid
1994 and afterwards: Political liberty, economic growth but local divisions and conflicts.

The Forgotten Highway Route Project is sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Futures (ICDF) at the University of the Free State, in partnership with the Karoo Development Foundation.