Compiling the family line for the Beaufort West Morkels was quite an achievement. Margaret Thebus and her late mother Margaret Lodewyk were the main drivers with assistance from others, as described in the article under ‘Morkel Ancestors’. My contribution was to try and link Gert Thomas MORKEL and his descendants who became that branch of the family to the Morkel Genealogy. There were two likely candidates – Hercules born 1821 and his cousin Hercules Adriaan, born 1823. According to the GISA Genealogy the first Hercules (born 1821) died young. However, PW Morkel’s Genealogy had that date for his baptism, so he could have grown up, but there is no further information about him. I chose him as the most likely candidate for our link because the other one, Hercules Adriaan (born 1823) was married with children.
A week or two ago, a contributor generously sent along two website URLs that contained the baptism and marriage registers for Gert Thomas MORKEL. It showed clearly that his father was indeed Hercules Adriaan MORKEL and his mother Flora MORKEL (unmarried) – we know that her maiden surname was SIMON. It seems that Hercules Adriaan, a farmer near Nelspoort (not far from Beaufort West) and field Cornet for Beaufort West maintained two families. He clearly did not neglect Flora and her children. Four girls were baptised in 1856 and Gert Thomas in 1864. The marriage register entry for Gert Thomas has him as a farmer at Salt River Vlei in the Beaufort West district (look it up on Google Maps) so Hercules looked after all his children, whether with his wife or with Flora SIMON.
I am in the process of updating our website to reflect this new information. The article under ‘Morkel Ancestors’ has been updated and posted. It will be much harder to change the Morkel Genealogy. The Family Tree Maker Program I use is amazing and versatile but I still have not figured out how to make this change without laboriously erasing and whole Beaufort west line and re-typing it all. I encountered this problem also trying to correct the error I had with Maria Dorothea LOUW – see below). One day I shall get on to this task.
