South African roots: the villages your family left
British South African family history usually runs through one of two doors: the 1820 Settlers, four thousand people recruited in family parties from across rural Britain for the Eastern Cape, or the mining rush that followed gold to the Witwatersrand at the century's end, when the deep-level men of Cornwall arrived in their thousands.
The 1820 Settlers: recruited by the parish
The 1820 scheme gathered its parties county by county, and the settler lists survive with leaders' names and home districts: parties from Somerset, Wiltshire, Kent, Devon and beyond, farm and trades families together. Their descendants' surnames map back to the English shires with unusual precision because the recruitment was so local.
The Cornish: to the Rand
When gold was found on the Witwatersrand in 1886, Cornwall's hard-rock men were the most experienced deep miners in the world, and they went in such numbers that by the end of the century they were sending as much as a million pounds a year home. Whole villages around Redruth and Camborne lived on Rand wages. Many families came back; many stayed and became South African. Read the full Cousin Jacks story →
Tracing your actual ancestor
The 1820 Settlers are exceptionally well documented: the party lists, ships and home counties are published and searchable through settler descendant societies and the South African archives. For the mining generation, the outward passenger lists from 1890 at The National Archives at Kew record the traffic to the Cape ports, with home addresses from 1922 pointing back to the village.
Every event above links to dates, the organiser's site and places to stay nearby. Stand where your family stood.