To Readers of this First Blog

Why this blog:

This blog, starting in April 2009, is going to be about the Molteno and related families – their history over the past two centuries and more. I have been researching this history on and off for over a dozen years, including a wonderful couple of months spent working on the family archives at the University of Cape Town. And doing so has brought me in contact with numerous members of the family, and other people, all of whom have been wonderfully kind and generous. But my life as a publisher – I was the Managing Editor of Zed Books for 27 years – was too busy for me to be able to write up the materials I was collecting. But now I am retired. And I am able for the first time to spend a significant amount of time on this project. My intention is ultimately to turn the whole thing into a book.

Who it is for:

In the meantime, I would like to make what I find out available to anyone who is interested. I am also sure that there is a lot of additional material that other members of our far-flung family may have – stories, letters, recollections, heirlooms, family trees. It would be lovely if you could share these through the medium of this blog. I know that I, for one, would find such material fascinating and very valuable.

Frequency and Content:

I hope to post a blog every fortnight; possibly sometimes more frequently. These blogs will be based on the large amount of information I have already collected. What I am intending to do over the coming months is spend some time doing more research – it is amazing how new leads and possible sources of information keep opening up -- and the rest of my time writing up what I have already found out. The blogs I post will usually be stories or accounts of the lives of particular relatives, now long deceased. But some may contain shorter insights or reports on my ongoing research. I must stress that the texts are always provisional, and may have to be revised in the light of new information coming to light. I will also change these drafts for the purposes of the actual book.

Your contributions:

Anyone reading these blogs is most welcome to post comments and contributions, but I will be moderating them. Also, if you want an automatic email alert when I post a new blog, let me know and I will put you on the alert list.

Finally, I have compiled, and am constantly adding to, three big documents that may be of interest to you. They are:

1) A Molteno Family Timeline: This is records detailed events in the life of individual members of the Molteno, Murray and other related families ever since George Anthony Molteno in the 1780s. It is currently organised by year. But it can be sorted by precise day and month (where available); by the person one is interested in; and by where the event happened (e.g. Cape Town or Scotland). This is an Excel file.

2) Molteno Family Index: This lists every member of the family, again including related families, that I have come across since the 1780s. It contains information about each person’s year of birth, year of death, marriage(s), children, parents, main country where they lived, and a few remarks about the person concerned. Being also an Excel file, it is sortable alphabetically by person, or by location, or by date of birth or death.

3) Molteno Family Tree: This is in a programme called Family Tree Maker. You can therefore only look at it if you have got this programme installed on your computer (buying it is relatively inexpensive). I should add this document is both in urgent need of being updated, and not immediately available since I am having difficulty in transferring the original version to my current laptop.

I look forward to this family history project enabling you to share in the intense interest and joy that it is giving me.

Robert Molteno