29/11/2025
The clock is ticking. The countdown to the end of our Window on Yesterday photo story competition has started. Have you submitted your black-and-white photo story for our Window on Yesterday photo story competition yet? Don’t miss your chance — send in your photo story and let the timeless power of black and white help your family’s voice live on. Hurry! The competition closes at midnight on 30 November 2025. Entry details are available at the following link: https://forms.gle/fVARHkKG5Ppma22q6 (English form) / https://forms.gle/XWAtW3cCnrrQcdUi7 (Afrikaans form)
Here is a good example of a photo story from one of our entries if you still need some inspiration. The photo story titled The Lost Boy of La Provence was written by Christa Meyer Rautenbach.
Every family has its secrets, but ours was hidden behind a changed name and a faded photograph. My grandfather was Jacobus Petrus Roux le Roux, born on 26 May 1892 on the farm La Provence in Franschhoek, a descendant of the proud French Huguenots who had fled religious persecution in the late 1600s to find refuge in the Cape. Yet when he died in Sasolburg in 1974, he was known not as Le Roux, but as Hendrik Ferreira.
For decades no one in our Ferreira branch knew the family name had changed. His past was cloaked in silence, no photographs, no stories, only a gap that begged to be filled.
About ten years ago, curiosity turned into determination. I began tracing our family line, paging through archives and cemetery registers, scouring baptismal records, and connecting with distant cousins. Still, there was no trace of the mysterious Ferreira ancestor before 1930. Then, in 2023, after countless hours spent studying Le Roux family trees, and with the help of DNA analysis and patient friends, the truth at last surfaced. What we discovered was both heartbreaking and illuminating.
My grandfather’s mother, Magdalena Catharina Le Roux, died eleven days after his birth. Her four children were left motherless: six, four, one, and the newborn baby. The infant was taken in by one of her childless sisters. Barely a year later, his father, Joseph Daniel Le Roux, married Magdalena’s youngest sister Elizabeth Catharina, and six more children were born.
At the age of twelve, the boy was brought back to La Provence to help on the farm. Later, he became a clerk in his uncle’s law office, an opportunity that would prove disastrous. In 1925, tragedy struck three times: he was accused of taking money from the firm, and his young wife, Hester Isabella du Plessis, died by su***de. The same year, his elder brother also passed away unexpectedly. Overwhelmed by scandal and grief, his father disinherited him, and the family records fell silent.
Five years later, a man named Hendrik Ferreira appeared in Steynsrus, marrying my grandmother, Magdalena Christina Mienie, in 1930. No one suspected the truth, that Hendrik Ferreira and Jacobus Petrus Le Roux were one and the same.
Nearly a century later, I found three elderly daughters of his father’s second marriage. They confirmed the story and handed me a small, timeworn photograph of my grandfather as a child, the only image linking his two lives. To my Ferreira and Le Roux relatives, who had believed his past was lost forever, it was a revelation.
That photograph is now more than a relic; it is a bridge between families, between loss and discovery. It reminds me that genealogy is not only about names and dates, it is about reclaiming forgotten truths. Through this picture, a lost son of La Provence finally came home.
You ran from your past, Oupa, but I found you in this photograph — the boy you were and the man you became are one again. Rest easy; your family knows who you are.
