The 7 & 6 Pretoria News Legal Notice closes out Sarah's life

I was in Pretoria yesterday and decided to pop past the National Archives again, this time for my great-grandmother Sarah Petronella van der Veen, born Wessels.

My mother's female ancestors interest me, because so little is known about them and that we have very little to help with the research.

The dry, factual Estate Late files add very little insight. And yet, I get some sense of who they might have been and I find them interesting to browse and to read.

I noted that she was born in the Cape Province which I did not know, the information for her parents is left blank on her Death Notice, which would make it difficult to trace the Wessels ancestors.

I wonder what brought her to Pretoria; did she arrive with her parents, or come up to work or did she meet Arend Johannes van der Veen?

One of the challenges of this type of research is the variation of the spelling of names. Sarah, Suzara, Susara are just some of the options I have noted in her file. In fact the Estate Notice and her Death Notice are different!

This 7 & 6 advert in the Pretoria News, cut and pasted into Sarah's file, caught my eye, it makes me melancholy, the end of a life with an advert and a receipt to close it off.

She was Ouma to my mother and I have found traces of her in a dear little
brown suede photo album that Nan put together for Mom as a little girl growing up in Pretoria.

On the back of this van der Veen family photo Nan jotted down names and Ouma is back row on the left - Sarah Petronella.

Mom is 6 years old in the photo, so looking at the Death Notice, Ouma would have died soon after this was taken, she was 55 years old and 5 months when she died on the 1 July 1938.

I was excited to see that Sarah appears in one other photo in the little album and her role as Ouma is evident.

Sarah is standing behind Mom at a table, set on a veranda, for the birthday with an iced cake and tumblers for cold drinks, as well as 4 quite mischievous looking little boys, cousins perhaps?

From the photos around this one it seems to be Mom's 4th birthday.

Ouma is mindfully dressed, wearing a frilly blouse, a necklace as well as a brooch on her tailored jacket. It was her distinctive hairstyle that made me realise that this was her in the photo.

The building in the background looks so familiar too, time to google and do more research - is this the home of Ouma and Oupa van der Veen in Gezina, Pretoria?