Index of Anglo Boer War Projects:

On the bottom of every project, I've also cross-referenced & put 'Jump Back to' links to the Main Portal Index, as well as to the applicable overarching SubProject.

On the main POW & Concentration Camp SubProjects:
I've included cross references at the bottom of each to the list of those pertaning projects.
Feel free to copy them into the main body of the text as suits you.

--The POW sub list is according to size, as indicated in the text.

--The Concentration Camp list is just as they appeared on the Geni Search. If somebody wants to reorganise them alphabetically, don’t hold back :-)

On the SA GEni Landing site, Welkom Cuzzins - https://www.geni.com/projects/South-Africans-Geni-Landing-Site-WELK... - ,
- I’ve put a link to the Main ABW Portal page under ‘Timeline’,
- & I’ve also detailed links to all the Concentration Camps under ‘Places’

Hi Sharon, this probably isn't the right place to post this (but there are worse places to post this).

My understanding of the Boer War / Boer War Concentration Camps has fundamentally changed over the last decade. I found, growing up, that South Africans tend to divide the war into two; us and them. Especially when we're discussing the Concentration Camps.

I have found in my research that descendants of Henry James Hanford (a Liverpudlian, most likely born in St. John, New Brunswick, British North America) not only fought on the side of the Boers but were also sent to British Concentration Camps (Kimberley). I've also ventured into the Hall family of Nelspruit and found that one of the sons of Richard Thomas Hall (of Falmouth/Devoran, Cornwall) was sent to the Middelburg and Belfast Concentration Camps.

Consequently, my view of Johannesburg, Kimberley, Kroonstad etc. in the 1870s/1880s has fundamentally changed. I see English, Welsh and Irish families marrying into old Afrikaans families (did the Scots prefer Natal?). I see a bustling, thriving society much less stratified than what I was led to believe.

The Boer War was a tragedy; one that included fathers against sons, brothers against brothers. Please don't take this as a criticism, rather an observation of my own. In reality, the lines were never quite so clearly drawn.

At the siege of Mafeking, one of my paternal great grandfathers was behind the cannons, and one of my maternal great grandfathers was inside. :-)

I am married to a Brit, but that doesn't blind me to the fact that the Anglo Boer war was an unconscionable war, for which the British should be ashamed. The fact that the Boers went on to do unconscionable things themselves, and that English speaking South Africans are no more British than the Afrikaans speakers are Dutch, was easily forgotten by the Afrikaner ruling party in my youth.

It's a complex issue, no doubt - but the atrocities are unquestionable, and this group of projects is a very valuable addition to the Geni SA field of work.

Sharon, that's true; the British / Boers distinction (even then) wasn't as binary as what the old guard would have had us believe. Not to mention the distinction between Boer and Boer; the Bittereinders and those that joined the National Scouts etc.

The Boer War was an invasion by foreign force, but concurrent to the Boer War there was a sort of civil war that permanently fragmented the Afrikaner/Boer identity. Every step of the way it was further fragmented 1902, 1910, 1914. The terrible cost of the Great War of 1914-1918, so shortly after the Boer War.

That's why my opinion has changed so much over the years. If we draw an imaginary line between English speaking, Afrikaans speaking and native South Africans we essentially dividing the true cost to South Africans. I look at photos of 1880/1890 South Africa and there is so much promise! Perhaps the most evil thing about the war is that it ever took place at all. Had both sides had better leaders and had it all been settled amicably, just think what might have come of it.

It's a very interesting topic, Drummond.
I know not much more than I was taught in apartheid history in high school, so I'm not pretending to be an expert.
It seems clear to me that many of the 1820 settler farmers were boers in every sense by the time of the ABW. Dick King's ride is to protect the boers, for example. This was never made clear in history lessons though. I'm sure even less so in Afrikaans schools.

I also have an understanding of the British motive in the ABW as gaining access to the mineral wealth that the Boers had discovered. That is what I mean by an unconscionable war - and I don't understand how that could have been settled amicably at all.

Smuts, my ancestor, finds he has a gift for international statesmanship at the end of the war - but that seems to me about how to negotiate the best peace if you're the loser. Equally, I understand the 'hensoppers' as acknowledging the moment when there was no way to win. It's the idea of the 'joiners' that I don't get. Were there actually boers who changed sides and took up arms against their own? About these people I was never taught, and this, indeed, would suggest that they must have thought the Brits were right and they were wrong. Perhaps you know more about that?

On my father's "Afrikaans" side, my fourth great grandmother Clarissa Gertruida Bothma (Dry) was the daughter of Thomas Dry, an 1820 Settler. The 1820 Settlers seem to have integrated really well, compared to those that arrived later (post Transvaal annexation). By an amicable end I mean peace post 1st Boer War (1881). The British agreed to complete Boer self-government in the Transvaal under British suzerainty. That should have been the end of it.

As I understand it, there was great upset and anxiety amongst the British who had ventured into the Transvaal post annexation, thinking that their interests would be better protected under Crown rule than under the Boer. There were protests where they set Union Jacks on fire and paraded effigies of Gladstone around.

Meaning that, whilst the lure of mineral wealth was most likely the primary motivation, their discontent and lack of self-determination was another major issue (None of which I consider a valid motive).

The history books say "tensions erupted" in 1899, but what of the Pretoria Convention and London Convention? I don't fully understand the The Jameson Raid and its effect. However, my Stielers were Staatsartillerie and were at the Johannesburg Fort during its construction post raid. I read an interesting article about (the population's "feelings" about) the guns at the Fort being directed towards Johannesburg rather than towards an external threat.

I have a page from a newspaper (handed down to me by my grandmother) the headline reads "Hertzog resigns: Smuts now Premier". I've always been rather divided on Jan Smuts. He was one hell of an orator. I've watched a few of his speeches: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/general-smuts-addresses-the-mothe...

Smuts quite ruthlessly crushed the Rand Rebellion; bombing his own people. I don't know enough about him to try and reconcile Boer War Jan Smuts with Rand Rebellion Jan Smuts. I do hold him in very high regard however. Louis Botha is equally perplexing.

As for the joiners; I read a paper by F.J. Loots on OpenUCT:
https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/item/18126/thesis_hum_1949_loots_f...

In it he talks about land ownership and how, in the 1890s, a new property-based economy reared its head (thanks to shortage of land and discovery of minerals). This left the poor "bywoner" class destitute and poor. There's a quote: "Upon the entire remoteness or the veld the invasion or the instruments and the men of modern industry and commerce had a disturbing effect. The new towns meant a money economy instead of a subsistence economy. The new industries meant the habits of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Before the tide of economic progress the slipshod habits of a subsistence economy became improvidence and the old easy-going ways became insolence punishable by bankruptcy and impoverishment"

Perhaps the joiners had a certain prescience? Their farms destroyed, women children dead in camps (or worse fending for themselves in the veldt), destitute and poor while the Empire just kept funneling more and more and more troops into South Africa. Perhaps, with no end in sight, joining meant a kind of deliverance?

I don't know; I am no expert. Just an opinion.

On the question of 'joiners' - Perhaps some insight as to why English speakers would have joined - through the eyes of a child -Henrietta Emily Iris Vaughan - at the time. The boers appear to be harassing and stealing from the local towns.

' Yesterday the first Boers came. We looked at the milk bushes near the brick fields and saw the men on horses bobing and riding from one side to the great sloot on the other. Charles said Pop lots of farmers are riding near the bricks. Pop was reading his new book about Minie haha Hiawatha laughing water and would not listen. Then the next thing lots of men were riding in the street and Willem ran and said "seer dit is de Boers and Pop said My God so they are and then the Boers were opening the gate. They nearly all had beards like men in the bible. They took Pop away in his slippers and no hat. Mom ran after him and heres your cap can I bring your boots He said to hell with boots look after the safe keys.... Pop said today that what he did not see well was a man called Smuts and his 59 Boers going over the dam wall to Cradock. Pop says it is all this silly pass friend and sentry go business taking up so much time. Boers don't have that and they never get caught. They always see the columns miles away and then come after and pick up all the bullets and guns and tired horses the columns leave behind. What a disgrace Pop says. I think so too. Now the boys [boers] have taken Naughty and my horse with the mange which military left and Charles also.' ' [Vaughan, Iris. 'The diary of Iris Vaughan'. Cape Town:Stormberg. >1958. Print. pp 19; 23] Geni Diary of Iris Vaughan Project: https://www.geni.com/projects/The-Diary-of-Iris-Vaughan/33296

Ahh the long shadow of the English/Afrikaans divide after the ABW on the lives of white South Africans:

- My grandpa Doubell was a Smuts desendent - my granny, a Botha. Their children were brought up Afrikaans until an NG predikant preached against men who brought war into the kerk when my grandpa wore his British uniform to church during WWII. My grandpa got up and left, & his family spoke English & became Presbyterians from that day on.

- I remember having to sing the national anthem in Afrikaans at school, & not being allowed to teach English in an English school without first passing a university test to prove I was fluent in Afrikaans!

-"Remember Majuba!" was yelled in the faces of my brothers when they were training as conscripts in the army in the 80s. (They were puzzled, and had to go and look it up.)

- Even today, the animosity towards my British husband by the Afrikaans husband of his South African born daughter is cringeworthy. The risk that his granddaughter might become English speaking by association with him, is apparently too great.

I would be interested to find out how many Jewish soldiers fought in the Boer War, especially new immigrants to Cape Colony. My great-uncle (Morris Spiers) was born in London, moved to Cape Colony with his family, and enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland regiment. We have a photo of him in full regalia (kilt...), I understand that this regiment was badly defeated and that the Boers considered the kilt an easy target. The incongruity of the offspring of immigrants from Minsk and Kaunas going to battle in a kilt still strikes me as odd, but my child grandfather was so jealous of the uniform that my great-grandfather, who was a tailor, made him a child version.

Boere Trek Argentinië toe:
https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/insight/2070792/research-re...

Carel, did you watch the video linked in that article?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h39nq0KqHs&feature=youtu.be

My heart, when he said "this is the house where I was born, this is where I want to be buried". That resonated with me to my core. Whatever my life, my heart belongs in Africa.