Miners, Mercenaries and Millionaires

The last year has been a crazy time for everyone. Much of it was spent readjusting and coming up with new ways of doing things. And then my son reminded me that I hadn't touched my blog for ages. Added to that I still had several images to upload for Melkkamer: A Pictorial History. So today I'm back on blogger. To be fair my writing hasn't been dormant and there is another book in the workings. More to follow on that in the future ...

The working world has been forced to change the way we operate as a direct result of COVID-19. Significantly the various enforced lockdowns have led to a realisation that certain jobs can be performed remotely, given access to appropriate tools and information. The same could be said for genealogical research. Over the years researchers in the genealogy space have benefited massively from various digitisation projects which have made documentation, previously only accessible in a physical archive building, available at the click of a mouse. Not only has this process provided greater access to a global audience but it has also ensured the preservation of archived material. Here one immediately thinks of the fire at the Public Record Office in Dublin in 1922 which destroyed numerous valuable records. The digitisation projects are mammoth and costly, with full digitisation a long way off. But the temporary closure of libraries and archives as a direct result of COVID-19 has shown tha...

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I recently finished a writing job for a client through my excela WRITER business. So, if you are looking for help with documentation and presentation creation as well as content writing feel free to message me. All work can be done remotely. EMAIL : excelaWRITER@gmail.com Here's what a client had to say about  excela WRITER : " Stephen assisted my Company with the formatting and compilation of various high level documentation. The service was very professional, timeous and well executed. I will definitely make use of his services again. " Megan Britz, Employment Law Attorney Thanks to Darth Fandom for making the ad.

Just prior to the COVID-19 lockdown I completed the hardcover edition of my book Melkkamer: A Pictorial History for the De Hoop Collection . Copies of these will be placed in some of the accommodation at De Hoop Nature Reserve. While we wait for De Hoop to fully reopen for guests I thought it would be nice to make available digital copies of the pages from my book. My plan is to post four pages every Monday for the next 11 weeks. Feel free to download the pages, comment and subscribe. Read on for a bit about Melkkamer. Melkkamer was once a 7472 hectare farm situated on the western shore of Grootvlei, just opposite the De Hoop Nature Reserve, Cape, South Africa. In its heyday it was referred to as a ‘fine sporting estate’ with buildings that were ‘substantial and a credit to any part of South Africa’. Those buildings were built by an ancestor of mine, John Henry ‘Biddy’ Anderson. Over the years as farming activities declined the farm became a wonderful place for us to enjoy the mo...

STEPHEN D’ALTON excelaWRITER@gmail.com There’s no denying it, I am a massive fan of James Bond. From Ian Fleming’s ‘Spy story to end all spy stories’ through to the present day Bond films. I love them all. So much so, that when our son was born we named him Timothy after actor and fourth Bond Timothy Dalton. Bond is of course no stranger to Russia. For many years he traded blows with numerous agents of KGB and SMERSH (‘Death to Spies’). In the 1995 film Goldeneye Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond meets the aptly named Georgian assassin Xenia Onatopp. She asks him if he’s ever been to Russia to which Bond replies quite casually “Not recently. I used to drop in occasionally. Shoot in and out.” Xenia in response assures Bond that Russia has changed and is now a land of opportunity. And so it was for us at Subex, and our efforts to expand our customer base in the East. An opportunity came up to perform a software trial for a state run Telco in Moscow. With projects like these it’s crucial that p...

COVID-19. We hear about it all the time. It’s part of our everyday lives. A lived experience. You would be hard pressed to find anyone on this planet who hasn’t heard of COVID-19. And yet the opposite is true of its predecessor Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). According to the World Health Organisation SARS Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) is a ‘virus identified in 2003. SARS-CoV is thought to be an animal virus from an as-yet-uncertain animal reservoir, perhaps bats, that spread to other animals (civet cats) and first infected humans in the Guangdong province of southern China in 2002.’ 1 Sound familiar? Although the first cases of SARS-CoV occurred in November 2002 it was only officially recognised at the end of February 2003. ‘At the time, the Chinese government was criticized for responding slowly to the outbreak and concealing the seriousness of the illness.’ 2 It took several months before they ‘started sharing information with the World Health Organization (WHO).’ 3 The Guardi...

Cape Town, 14 April 2020. Hello World Day 19 and under the original schedule we would be coming to the end of the lockdown. However, government has decided, quite rightly, to extend the lockdown for a further two weeks taking us to the end of April. Of course this could be extended even further but indicators are that the lockdown has contributed to a levelling off of new cases. Figures last evening showed 27 deaths and around 2200 known cases. My second venture to the shops was a rather long and drawn out affair. At least I was able to stock up for at least another week. The car needed a bit of a run too so I drove around our neighbourhood en-route keeping one eye out for the police. I doubt they would accept my protestations of getting lost on the way to the shops! Fandom continues to write and contribute to various forums. I am working on some forex stuff with GlobalWebPay. If you are reading this and need to transfer funds from the UK check out my partner link http...

Cape Town, 2 April 2020. Hello World Can you believe it’s been nearly a week since we went into lockdown? Overall I think the government and general populace have done a remarkable job. Obviously there have been the problems with queueing for social grants but this was always going to be an issue. The effects of the lockdown seem to be showing in the stats too and over the past few days the number of new cases has risen only a bit to around 1380. South Africa’s COVID-19 related deaths currently stand at 5. Markets remain volatile and the South African Rand continues to take a pounding (pardon the pun) with one British Pound buying 22 South African Rand. Of course if anyone needs to transfer funds from the UK to anywhere in the world do give me a shout as I should be able to get you a very good deal on your forex transfer. Yesterday I left the house for the first time and ventured down to the shops to stock up on supplies. There was a queue outside Checkers but this mov...

A few weeks ago we attended a school carnival. Driving into the designated car park, an uneven and pot holed sports field, I noticed a brand new Porsche parked in a rather unusual spot near the entrance. It was surrounded by orange cones. I immediately recognised that this car belonged to Sinead, a friend of mine who along with her husband owns the recruitment agency Parvana. The Porsche’s Parvana branded number plate was a dead give-away. But why was the car parked there? Well it turns out that the security personnel who were directing cars realised that the low profiled Porsche would not make it more than a few metres into the parking area. So they directed Sinead into this spot and sealed off the area with cones. We all find it very funny and suggested to Sinead that she was doing this as a means of marketing. I decided to make a cartoon of this and sent it to Sinead. That cartoon can be seen below.

Cape Town, 29 March 2020. Hello World All quiet on the Cape Town Front. Almost eerily so. Fandom and I haven’t left the house since lockdown though I plan to take a trip out to the shops on Monday to stock up on supplies. We pulled out the swingball yesterday and had a lot of fun. The windows are coming along too. A bit more sanding today and I should be able to apply the first coat to the side windows and door. I see ratings agency Moody’s downgraded South Africa to junk status late on Friday. This was not unexpected though the timing could not be worse and it will hamper any economic recovery we may have been expecting post COVID-19. Speaking of COVID-19, US death toll is now over 100,000 and Spain had something like 824 deaths in 24 hours. Stay safe.

Cape Town, 28 March 2020. Hello World Day 2 of lockdown and a long way to go. Yesterday we managed to keep ourselves fairly busy. In between the Nerf gun battles – Fandom cheated and stole all the bullets – we were engaged in a number of activities. I used the time to start sanding down some of my windows in preparation for a few coats of Woodoc. Fandom focussed his attention on reformatting Chronicles of Christmas into a paperback format. After lunch and a bit of exercise we beta tested a website on behalf of a friend of mine in the UK. That work will continue today along with more sanding (sigh!). We finished things off by making silly podcast recordings of Emma and Tracy, our female alter egos. News on the COVID-19 side was not good. By lunch time it was confirmed that South Africa had suffered its first COVID-19 related death - a woman from Cape Town. And more bad news, the number of reported cases had risen to just over 1100. There was a steady increase in cases over...

Cape Town, 27 March 2020. “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities I woke this morning to an unusual silence. Very little traffic or people noise and while it was pleasant it didn’t seem right. I had to wonder – was I mad, in a coma or have I just watched Life on Mars too much? Seriously though, lockdown has finally reached Cape Town. Businesses, beaches, restaurants and comic book shops all shut down for 21 days. Had Thanos snapped his fingers? Luckily Fandom and I are well prepared: Life on Mars, a shelf full of novels and comics, some PC games, LEGO, Kenner characters and a rather large MCU collection. The thing we may be a little shy on is food but I just couldn’t bear standing in the queues behind all those people and their 300 rolls of toilet paper. One of the main impacts to me is that I now have 22 copies of my Melkkamer book sitting on my dining room table awaiting collection after the 21 day lockdo...

A few weeks ago I was guest speaker at the monthly meeting of the Cape Town Family History Society. My talk, Forgotten Constantia: The Lost Vineyards of Hauptville, covered the history of Hauptville, a Constantia wine farm, from its humble beginnings as a portion of land granted to Captain Pieter De Waal just south east of his farm Alphen in 1795, through to its ignominious end as it succumbed to suburbia in 1983. At its peak Hauptville had produced wine and brandy (from the farms own still) and grapes were exported to Europe. The first sub division took place when my great grandfather Jasper Albertus (Bertie) Van Niekerk and Pieter Brink bought the farm in 1925 and divided it in two. Bertie’s portion included the Manor House, Haupt Villa , built by PJ Haupt sometime between 1867 and 1874. A highlight of the Van Niekerk era was my grandparent’s society wedding. My grandfather, George D’Alton, was a Springbok rugby player and the Van Niekerks were well connected in the sporting...

Welcome to my blog - Miners, Mercenaries and Millionaires – the ramblings of a repressed writer. Now you may be wondering why I chose this slightly unusual title. Well it all started back in 2006 when I undertook to investigate what happened to my elusive great-grandfather Benjamin Dalton with a view to writing up his story in a two or three page essay. As it turns out Benjamin was quite a character. He even created a new branch of the family by using the D’Alton surname when he married my great-grandmother Caroline Dickson in 1902. As I researched further I discovered the interesting exploits of other ancestors. What started out as a seemingly simple exercise soon turned into a mammoth project chronicling the wider family history. Nearly two hundred pages later the resultant book - Miners, Mercenaries and Millionaires - is still a work in progress. Along the way I have discovered long lost relatives around the world and had the privilege of working with some interesting researchers...