Pop Gran’s Parents 

I know very little about the parents of our grandmother, Susannah (Van De Venter) Ziehl, so was excited to receive an email recently, with pictures of her parents, from our second cousin Alec Ingram. Alec said he had just been to Cape Town, and reconnected with a cousin, Peter Breen, who he hadn’t seen since Peter left Rhodesia in 1974. Peter had later sent Alec the pictures. Alec and Peter are the grandsons of Katy (Van Der Venter) Ingram, Susannah (Van Der Venter) Ziehl’s sister. Their parents, our great-grandparents, are Cornelius Johannes Van Der Venter and Anna Pretorius.

Katy married George Ingram in Bulawayo, Rhodesia in 1921, before Susan married Lenny Ziehl in Rhodesia in 1927. Katy and George had five children Olga, Hamilton (Bob), Joyce, Aubrey and Dennis. Alec is the son of Dennis Ingram, and Peter is the son of Olga (Ingram) Breen. Peter has Katy’s old photo albums, from which he obtained the pictures of our great-grandparents. The two brides in the picture look like sisters, but I have yet to confirm that.

Cornelius Johannes Van Der Venter and Anna Pretorius were

married in Molteno , Eastern Cape, South Africa in about 1895.

Anna Pretorius

What I do know about our great grandfather is that he Anglicized his name, and was known as Charles John Van Der Venter, not Cornelius Johannes Van Der Venter, which is a very unusual thing for an Afrikaner to do, especially during the time of the Anglo-Boer War.