Descendants of John Henry William Shade

Elderly relatives have claimed that John Henry William Shade was of German descent and that the name might have originally been Schade.

It is officially documented that he was born about 1816 at Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. There is known to have been immigration to South Africa from Germany prior to this. (He made his way to New Zealand, then to Australia, going to Tasmania, finally settling in Victoria before leaving a family and disappearing from the records.)

The following article from Wikipedia, 2007, describes some of the history of migrations to South Africa.

In 1647, a Dutch vessel was wrecked in the present-day Table Bay at Cape Town. The marooned crew, the first Europeans to attempt settlement in the area, built a fort and stayed for a year until they were rescued. Shortly thereafter, the Dutch East India Company (in the Dutch of the day: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) decided to establish a permanent settlement. The VOC, one of the major European trading houses sailing the spice route to the East, had no intention of colonizing the area, instead wanting only to establish a secure base camp where passing ships could shelter, and where hungry sailors could stock up on fresh supplies of meat, fruit, and vegetables. To this end, a small VOC expedition under the command of Jan van Riebeeck reached Table Bay on April 6, 1652.

While the new settlement traded out of necessity with the neighbouring Khoikhoi, it wasn't a friendly relationship, and the authorities made deliberate attempts to restrict contact. Partly as a consequence, VOC employees found themselves faced with a labour shortage. To remedy this, they released a small number of Dutch from their contracts and permitted them to establish farms, with which they would supply the VOC settlement from their harvests. This arrangement proved highly successful, producing abundant supplies of fruit, vegetables, wheat, and wine, they later raised livestock. The small initial group of free burghers, as these farmers were known, steadily increased and began to expand their farms further north and east into the territory of the Khoikhoi.

The majority of burghers had Dutch ancestry and belonged to the Calvinist Reformed Church of the Netherlands, but there were also numerous Germans as well as some Scandinavians. In 1688 the Dutch and the Germans were joined by the French Huguenots, also Calvinists, who were fleeing religious persecution under King Louis XIV.

As the 18th century drew to a close, Dutch mercantile power began to fade, and the British moved in to fill the vacuum. They seized the Cape in 1795 to prevent it from falling into rival French hands, then briefly relinquished it back to the Dutch (1803) before finally garnering recognition of their sovereignty of the area in 1815.

At the tip of the continent the British found an established colony with 25,000 slaves, 20,000 white colonists, 15,000 Khoisan, and 1,000 freed black slaves. Power resided solely with a white élite in Cape Town, and differentiation on the basis of race was deeply entrenched. Outside Cape Town and the immediate hinterland, isolated black and white pastoralists populated the country.

Source: Wikipedia 2007

The direct line to Fred is (1) John Henry William Shade & Harriet Diment, (2) Theodore Shade & Mary Jane Chinery,
(3) Albert Shade & Ada Evenia Johnson, (4) Albert Ernest Shade & Mary Beatrice Chapple.

Contact Libby Shade for further details
email: lshade@melbpc.org.au

This family tree is provided for mutual information within the family.
The information given will be referenced by official documents, family bibles etc.
Information that is uncertain or unreferenced will not be published.
For privacy of the present generations, the family tree will halt at the generation born around the start of the 20th century.
Discussion gladly entered into.