Return of the Jedi/King/Mummy/Superman?

After a 4 month hiatus, the show is on the road again.  Although unintentional, I think that the break was a good idea.  I don’t have the time or energy to relate all of the events since September, but perhaps I’ll fill in the most important details as time goes by.

In the last week, the biggest event has been the Bridging Course.  This is a 5-day quick introduction to programming for first years who have never programmed before.  We teach the engineers C and the BSc students Java.  There are three groups and I taught the English engineers.  Hard work!  Three hours of lectures in the mornings and three hours of practical sessions in the afternoon.  I have been speaking for six hours each day for the last five days.  It started last Thursday and ended yesterday.  Big sigh of relief.  I loved teaching the course, but it is exhausting.  In between the session there are endless questions (good) and a fair amount of admin (bad), although the latter was handled to large extent by one of my colleagues.  To make matters worse, the temperature stayed above 30.  The first day was the first, since the classroom had no air conditioning.  After that we learned out lesson and switched to one of the newer classrooms.

Over the weekend and during the lunch breaks I indulged in another, very different obsession.  With a little from my parents and their peers, I’m trying to trace my ancestry back.  This has been a long time coming: I started drawing family trees back in the early 90′s with my grandmother’s help.  At that point I focused on the Geldenhuys side and in fact work a little sideways.  Unfortunately those notes seem to be lost now.  The project now is to simply work backwards and to fill in each layer as far as possible.  My office is about 5 minutes’ walk from the Genealogical Institute of South Africa and I have wanted to visit them for a long time.  It has always been postponed, but the realization that some people are getting older and that valuable information will be lost, prompted me to get going on the project.  I think I can connect myself to Charlemagne, but he is not a direct ancestor.  (I have to go back about 13 generations and then forward and back a few more times.)  The earliest ancestor I can trace is Rut Bufkens, born about 1460.  But that is only one line.  The Geldenhuys line in South Africa goes back to 1692 and I can trace back a generation or two in Germany, but I’m not perfectly sure how to connect myself to that line.  I know all eight ancestors three generations back, but only four of sixteen in the previous generation.  I think I have exhausted most of the easy resources.  Now I’ll have to start searching through endless baptismal, burial, and marriage records.  Luckily the South African church records are pretty complete from about 1750.  And luckily my ancestors were pretty religous.