Veronica (Yorke) Spalding

Hi and thanks for checking in. I am making progress and enjoying doing so. Do have a question. I know that my brother is my half brother- my mother had him prior to marrying my father. However it is a "big family secret" that has no answer. We do know that his biological father's name was Piet Noppe or some form of Piet and that Piet was a butcher. My brother was born in Johannesburg. Do you have any recommendations for tracking down further information? Given that my mother was born in 1912 I am sure that Piet was in the same age range and would therefor be dead at this time. We have no interest in contacting his family- just in knowing a little about him. Advice please.

Hello again Veronica,

Thanks for your question and I have a couple of suggestions. One is, has your brother taken a DNA test? I am not sure if that would help or not but it might. WikiTree has a group called the Adoption Angels and I think they can certainly help and advise you on what steps to take. Here is the link to fill out the request - needless to say, they are a busy group so it might be a bit before they get back to you but someone will contact you.

https://www.wikitree.com/contact/adoption/

I hope this will help. If you have other questions, be sure to ask. There are many here who are willing to help.

Ginny~WikiTree Greeter & Messenger

thank you so much for the wonderful suggestions. Do you have suggestions for tracking down information on my half brother's biological father's information? He was born in 1936 and our common mother married my father in 1941. My brother was adopted sometime after that. We do know the name of his biological father and the fact that he was a butcher in Johannesburg. Advice please

Hi Veronica,

Such recent records are hard to come by, the only advice I can give is to ask family members for as much information as they have. You could obtain your mother's probate records, which you can get at the relevant repository (or eGGSA.org also offer document ordering services whereby they visit the archives and photograph the records for a fee). Her probate might have the names of any previous spouses and hopefully your half brother's father would be listed but this is not guaranteed. Another way could be DNA, but unfortunately I have not had mine done so I can't tell you much about how it works.

The only websites that I have found so far for recent history are gendatabase.com and identitynumber.org, which unfortunately are paysites however searches are free and you can get things like marriage, birth or death dates.

There are a number of Noppe families from the Gauteng area on Familysearch, sometimes when I'm trying to find someone from this sort of time period I'll hunt for possible parents and on occasions I have been lucky enough to find children listed with birth dates on probate records.

I'm sorry I couldn't have been of more help, and I wish you all the best luck in your search. You're tree is looking gorgeous, well done! I have Hiscock from the Cape Province too.

Kindest regards, Pam