Gazette - 7/4/15 - Liable for Jury service, Uasin Gishu Plateau - L.L. Visser, Farm No. 41

Red Book 1912 - L. Visser - Uasin Gishu

Gazette - 10/1/1928 - Probate and Administration - Ludovicus Lourens Visser lately of Farm 41, Uasin Gishu who died on 28 February 1915

Willie Joubert: He was named after his maternal grandpa, as great-grandpa’s first son from his first marriage was named after the paternal side. He was baptized on October 7, 1883 in Pretoria. Lood or Loodjie as some called him grew up in Lydenburg on the farm and worked alongside his dad. When the Boer war started in 1899 the 16-year-old was in the saddle as part of the Boer forces. Near the end of the war, he was taken captive by the British and moved to Natal – prisoner number 1-32561. Following the war, he moved back to the farm Oshoek in Lydenburg where the family lived. Some time later a British official arrived and inquired about the farm and took an inventory. Some weeks later two others came and repeated the exercise and Great-grandpa surmised that they were taking stock for tax purposes. Having been through the war and the resulting loss of life and devastation caused by Britain, he was in no mood to be taxed on his farm income. He also wanted to give his 7 sons the opportunity to own their own farms and build a future that way. Therefore, when he heard about the possibility of settling in German East Africa, he sold out and bought a new wagon and left on May 5, 1905 to join the trek led by Great-grandpa Pieter Joubert. The trek with just over 500 individuals left from Brugspruit station by train to Lorenzo Marques and then boarded the German chartered ship “Somali.” They stopped at Dar-es-Salaam to finish official documentation. While there a relative of some in the trek convinced a group to break with the agreed plan and to travel directly from Tanga inland (we have followed that tragic tale earlier). The Visser family with others stuck to the route proposed by Great-grandpa Joubert and disembarked at Mombasa and from there traveled inland to Voi by train. From Voi they traveled with wagons to Oldonyo Sambu where the first Afrikaner settlers had their farms. They arrived in July and before long the Visser family began constructing their homestead and clearing the land at Ngare Nairobi at the foot of Kilimanjaro. In 1906 he decided to move to Kenya.

When he left on June 11, 1906, his daughter Cornelia and her fiancée Lood Visser accompanied him to get married at the magistrate’s office in Nairobi. It is not clear what Lood did and where exactly they lived while in Kenya. One would assume that they farmed and Lood did some transport and hunted, as many did. They had four children. The firstborn was named after his grandpa, Nicolaas Hendrik. He died when he was about 3 years old. Around 1911 a second boy followed and as per tradition he was named after his maternal grandpa, Pieter Cornelius. A third boy followed and was named Lodewikus Lourens after his father. The fourth and last child was the only daughter, generally known as Katie, but as per tradition she was named for her grandmother, Catharina Elizabeth.

As said, we have little information about what Lood Visser did for a living and where the family lived in Kenya. There is no indication that WW1 affected them adversely. In 1917 Lood was doing transport or on a hunting expedition in the Congo. He got Malaria and died. Cornelia was left with three small kids, the oldest being Piet, barely 6 years old. She had support, as Great-grandpa Piet Joubert and his third wife were also in Kenya. However, Great-grandpa Visser had made a promise to Lood to help his wife in the event of his death and with that Cornelia and the kids returned to the Visser homestead.
Willie Joubert His widow Cornelia (née Joubert and a sister of my Grandpa, Johannes Nicolaas Joubert), a widow, stayed at the Visser homestead at Ngare Nairobi for a while and then married Stephanus Bothma and moved back to Kenya. Not long afterwards, she died and Grandpa Joubert traveled to Kenya and brought the orphans to the Visser homestead where they grew up as part of the Joubert family. The older two accompanied most of the family to the Lupa goldfields in the 1930s where Catharina (Katie) Visser married Chris de Jager. They had a little girl, Cornelia Maria, that got meningitis at age 4 and was mentally handicapped. During the same time, Chris died when bitten by a Mamba. She later lived in Kenya for periods of time working in schools to provide for her and Nelie. Pieter Cornelius (Piet, named after his grandfather Rooi Piet) as young man left the Lupa and moved to Kenya where he worked at Kakamega mine but died in an accident after just a few months. Lodewikus Lourens (Junior) finished schooling at Ngare Nanyuki, then went to work at the mines in the Lupa and during WW2 illegally crossed into Northern Rhodesia where he worked at Ndola at the mine. He flew to Kenya to marry Hendriena de Jager (met her at the Lupa – her father was the brother of sister Katie’s husband, Frik de Jager). After some time at the Lupa they went to Kenya where he worked at a tannery for many years before moving to South Africa: 4 children – Lodewikus Lourens, Frederik, Martha and Nicolaas Hendrik.