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And they weren't.
They showed me a family bible, written in Dutch. And it revealed that their surname had been
altered from Hanecom to Honeycomb - that the original owner of the bible had been a man
called HE Hanecom, who was born in 1845. He had married about 1870 and had six children,
four girls and two boys, from one of whom (the other died young) the Johannesburg
Honeycombs were descended. Lulu was married to one of HE Hanecom's greatgrandsons,
Daniel Johannis Cornelius Honeycomb, born in November 1941. He had married Lulu in 1966
and they had three sons. Lulu's full maiden name was Lucy Magdeline Van Rooyen. All the
Hanecom names in the Bible had been altered to Honeycomb, by the simple expedient of
adding a y and a 'b' to each name. As the 'a' in Hanecom looked like an "o' and as the two parts
of the name were usually written separately (ie, Hane com) it was easy to change the name to
Hone(y)com(b).
But why? None of the Honeycombs professed to know why the name was anglicised from the
Dutch Hanecom to the English Honeycomb. Possibly someone had wanted, perhaps during the
First or Second World Wars, to become more acceptably British. Yet despite the sweeter
surname, the Honeycombs I met couldn't have been more Afrikaner if they'd tried.
It was both sad and pleasing to realise that the colourful Honeycombs (black, coloured or
white) were no relation to us, and that Warren, great-grandson of Jack, could be the last of the
true South African Honeycombes, whose ancestry stretched across back continents to ancient,
rural Cornwall, and to Calstock, for over 600 years.
The Cape Coloured Honeycomb in Cape Town could have resulted from a liaison between a
white Hanecom and a coloured servant girl. And indeed in the archives department in Pretoria I
found a death notice for an Elena Honeycomb, a Cape Coloured single woman, born in the
Cape Province, who had died in October 1918 aged 35, at the Klipfontein farm at Boksburg
North, where she worked as a domestic servant for a Mrs Mina Joubert (who was illiterate by
the way). No cause of death was given, nor Elena Honeycomb's parentage. But Boksburg, now
an eastern suburb of Johannesburg, is not far from Germiston, where later Honeycombs would
be entrenched. Elena would have been born in 1883 - a bastard child? Or was she given the
surname of the family for whom she worked?
Two other death notices, unexpectedly found in Pretoria, solved one mystery and caused some
more.
One revealed where and when Fred Honeycombe, born at St Cleer in Cornwall in March
1877, had died. I had been told by Cornish descendants of Fred's family that he was a sailor
and had died and been buried at sea. Fred was one of the ten children of William Henry
Honeycombe, a carpenter, who lived in Hocken's House, St Cleer. Now it turned out that Fred
had died in August 1911 in South Africa, aged 34 and single - and 'miner' was his
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occupation. Again, although he died in Boksburg Hospital, no cause of death was given. A
mining accident perhaps? It would seem that Fred jumped ship to seek his fortune on the gold-
fields around Johannesburg.
Several of the deepest and richest gold-mines in the world are now centred on Boksburg.
Before the Boer War President Kruger owned a nearby farm called Geduld; and the first
railway service in the Transvaal, linking Boksburg and Johannesburg, was inaugurated in 1890.
It was called the 'Rand Tram'. Fred Honeycombe, who died in 1911, could have been in the
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