Jan Latsky: Ander navorsing

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: [unknown]
Surname/tag: Latsky

Jan Latsky (abt.1791-1866)

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Jan Latsky

Jan LATSKY arrived at the Cape between 1817 and 1819. He was born in 1792. He married Lacya Gloudina BUYS at Worcester, her parents were Stephanus Johannes Buys and Anna Catharina Jachemina Du Buisson.

It has been stated that he was of very large stature. He must have had a very adventurist spirit, since he served in the Cossack regiment against Napoleon. He saw Moscow burning. He received a bullet wound and had a scar on the forehead from a sword slash. He also fought at Waterloo. At first he served a doctor grooming his horses.

He moved to the arid part of the Karoo and he obtained the farm Celeryfontein in 1827. He built a house with loopholes for defence. There are very old graves on the farm, with flat stones stacked on top of one another but the graves are not marked.

CHILDREN b1 Anna Catharina Jacomina = 11 Jan 1828, X 9 Dec 1844 Stephanus Johannes Heyman b2 Magadalena Alida Petronella = 16 Aug 1829, X 5 Jul 1847 Mattheus Willem Johannes Kuhn b3 Stephanus Johannes = 3 Mar 1833, X 28 Mar 1853 Neeltje Visser, XX 30 Jul 1866 Christina Johanna Paulsen

Jan died on 18 December 1866 on his farm Celeryfontein not far from Carnarvon in the Cape. ^[1]

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Jan Latsky (Lacki) might have found himself in the ranks of the British 60th Regiment of Foot at the same time with Kolesky and Kitshoff (roughly 1810) and, like the remaining soldiers of this regiment, came to the Cape Town in September 1811. Poles, who served in the rows of the British army, did not do this entirely out of free will. They had most often been previously the soldiers of the armies of the Napoleonic coalition, fighting in various parts of Europe and the World. Jan Latsky originated from Lithuania, which had been for centuries associated through a union with Poland, and had been inhabited by many Poles. He was born in 1792, as a son to Michael (Michał) and Anna. The legend, repeated in the family, says that he participated in 1812 in the Russian campaign of Napoleon’s and that he saw burning Moscow. He supposedly fought against the Napoleon’s army in the Cossack detachment (Żukowski, 1994). Later on he was to fight under Waterloo, as a soldier of the Prussian army, commanded by general Blücher (van Rensburg, 1999; van Rensburg, South African Stamouers). The family tale probably magnifies excessively the Napoleonic episode of his life, since in 1810 he was already the soldier of the 60th Regiment of Foot (WO/2/6878), and starting with September 1811 he was already in South Africa. In 1817 (on January 13th) he obtained the right to settle in the Colony (Philips, 1979). Initially he did not fare well. In 1821 he got without any means to Cape Town. Luckily, he found a job in Paarl as a groom with a local physician. On June 2nd, 1826, he married in Worcester Lucya Gloudina Buys, being mentioned then as a citizen of the town of Beaufort. The couple had three daughters and two sons. In 1827 Latsky purchased 14,000 acres of land in Karoo and established the farm “Celeryfontein” in the vicinity of today’s Carnevon, becoming one of the pioneers of the European settling in High Karoo. He died on December 18th, 1866, on his farm (Pama, 1983; van Rensburg, 1999). Numerous descendants of Jan live in South Africa until now, bearing the family name of Latsky.^[2]

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Sources

1. ↑ Stamouers AM van Rensburg, "Jan Latsky a Centurion" Familia, 1999, vol 36, no 4 Heese and Lombard LG Green, Karoo
2. ↑ Kowalski M., 2009, Polish soldier-immigrants to South Africa in the period of French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars (1789–1815), Familia, 46, 3, pp. 147–164.