Surnames/tags: Parkin van den Berg Khoisan
John Parkin, an 1820 settlers, was the first Parkin to set foot in South Africa, in Algoa Bay on 20th May 1820. He was accompanied by his wife Elizabeth Abraham (nee Howard) and his first four children, William, John, Jane and Robert. Initially settling on the farm designated by the British Government to the Parkin party, some 14km south west of Bathurst in the Eastern Cape, he moved into Port Elizabeth soon after and during the early years of the cities existence, quickly acquired a large portfolio of the Port Elizabeth real estate.
Today, not much (if any) of his original land remains in the Parkin name, with only a few items in the city remaining as an acknowledgement of his input into the beginnings of Port Elizabeth, namely Parkin Street in North End and a memorial plaque in a park in Stella ave Fernglen, close to where his original homestead was.
Marrying a second time, John Parkin's offspring could have made up a rugby team, all of 15 kids. Upon his death in 1856, his estate was never settled as a number of his children had moved on from Port Elizabeth and some thought to be dead. In the years that followed, some of his property was purchased from the estate by the government of the day for in order to build the Port Elizabeth Railway Station, where it still stands today. In the 1960's, a descendant of John Parkin, (N.P. Sellick) interested in determining who still had a claim to the estate, researched the Parkin genealogy in conjunction with the HSRC and wrote a book "John Parkin of Baakens River farm and his family, 1820 to 1970", which gave the basis for the family tree that can be found on this site.
To this I have added my direct family from information my father could still remember before his death in 1993 and more recently, through contact with Parkin Family on the net, have managed to update other lines in the family tree.
More recently, I have discovered my ancestry has a rich history from the earliest European settlers in southern Africa, dating back to the late 1600s, on the van den Berg side. Robert Parkin, John's son, married into the van den Berg family and trekked with them to the Orange Free State. A few of the following generations of Parkin males found the van den Berg women irresistible. This, together with a recent DNA test in which I discovered North Indian, Nigerian and Khoisan DNA inheritance, which appears from linking with other descendant, to be from the van den Berg clan, has given me renewed interest to find the source of this lovely diversity.
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