Van Blerk Genealogy

Name

Married in Cape Town on the 5 Oct 1963.

A Voice on Paper: at some point in the years before his death Claude wrote short stories, later gathered by the family into a booklet titled From the Heart (self-published, 2005). The settings and names are invented, but the stories return repeatedly to the same themes: a father fighting his way back to a child he has lost; a man who takes in a boy who is not his own blood and loves him as if he were; a family holding together through fear on faith alone. One story, "Please Let Me Love You," follows a father returning after years away to a daughter who does not yet know why he left. Claude could not have known, writing it, that he was the one who would run out of time -- that it would be his own youngest son who never got the chance to stand at that door. Of everyone in this family's story, he is the only one whose actual voice survives in his own words rather than a document or a memoir written by someone else. Source: From Blerick to the Cape, Chapter Seventeen, quoting From the Heart (2005).