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BOOK 2

THE HODGKISS FAMILY (FROM
1825)

PART 1: THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE HODGKISS FAMILY
PART 2: LES HODGKISS & RUBY ANDERSON: FROM 1934

PART 1: THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE HODGKISS FAMILY

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INTRODUCTION

e have witnessed the Andersons as they absorbed the daughters of other families
into their patrilineal line through marriage. We now must introduce another family
who will bring their own name into the family. Or in fact would graft an Anderson
branch onto their tree: Ruby was not the first Anderson to have already given up
her name for a Hodgkiss boy.
Cast your mind back to one of Jack Anderson’s sisters, the little bridesmaid Linda Anderson,
posing in an alarming outfit and hat at the marriage of her big brother Jack to Ida Waters. Linda
was to grow up and marry the eldest Hodgkiss son, Albert Hodgkiss, who as was mentioned on
the last page of Book 1 died in 1944 at the age of 48 from asthma, leaving only one child, a son
called Arthur Hodgkiss. Arthur in turn married Pam and they had five sons, so the Hodgkiss
family name increased substantially. And Aunty Linda could smile again with so many boys to
love.
Aunty Linda as a young girl would have moved with her parents Carl Gustav and Catherine to
Pietermaritzburg with many of the other family members during World War 1, round about
1915. So when she as an adult met Albert Hodgkiss they would all have been living in the same
town. It seems natural that someone in the family would have brought Leslie Hodgkiss to the
Anderson girls’ party where he and Ruby met.
So now having established that the families had already been known to each other let’s take a
closer look at this Hodgkiss family: Who they were and where they came from and what was
their reason for being in Pietermaritzburg during the early part of the 1900s?

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CHAPTER 1: AS FAR BACK AS WE COULD GO

ur thanks must go to Ruby Anderson Hodgkiss for her painstaking research and to
Alan Hodgkiss, for compiling a genealogical chart of the Hodgkiss family which can be
consulted for names and dates. Ruby was able to follow the trail back to 1825 but
there the path ran cold. Although she found names and some dates she found very
little ‘story’ and so we know nothing about the families that made up our ancestry. The family
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