A question that’s often asked of couples and it’s one I would love to ask William Wimmer and Helene Marie Seiller.

William, the grandson of an Austrian missionary and his Baster wife.

Helene the product of a military family with highly-decorated family members but whose mother died alone in poverty in London, and a father who disappeared when she was a child.  No obvious connections or common backgrounds.

We have to assume they met in South Africa.  We should also assume that Helene arrived in the Cape Colony around the time of her mother’s death: probably to stay with her aunt (Henrietta) and her husband, William Simkins.  Helene’s uncle had been with the Cape Mounted rifles too but by the time Helene arrived in the Cape Colony he would have been living in Jersey.

But how she met William Wimmer I have no idea.

We do now that they ended up living in Middelburg in the Cape Colony.

William was a grocer/shop owner.  I’m not sure when or where they married – probably in the early to mid 1880’s, perhaps in Grahamstown, where Henrietta and William lived.

They had four children: Florence born in 1885, Frederick born in 1894 and Robert born in 1897.  An unnamed child was born in 1887, dying at the the age of 16 months.  I found a photo of the headstone of this unknown child on the Internet.  I wonder why the child was never named? I have no record of whether the child was a boy or a girl.  Perhaps the baby was born sick and was not expected to survive.  It was often a practice in those days not to name children that were not expected to survive.

William and Helene lived all of their life in Middelburg and brought up their children there.

Helene died at Middelburg in 1912 at the young age of 52 of breast cancer.  Her son, Robert, was present when she died.

William died in October 1938 at the age of 78, also in Middelburg.