Susanna Johanna was die dogter van Gerrit Cornelis Nel en Jacoba Margaretha Labuschagne.
Uit hulle pa se sterfkennis van 1872:
Her mother was left widowed when she was 10, and her mother remarried a widower Pieter Daniel Roux, reportedly a harsh and cruel man, who often beat his stepsons. Susanna was put with an elderly German family at age 13 to work for them in return for her education. In fact she only filled one copy book with figures and letters over the next 4 years, but at least learnt to read the bible. The family oral history records that she ran away from home due to her step-fathers cruelty. She was 18 and working as a mothers help on a farm when she met Dr Francis Wilson who had come to attend a patient there. They married when she was 19 (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/L5RR-RXX)
Apparently from Sheffield, he studied medicine at Edinburgh. It appears he married a nurse against his family wishes, and after she died young, he went to sea as a ships doctor working in Norway and Sweden, and also in China. (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/G9HG-M67)
The doctors’ dilemmas: Medical practice in the Free State during the South African War
John Boje
"Francis Wilson was not only British by birth and a burgher by residence; he also had a Boer wife. In these circumstances, he defined his national sentiment in negative terms by saying that he was “not a Boer hater but not pro-Boer”. (110) When the Boers sought to recruit his services, he took refuge in Basutoland, leaving his family on his farm. When Boers threatened to burn his house down, he returned with a view to removing his family to safety. The Boers arrested him and paroled him to his farm, where he remained until September 1901 when he was visited by the 1st King’s Dragoons on a farm-burning mission. Afterwards he went to the camp of Lord Basing, their commanding officer, on a neighbouring farm, where he saw remains of his furniture and his library of 300 books. He seems to have felt no rancour towards the British, but prided himself on serving them as a medical officer with Bethune’s column and by providing them with information. (111) Wilson and his family were “brought in” by Bethune’s column on 12 September 1901 (112) and for the next month he and his son were resident in the Winburg concentration camp, (113) but the camp register offers no indication on the whereabouts of his wife. In December 1901, Wilson applied from Ficksburg for a position in any concentration camp but specified that for private reasons, he did not want a medical appointment. He clearly hoped to secure an appointment as a camp superintendent because he makes a point of saying that he had had much experience in managing large numbers of emigrants in the service of various shipping lines. He was strictly temperate, in robust good health and could speak Dutch, Sesotho, French and German. Wilson was promptly offered a position as medical officer in the Bloemfontein camp, where a doctor was sorely needed, but when he indicated that he proposed bringing his family with him, the appointment was cancelled because the commandant of Ficksburg would not allow his pro-Boer wife to remain in Ficksburg if he was not there to keep an eye on her, while the military authorities in Bloemfontein would not allow her to live there either because they had “quite enough of this sort in town already”. (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/G9HG-M67)
Kinders:
g.1. Margaret
Jacoba WILSON, geb. 1887, oorl. 1969
g.2. Frances WILSON,
geb. 1889, oorl. 1958
g.3. Gert
Arnold WILSON, geb. 1892, oorl. 1964
g.4. Francis WILSON,
geb. 1900
g.5. Wilfrid
Alvan WILSON, geb. 1904, oorl. 1991
