The Laker Line

church register

The first English line to enter the family. James Laker was christened at Rudgwick in Sussex in April 1790; he married Sophia Pearce at Marylebone, London, in August 1815. The family had moved to the Cape by 1819, where their daughter Anne Laker was born.

Anne Laker married Andries Johannes Retief at Cape Town on 30 July 1837, joining the Retief spine at Gen 5 — and so the English Sussex thread runs through every generation below.

That a Sussex family had landed at Piketberg, exactly the same Cape farming district that the Retiefs had been working since the early 1700s, is no coincidence: Piketberg in the early 1800s was a small enough world that the two families’ paths were always going to cross.

People in this line

• James Laker church register 1790–1835
• Sophia Pearce church register 1798–1835
• Anne Laker primary source 1819–1864