James Laker was christened at Rudgwick in Sussex on 11 April 1790. He married Sophia Pearce at Marylebone, London, in August 1815. By 1819 the family had moved to the Cape — and not just to the Cape, but specifically to Piketberg: the same small farming district the Retiefs had been working since the early 1700s.
Their daughter Anne Laker married Andries Johannes Retief at Cape Town on 30 July 1837. The two families were already, by then, neighbours. Out of a whole colony, the Sussex family and the Huguenot family had ended up in the same district, and their children, of course, eventually married.