By Nico Docherty, Project Manager
This time last week I was scaling the crest of Signal Hill, Cape Town, a vantage point that affords incredible views of the city, Table Mountain and the surrounding ocean. It was a bright summer’s day, but the famous clouds that roll in from the southeast and spill over the iconic mountain (“tablecloth”, as the phenomenon is known locally) were putting on quite a show for our cameras. I guess the old production adage, that b-roll day inevitably brings the worst weather, isn’t always true.
Capturing Cape Town at its dramatic best was the perfect way to wrap on three successful days of filming in a new country for Family History Films. Over the years, we’ve researched and presented many stories from Africa (the ancestry of an Egyptian-American, the story of a family that spent their childhood in Benghazi, Libya and Ugandan Asians that relocated to Britain in the 1970s, to name a few) but we’ve never filmed in South Africa before.
The occasion was the homecoming of a South African client revisiting the country of their childhood and early adulthood. It’s always a unique pleasure to join clients on such a trip and the interviews we captured were particularly rich. After all, talking about your memories amongst the sights, sounds and smells that inspired them is that little bit more special.
We were also in Cape Town to interview our client’s nonagenarian mother and digitize her extraordinary collection of assets and precious family heirlooms. Over two days at her home we recorded her memories of a remarkable life and shared many of our research findings, from the life of a grandfather she had never known to a two-times great-grandmother born in the 1770s whose surprising origins (in what was then called Kaapstad) tied the family’s story to the much deeper history of Cape Town and South Africa.
Our final interviews took place at a local church with special resonance for the family. Sitting in the shade of the memorial garden, our clients reflected on the discoveries of the last days and the new horizons that a knowledge of history provides. My experiences discovering a remarkable new country had brought me to the very same conclusion.
