Traces analysed
The trace is what remains, the flotsam and jetsam of the past that fetches up not only in archives, special places for conserving them, but also in our lives. Traces are the stuff found in handbags, cupboards and attics, as well as in museums, libraries and archives. These are the letters, wages-slips, photographs, shopping lists, appointment diaries, hand-drawn maps, draft wills… The traces remaining are wider than written documents, certainly wider than letters alone. Discussions of a variety of remaining traces can be accessed from the links below, and new traces are added regularly.
- The trace
- All the whites are to be killed, Jan/Feb 1914 NEW!
- Communicate to the King, 25th January 1884
- In the Supreme Court of the Transvaal, 13 Nov 1902
- Cattle pass, 23.11.1902
- Send the coolie on: nd but 1889
- ‘I send this boy’, 21.9.1896
- 10 December 1896 telegram: D. Carnegie To LMS
- Receipt for £5 to JHL Findlay per EB Quirk 1907
- Indebted to your indulgence, a 1795 letter
- A diary, tracing change 1960
- Ringing silences in Jan Smuts’ letters to May Hobbs, 1919-50
- Prosecution for Libel: An 1840 News Item
- Whiteness, now you see it, now…, 1908
- Indiscriminate slaughter? 1851
- The ‘n word’: Le Sueur’s note, Sept 1901
- Indentures of the Apprenticed Labourer Anna, 4 June 1835
- A letter and three lists: Hawksley to Rhodes, 9 February 1901
- Letters by Njube son of Lobengula, 21 Sept-21 Oct 1898
- Two Cecil Rhodes letters 1891 and 1895
- The Forbes, the Men and Nomalanga’s Baby, Forbes Diaries 12-18 July 1904
- The Wills of Elizabeth Hockly and Dods Pringle 1857 and 1876
- Forbes Diary, 24 May 1904
- William Gilfillan to W. Dods Pringle, 23 January 1851
- ‘Kaffir Employment Act’ 1857 no.27 1857
- Robin and the cuts, 15 November 1911
- On the panikin filled to the brim, no date
- The rings of Umquaka and Nellie: two 1880s photographs
- Seeing Soweto 1976, Re: Seeing Sharpeville 1960
- “The Kafir would not go with me…” 15 July 1868
- The ‘K word’ and the Forbes diary, 13 July 1904
Last updated: 30 August 2017
