I’M TRYING to trace information regarding my maternal grandmother, Alberta Sarah Williams.

She was 17 in 1901 and living with her mother Annie Williams and her brother Edmund, builder’s haulier, and sister Susannah, in Marshfield. Alberta was an apprentice dressmaker.

She left Wales to travel to Cape Town, South Africa when she was 21, possibly as a companion to an Army family, as she met my grandfather, Montague William Loveridge, in Wynberg, a military base outside Cape Town, where they were married on 22 April 1908. Alberta died shortly after my mother was born, in Brighton, West Sussex, in February 1911.

I’m hoping you will be able to find space for this letter asking if anyone has any knowledge re Alberta.

Maybe some one knows if she left with a family or – an equally long shot – the dressmaking firm (name unknown) may have a record and a reason for her departure to South Africa.

It is a mystery as to both ends of her journey, why she left and what she did in Wynberg the years before her marriage. Pauline de Cardonnel Hoare 41 Quentin Smythe Road, Kloof 3610 KZN South Africa