1. The Tailleferts

Susanne TAILLEFERT, daughter of Isaac TAILLEFERT and Susanne BRIET, is the ancestress of both the NAUDE and the CRONJE families of South Africa.

In the seventeenth century, the TAILLEFERTs were a large and prosperous family in the district of Brie, in the Poitou-Charentes area of France.

At Nogentel lived Pierre TAILLEFERT, a merchant and elder of the church, at Chateau Thierry his brother Jean TAILLEFERT, an apothecary and church elder, and at Monneaux their cousins Jean, Claude and Paul TAILLEFERT, all men of means and esteem in the community.

The apothecary Jean TAILLEFERT, with his wife Esther JORDIN and their adult children Nathaniel, Elise, Jeanne and Marie, fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Marie later came to the Cape with her husband, the surgeon/apothecary Paul Le Febre.

Jean and Esther's youngest son, Isaac TAILLEFERT, had established himself as a master hatter at Chateau Thierry.

 
Isaac Taillefert's signature on a document dated 1696

He was married to Susanne BRIET, who came from the valley of Essomes. Through her, Isaac possessed some vineyards at Monneaux in the valley, and after the Revocation they went to live there with her family. The baptismal entries of their first 5 children, Elisabeth, Jean, Isaac, Pierre and Susanne, are in the records of the Protestant church at Nogentel, but the youngest daughter, Marie, was baptised in January 1687 by the monks of the church of Essomes. 

A year later, Isaac TAILLEFERT left Monneaux and went to La Rochelle, the Protestant city, with his wife and six children. In 1688 they  boarded the Dutch East India Company's ship Oosterland, bound for the Cape.

On the ship's passenger list, Isaac's profession is given as hat maker and agriculturalist, but once at the Cape, he seems to have shunned the felt, straw and artificial flowers, turning to vine-growing instead.

Laborie et Picardie

in 1691 Isaac Taillefer and his brother were granted two neighbouring farms, Laborie and Picadie. They set about clearing the bush and planting vines, no easy task. The earth had never been tilled since the world began, bushes and roots had to removed with primitive implements and the ground fertilised.

However, within seven years they were making a drinkable wine - it was the opinion of a Frenchman, Leguat, who visited the Cape in 1698, that their wine was "the best in the colony and similar to our small wines of Champagne."

Leguat also mentions the beautiful garden "in which nothing is lacking" and an inner yard in which there were aviaries containing all kinds of birds. The two farms later became untied through marriage, and the property is now known as Laborie et Picardie.

Susanne TAILLEFERT was two years old when the family arrived at the Cape. Her third marriage was to our ancestor, Jacob NAUDE.