• General Notes

  I was schooled at King Edward VII prep school in Johannesburg and St. John's College next door where I matriculated. After a year in the SADF at 3 Loc Bty in Potchefstroom, I studied Engineering at Wits, graduating in 1973. I worked at Iscor in Pretoria for 4 years, during which time I married Anne-Marie Georgia Paizis on January 19, 1974. She was the elder of 2 daughters to Denis Milton Paizis from Parga, Greece and Regina Clarkson from Leeds, England. In 1979 we immigrated to Canada where my son Nicolas Yves Hammond was born in Vancouver, Canada on January 30, 1980. He is an only child. I formed Hammond Engineering Inc in 1983  in Vancouver to provide consulting electrical engineering services to industrial clients. The lion's share of our business was in bulk materials handling, mostly grain, canola seed and other cereal products. I divorced in 2002, retired and moved to Greece, settling on Skopelos Island in the Aegean Sea. There I met Diane Sheila Sheehy (nee' Ginnetty). Diane was the youngest daughter of Paul Edward Ginnetty and Irene Veronica Skalecki of Randolph, Ma in the USA. She is a BFA graduate from Mass College of Art. We moved to the USA in 2007 to be near her children and were married in Austin, TX on May 5, 2009 (Civil ceremony) and again on July 26, 2009 in the Greek Orthodox church, also in Austin. We watched the 3 grandchildren grow up to be teenagers and decided to move to the coast in 2014. We currently live in the tiny hamlet of Arroyo City in deep south Texas on the banks of the Arroyo Colorado River which is part of the US intra-coastal waterway system. We have access by boat to the Laguna Madre and the Gulf of Mexico. If you search for us on Google Maps you'll see us in a remote corner of the state. We are about 40 miles from Brownsville and the Mexican border.
  Diane and I have a blog www.ArroyoCityNews.wordpress.com that we use as an information source for our community. Please give us a look.
  We love your site. Diane has been searching for her Skalecki roots in Ruthenia (modern day Western Ukraine) but has run into all manner of brick walls. Her Ginnetty Irish side has been a little easier, but there remains some very murky episodes in the past. She loves the fact that I can trace my family back so far.
  Please keep up the excellent work and if I can help you in any way, just say the word. I realize that Texas is a long way from South Africa, but we have a few ex-pats here along the Rio Grande. I am doing some substitute teaching in the local school district and the kids have asked me to coach them in a rugby team. Perhaps you will see us in the news one day as the only school in Texas with a rugby team - possibly with no one to play against! Despite the Protea push, we shall be the Springboks!
  I would love to hear back from you,

Details of Mark's family with Anne-Marie Georgia  Paizis

Details of Mark's family with Diane Sheila Ginnetty