Birth Name: Oscar Leonard Carl Pistorius
Place of Birth: Sandton, Johannesburg, Transvaal Province, South Africa
Date of Birth: 22 November 1986
Ethnicity: Afrikaner (German and Dutch), 1/8 Italian
Oscar Pistorius is a South African sprint runner. Although both of Pistorius’ legs were amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old, he competes in events for single below-knee amputees and for able-bodied athletes.
Oscar Pistorius has Afrikaner (German and Dutch) and 1/8 Italian ancestry, from his mother’s grandfather, an Italian emigrant to Kenya. Pistorius is English-speaking.
He was born to Heinrich Carl Wilhelm “Henke” Pistorius and Sheila Francis Bekker.
Oscar’s paternal grandparents were Hendrik Wilhelm Carl Pistorius (the son of Theodor Georg Joseph Pistorius and Anna Sofia Magdalena Stander) and Gertruda Jacoba de Beer (the daughter of Arnoldus Stephanus de Beer and Martha Johanna Maria de Beer).
Oscar’s maternal grandparents were Len Bekker and Joyce Sugar.
The original Pistorius immigrants to South Africa were Friedrich Heinrich Pistorius (b.16 March 1789, Tondorf, Sachsen-Weimar, Germany) and his elder brother Maximilian Ernst Ludwig ( b. 1781 ) and the eight children of Friedrich, who arrived at the Cape, South Africa in 1838 onboard the “Cape Packet”. The family moved to Natal in 1842. The brothers were the sons of Wilhelm August Pistorius and Fredericke Maria Voigt. Friedrich Heinrich (1789- c.1863), a brick-maker, is considered to be the Progenitor/Stamvader of the Pistorius family in South Africa.
In February 2013, Oscar Pistorius fatally shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in his Pretoria home. In October 2014, Pistorius received a five-year prison sentence for culpable homicide (and a concurrent three year suspended prison sentence for a separate reckless endangerment conviction).
Source: Genealogy of Oscar Pistorius – http://www.geni.com
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