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Pierre Guillaume Néel III was born on 19 December 1638 in Rouen, Seine-Maritime, Upper Normandy, France and died during the period of the Huguenot persecution by the Dragonnades of King Louis XIV in the year 1681 (at the year-end age of 43, his exact date of death in the year of 1681 is unknown) in Greuville-en-Caux, Rouen, Seine-Maritime, Upper Normandy, France. Following the onslaught of the religious persecution during the year of his death, his wife (who died much later in 1700, whilst still in France) seemed to have continued to face persecution in France, or practised her Protestant religion in secret, or was forcefully converted to Catholicism. Of their seven children some is known to have fled from France, during King Louis XIV's kingdom's religious persecution of Protestants, intimidating them with Dragonnades, to convert back to Catholicism.

One of his sons, Guillaume Néel was born in Rouen, France in 1662 and was baptised the following year. Guillaume Néel partially bearing his father's name, fled from religious persecution in France, when it escalated with King Louis XIV instituting of the Dragonnades in 1681, at which time he lost his father, at the age of 19. He went to Amsterdam, as the Dutch government offered Huguenot religious refugees, safe passage to the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Southern Africa. He married Jeanne de la Batte in Amsterdam on 3 May 1685, at the age of 23. On 19 February 1688, he, his wife and two young children left for the Cape of Good Hope (as part of present day South Africa) on board the ship De Schelde. They arrived in Table Bay on 5 June 1688 as some of the first European Christian refugees in Africa.

The Protestant Christian faith in Southern Africa grew, and continues to grow, to a present day number of 55,432,677 from a total population of 137,092,019, to be 40.44% of the total population, amounting to the region of the world with the fourth highest concentration of Protestant Christians (following Northern Europe at 54.8%, North America at 52.4% and Oceania at 43.73%).

Pierre Guillaume Néel III's wife Judith Néel, died in 1700 at the age of 60 in France. Whether she would have remained in France for the remainder of her whole life, and could have stay true to the family's French Huguenot Protestant faith, without facing persecution by King Louis XIV, if conversion to Catholicism was refused, remains a mystery.