Now that she had shown her rock art research to an international audience, it was time for Dorothea to return to the field. It must have been a bittersweet period for her, with the prospect of finding descendants of her father's interlocutors and doing her own language fieldwork shadowed by the death of her mother in October 1909. Dorothea managed two trips in the months following her mother's death: a short visit to the northern Cape in 1910, followed by a longer trip in 1911. She returned to Cape Town early in 1912, in time to welcome Lucy back from Germany to Charlton House, which her mother had bequeathed to the surviving Bleek daughters. Having completed the long process of readying a collection of notebook texts for publication in Specimens of Bushman Folklore, Lucy had left Charlottenburg and returned to Cape Town to set up home near her nieces.

Dorothea could now pay serious attention to the notebooks and related material Lucy had brought back with her from Europe, and hone the language skills she would need to support her research plans. But this interlude of a warm sharing of knowledge was short-lived. Lloyd died at Charlton House on 31 August 1914. Dorothea was now alone in the Cape save for her sister Helma Bright and her family who lived at Somerset West, these days a mere thirty minutes by car from Cape Town. But the Brights shortly returned to live with Dorothea at Charlton House. In 1926, the family – including Dorothea, Helma, her husband and their two young daughters Marjorie and Dorothy – moved to La Rochelle, Newlands, an arrangement that was to last until Helma's death in 1947.