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Burial ground CEM-063

Williston old town cemetery

2 graves recorded · 2 identified in this project · 1953–1961

[11 Aug 2026, SRC-389] Williston is where Jacobus Johannes Gideon van der Merwe died in 1961, where his son married in 1949, and the district the 1956 death notice's informant wrote from. | [11 Aug 2026] COORDINATE ADDED, AND AN EARLIER NOTE ON THIS ROW WAS WRONG. It said eGGSA carries no GPS for these cemeteries. It does. The COLLECTION INDEX truncates each album's description at an ellipsis; the ALBUM PAGE carries the whole thing, including a line "Google Earth Project Information:- GPSID: nnnn GPS: -31 28.059, 19 45.950". Only the index had been read. THE FORMAT IS DEGREES AND DECIMAL MINUTES, not decimal degrees. -31 28.059 is -(31 + 28.059/60) = -31.46765. Read the obvious way it would put Calvinia four hundred kilometres out, which is exactly the class of error 5 exists for. eGGSA album WILLISTON-Urban/Old town cem, which is where the stone of Jacobus Johannes Gideon van der Merwe and Catharina Isabella Bruyn stands (GRV-1455, GRV-1454). Williston has five burial grounds on eGGSA within 1.5 km of each other - old town, new main, amandelboom, jewish and ng-kerk - and the AMANDELBOOM one at -31.34230, 20.92285 is 30 m from this one and is the mission-station ground the town grew out of. This row and CEM-405 were the same burial ground. CEM-405 came in with the eGGSA album walk of 12 August 2026 and was not caught by the album-url check, because this row's url was the COLLECTION INDEX rather than an album — the two keys were never comparable. The same coordinate to six decimal places and the same GGSA cemetery number settle it. This row keeps the id and now carries the album's own url; CEM-405 was removed before it was ever built.

Where it is: -31.34205, 20.92285 · GGSA cemetery 3267 · Show it on the map

Who lies here

NameBornDiedIn this project
Catharina Isabella Bruyn born Bruyn 1895 1953 Catharina Isabella Bruijn FS
Jacobus Johannes Gideon van der Merwe 1888 1961 Jacobus Johannes Gideon van der Merwe FS

A name links to its own photograph on the eGGSA site, which holds the picture of the stone. Names and dates in this table are eGGSA transcriptions except where a stone was read here.

Photographed here, not yet read

207 photographs of this ground carry a caption on eGGSA that nothing in this project has yet matched to a person. The words are eGGSA's transcription of the stone, kept exactly as written; nobody here has read the photograph. Each one links to its own page on their site.

List them

How this ground connects to the others

Drawn from this project's own parentage and marriages, never from a shared surname on its own.

The families buried here

Bruijn · Van Der Merwe

The album

See every photograph of this ground on eGGSA

The photographs are eGGSA's and stay on their site; this project links to them and does not copy them. Their albums are expressly incomplete, so a name missing here is not evidence that person is not buried here.