How complete this is
What this record holds, and what it does not. Every number here is counted from the model when the site is built.
A gap here is almost never a doubt about the evidence. It is research nobody has done yet, and it is on this page so that a reader who reaches the edge of it knows that is what has happened.
| What | How many |
|---|---|
|
People published
Everyone the site can show. People who are living, or who cannot be shown to be deceased, are withheld. |
1646 |
|
People with no date at all
Named in a record that did not date them. They cannot be placed in a year, so the alive-in filter and the connections slider both leave them out. |
330 / 1646 |
|
People joined to nobody
No recorded parent, child or spouse. Almost always a name read off a deed or a stone with nothing yet tying it to the tree. |
320 / 1646 |
|
Farms with a written history
The rest have their record - grants, transfers, surveys - but nobody has written the farm up yet. |
45 / 269 |
|
Farms with a survey polygon
A farm with no polygon is a gap in the cadastre match, not an absence from the record. It is still in the list. |
233 / 269 |
|
Burial grounds with a coordinate
The rest have a page and a name but no position, so they cannot be drawn. |
428 / 473 |
|
Stones tied to a person
Every stone carries a name and dates off a photograph. Matching one to somebody in the tree needs a name AND a date AND a place, so most are still waiting. |
88 / 1450 |
|
Witness records tied to a person
Baptisms transcribed out of the church registers. Many name a child whose entry came off the page half-legible, and matching those is research rather than filing. |
105 / 314 |
Who counts as part of this project
Two pages - Connections and Descent - are about the families of this district rather than about the whole tree behind them. That needs a rule, and this is it, in the order the build applies it.
- The place. Everything the record files in this district: 266 of 269 parcels, and the burial grounds, town and church in it. Only the ORIGIN farms are outside - De Modder Fonteyn (Olifants River) (Citrusdal (Olifants River valley)), Nieuwmunster (Land van Waveren) (Land van Waveren / Tulbagh), Vrolykheid No. 61 (Tulbagh) (Land van Waveren / Tulbagh) — where families were before they came. Beaufort West is NOT one of them: it is the district the Koup was administered from until Prince Albert was founded.
- The community, and the ground decides what a burial proves. A person is in when one row ties them to that place: land held or lived on, an estate, or a church occasion here. A burial ON A FARM stands alone, because there the ground itself is the tie. A burial in the TOWN or CHURCH cemetery does not: Prince Albert buried its whole district, and a shared cemetery is not a shared community. That admits somebody only if they are kin to the project already, and never through others in the same ground. 301 people qualify.
- Depth is free, breadth is not. From there the record runs BACK through every direct ancestor, however far - that line is how a family reached the Karoo, and it is short: a full one is about 166 people. It runs FORWARD to the descendants of an arrival, 555 more. It does NOT run forward from the ancestors: everyone descended from one direct line is 949 people, a whole Cape cousinhood the district never saw. Spouses are in, because a marriage is how two families become one.
- The household this project exists for. Named by hand, because no rule derives it: Frans, his direct line, and his mother's parents with their own parents and everyone descended from them. Nothing here can publish a living person - the set is intersected with what the privacy gate already allows, so the living shape it without appearing in it.
That gives 1216 of the 1646 people this site publishes. The other pages - the map, the timeline, the people index, search - are NOT scoped this way and never have been: everyone the record holds is on them.
175 of the arrivals are dated before 1850, and those are the founding generation. That is EMPHASIS and not a rule: tried as a filter it removed 28 families, among them the Marincowitz, the Beukes of the Varsche Fontein stones, the Botes and Niehaus of Vredendal and the Klue of Klueplaas. A date test on births is worse - 64 of the arrivals carry no birth year at all, and they are the 1833 and 1841 people known from a quitrent list and nothing else. Being undated is what an early record looks like.
Two cases worth knowing about. A baptism only counts where the occasion was held in this district: twelve witness rows predate 1800 and every one is at Drakenstein or has no place at all, and reading those as ties once put the Oosthuizen arrival at 1722, a century before anyone took up ground here. And the place on such a row is free text, so it is read the safe way round - only a place known to be in this district admits anybody, and an unrecognised one admits nobody.
What it rests on
426 sources, 284 documents, 38 written pieces, and 152 open questions somebody has written down. The questions are not a to-do list kept out of sight; they are a page of this site, next to the gaps the model finds in itself.