Mense van die Koup

269 parcels · 233 surveyed

Families, by the ground they are on record on

Built from ownership, residence, burial and estate records, every one of which names a specific parcel. Place mentions from the family tree are deliberately left out: those are free-text place names, and matching them to farms by name is how a map starts making claims the record does not.

36 of 269 without a survey polygon

They are listed anyway. An unplaced farm is a gap in the cadastre match, not an absence from the record.

Key (click to close)

What does the map show?

Modern surveyed boundaries from the Surveyor-General cadastre. Historic extents on the old diagrams do not line up with these, see any farm's panel. The faint background is every other surveyed farm around ours, from the same cadastre, over an OpenStreetMap basemap held in this repo. Nothing loads from anyone else.

Line weight is the original farm. A farm surveyed whole is drawn with a heavy outline and the portions cut out of it with a light one, so the district's nineteenth-century shape stays readable under a century of subdivision. A dashed edge means something else entirely: a parcel with no transcribed history, only a polygon.

What this is

A history of the southern Koup: the ground below the Swartberg around Klaarstroom and Prince Albert, taken up as loan farms from about 1777 and fixed as property by the grants of 15 April 1841 — and of the families who settled it, the ground they held afterwards, and the roads by which they came there.

Or explore the land: click a polygon on the map, or a name in the list, to read what the record holds for that ground — grants and transfers, who lived there, the surveys and deeds, burials, estates, and the stories set on it.

6 farms have a written history so far — Middelwater, Vrolikheid, Rondabel, Spreeuwfontein, Varschefontein, De Claar Stroom — and that list is expected to grow; it is not the boundary of the project.

175 of 1821 people in the model are not published, because they are living or cannot be shown to be deceased. Where one of them held land, the span still appears and says a party was withheld.