Willem Venter
17 May 1819 – ? · Venter line
Names
- Surname
- Venter
The formal baptismal name and the name a person was actually called are both kept, and neither is derived from the other. Spelling drift between records is evidence, not noise.
Immediate family
- Father
- Jan Adriaan Venter
- Mother
- Maria Catharina Venter
- Brothers and sisters
A life in the record
- 17 May 1819 born Born
- 7 October 1839 witness Witnessed a baptism
- 25 December 1848 witness Witnessed a baptism
- 7 July 1850 witness Witnessed a baptism
- 2 October 1859 witness Witnessed a baptism
Who stood with them
Who signed at a baptism, a will or a survey is not incidental. It is the clearest surviving record of which families stood close to which.
- they stood for Willem Venter baptism · 25 December 1848
- they stood for Willem Venter baptism · 7 July 1850
- they stood for Willem Venter baptism · 2 October 1859
- they stood for Willem Venter baptism · 7 October 1839
What we don't know
- No death date is recorded.
- No dated record ties this person to a specific piece of ground.
A sourced gap beats an unsourced fill. These are the open questions on this person, stated rather than papered over.
Sources
- 'n Tak van die Swanepoel-familie in Suid-Afrika, 1699 tot 1999: 'n genealogiese en kultuurhistoriese studie Universiteit van Stellenbosch (SUNScholar)MA thesis, Departement Geskiedenis; studieleier Dr M Burden; April 2003; handle 10019.1/53526
- Beaufort West NG Gemeente, Baptisms 1819-1844 (doopregister) FamilySearch, "South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Records (Stellenbosch Archive), 1690-2011"; citing Genealogiese Instituut van Suid-Afrika (GISA), StellenboschSouth Africa > Cape > Beaufort West > Baptisms 1819-1844 > 302 images. Waypoint wc=M64H-PNL:13850901,13850902,14731201,14762701; cc=1392488. Last image (302 of 302) is ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-68TW-GKL. Held here: 91 distinct page images, filed under their ark suffix in sources/registers/beaufort-west-baptisms-1819-1844/
Research notes
[TREE] Added 2026-07-31 by kin_sweep.py under the one-degree rule: child of Jan Adriaan VenterL. Thin record, name, dates and the family link only. NO PLACE IMPORTED: the tree's place strings are systematically wrong and are not evidence.
[3 Aug 2026, SRC-200] STOOD AS A BAPTISM WITNESS at Beaufort West in 1839 (BWB-225-05), in the veldkornetskap Veldcornetschap Mocke. Identified on name + date + tree id, never on the name alone: 22 of 52 unique-name matches from this register were rejected because the person's own dates forbade it. [TO VERIFY]
These are working notes, not finished prose: they carry the reasoning, the corrections and the things still marked to verify. They are kept here so the page itself can read as what is known.
Open questions
-
Willem Venter and Anna Christina Oosthuizen stood as witnesses together four times over twenty years
priority 2 · LEAD-0087
Who were they, and were they a married couple? Four joint appearances between 1839 and 1859 make them the most active godparent pair in the register.
What would settle it A marriage entry naming both. Failing that, a baptism where one of them is a parent rather than a witness.
Elders
FamilySearch profile 972T-NY8