The Jouberts and Duminys of the winelands

The one line that never lived in the Karoo, and reached it three times anyway - in 1904, 1945 and 1946, every time through a woman. It also holds the only one of the four origins this record can put on a map: a foundling born at Lorient in Brittany in 1747, who became a Dutch East India Company sea captain, harbour master at Simonstown, and a slaver.

Three of Frans's four grandparents come out of families that walked into dry country and stayed there. This is the fourth, and it is the odd one: a line that never lived in the Karoo at all.

Four generations of Jouberts stay inside a circle about forty kilometres across, between Kuils River, Durbanville and Stellenbosch, while the Oosthuizens were crossing the colony eastward and the van der Merwes were going north-west into the Hantam. They were town and wineland people. Nobody in this story holds a Karoo farm.

And yet the family reaches the Prince Albert district three times in forty years, every time through a woman. That is what this page is actually about.

It also holds the only one of the four origins that can be named here with a place, a date and a document behind it. The others begin in an argument about a Dutch or German town, or in a compiled tree with no origin at all. This one begins in Brittany, and the record says which street.

Two lines that join in 1910

The Jouberts, in the male line:

The Duminys, who marry into them at the last step but one:

Francoise Jeanne Duminy married Christiaan Wilhelm Johannes Joubert at Durbanville on 16 April 1910, six weeks before the four colonies became one country. Their daughter is the grandmother this line reaches Frans through.

A foundling from Lorient

François Renier Duminy was born a foundling at Lorient in Brittany on 4 October 1747. Lorient was the home port of the Compagnie française des Indes orientales, and he went to sea in its service.

He then changed companies and countries. He came into the service of the Dutch East India Company as a sea captain, reached the Cape in 1771, and married Johanna Margaretha Nöthling at Cape Town on 2 February 1777. He was Equipage Master for the Company in 1786 and 1787, and Captain of the Port at Simonstown from 1803 to 1806.

Those last three years are worth a sentence of their own. He held that post under the Batavian administration, and it ended in the year Britain took the Cape for the second time. A harbour master appointed by one government does not usually survive the arrival of another one's fleet. He was also a cartographer, a farmer, a public commissioner, and a decorated freemason at Lorient and at the Cape. He died at 19 Graave Street, Cape Town, aged sixty-three.

He was also a slaver, and that is set down plainly because it is true. He is not the only part of the record that has to be stated rather than arranged. Two of the enslaved and free black women who stand as founding mothers of this whole ancestry belong in this line and not in the other three: Marij van Angola, through Maria Johanna Emerentia van Oosterzee, and Souwa van Madagascar, through the Zeederbergs. So the same four generations of one wineland family hold a man who trafficked in people and the descendants of women who were trafficked. Both are ancestors. Neither cancels the other, and they do not resolve.

A third woman, Maria van Bengale, has been claimed in this ancestry and the claim is disproven. What joined her to this family was a surname and nothing else.

Four generations that do not move

Johannes Jacobus Joubert was born on 17 July 1809 and married Christina Wilhelmina de Jongh on 24 December 1833.

His son Dirk Daniel Joubert was born at Kuils River on 19 June 1843, married Anna Tobia Jeanne Neethling at Durbanville on 1 October 1866, had eleven children by her, married again after her death in 1890, and died at Stellenbosch on 2 February 1914. Kuils River to Stellenbosch is about twenty kilometres. In the same seventy years the Oosthuizens had gone from the Olifants River to the Koup and the van der Merwes from Piketberg to Calvinia.

His son Christiaan Wilhelm Johannes Joubert was born on 11 June 1881 and married at Durbanville in 1910, in the same village his father had married in forty-four years earlier.

This is the thinnest of the four lines. No farm, no death notice, no register page has yet been read for any of them. What is held is names, dates and marriages, out of a compiled tree and a family genealogy. not yet verified That is a gap in the research and not a statement about the family.

The name that keeps coming back

Anna Tobia Jeanne Joubert was born on 27 July 1915 and carries her grandmother's name exactly: Anna Tobia Jeanne Neethling, 1841 to 1890, who died twenty-five years before this child was born.

Note the trap in that name. There is a second Anna Tobia Jeanne Neethling in the wider tree, born 1831 and dead 1909, of Neethlingshof. They are not the same woman and they are not joined here. not yet verified

The Duminy name does the same thing, sideways. It stops being a surname and becomes a given name in the next generation: Anna Tobia Jeanne's sister was christened Frances Duminy Joubert. That is how you can see, from a first name alone, which marriage a person came out of.

Three women, and the road to Prince Albert

Now the part that puts a wineland family into a Karoo record.

1904. Maria Johanna van Oosterzee Duminy, Francoise Jeanne's elder sister, married Jacobus Daniel Abraham Oosthuizen on 19 September 1904. He was a farmer at Zeekoegat, in the Prince Albert district, and his family built and filled the church out there. She died at Prince Albert on 7 April 1916, aged thirty-six.

1945. Frances Duminy Joubert, Anna Tobia Jeanne's younger sister, married Gert Annis "Tokkie" Marincowitz at Bellville on 25 August 1945. He farmed Rondabel and ran the Prince Albert Landbougenootskap. She died in 1965.

1946. Anna Tobia Jeanne Joubert married Hendrik Lodewyk Malherbe Oosthuizen at Bellville on 25 May 1946, nine months after her sister and in the same town.

So in forty-two years this one wineland family sent an aunt, a sister and a daughter into the same small district, into three of the families whose ground this history follows. None of them married a neighbour. All three marriages were made at the Cape end and the women moved.

Anna Tobia Jeanne died on 11 November 1974 and is buried in the Prince Albert church cemetery, beside her husband. Her mother, Francoise Jeanne Duminy, outlived her by eleven months and died in 1975, at ninety-three.

What this line is, in one line

The other three families are known through ground: diagrams, quitrent titles, deduction tables, farms held for a century. There is none of that here, and there may never be, because these people did not hold Karoo ground.

They are known instead through marriages, and the marriages are the point. A history that followed only the men holding title would not contain this family at all, and would then be unable to explain where a Prince Albert farmer's wife came from in 1904, in 1945 and in 1946. Three times the line that never came to the Karoo is the reason somebody else did.

What this story is about

• about Antoine Lebre Duminy
• about François Renier Duminy
• about Benjamin Jacob Wilhelm Duminy
• about Francois Jean van Helslandt Duminy
• about Francois Jean van Helslandt Duminy (b.1853)
• about Francoise Jeanne Duminy
• about Johannes Jacobus Joubert
• about Dirk Daniel Joubert
• about Christiaan Wilhelm Johannes Joubert
• about Anna Tobia Jeanne Joubert

Research notes

The research behind this page, kept separate from it: dated working notes, open questions, and what is not yet settled.