The portraits found at Middelwater

Two framed portrait sketches out of a loft on Klueplaas, which is ex-Middelwater ground. No names on the backing. A strong circumstantial case that they are Ockert Almero Oosthuizen and Aletta Hitge, and no evidence at all. The images are NOT published: permission has not been asked.

The two pictures are not shown on this page. They belong to the man who found them and he has not been asked for permission to publish them, so the site holds the record of them and not the images. That is the rule and it is the right way round.

In the loft

In July 2026 Pieter Olckers posted in a South African genealogy group that he had found two framed portrait sketches under decades of dust in the loft of the old house on Klueplaas, near Klaarstroom. He noted, in passing, that the farm is now called Middelwater. [SRC-118]

They are a pair. One is a bearded man in a frock coat; the other a woman in a dark high-necked dress with a white collar and a lace cap. They were drawn, or drawn from photographs, the handling suggests a studio hand working from a portrait rather than from life. There is nothing written on the backing paper. No name, no date, no photographer's mark.

Why the farm name matters

Middelwater No. 169 is the farm this whole history starts on. It was surveyed for Okert Oosthuizen in August 1833 and granted under perpetual quitrent on 15 April 1841, deed Bf.W.Q. 5-7. The copy of that deed held here does not name the grantee not yet verified. The family held it through the nineteenth century, and it is the ground Ockert Almero Oosthuizen was born on in 1836 and died on in 1922.

Klueplaas is part of it. Vaste Water, nine morgen and some roods around the spring the 1883 diagram marks, was cut out of Middelwater and transferred to Susanna Maria Klue on deed 3007 of 1923.

That is the year after Ockert Almero died.

So the chain is short and it is not a coincidence: a piece of Oosthuizen ground changed hands within months of the old man's death, and eighty years later two unnamed nineteenth-century portraits turn up in the loft of the house that stands on it. Things left behind in a farmhouse tend to stay in the farmhouse.

Who they probably are

The suggestion, made by Frans in the same thread and recorded here as his, is that the pair are Ockert Almero Oosthuizen (1836–1922) and his wife Aletta Catharina Maria Helena Hitge (1846–1933), who married at Prince Albert on 1 December 1863.

What supports it:

• The dress. The man's frock coat and the woman's high collar and lace cap put the

sitters in the 1870s or very early 1880s. Ockert Almero was in his late thirties in 1875; Aletta was in her late twenties. A couple in their prime, about a decade married, sitting for a pair of portraits is exactly the occasion these were made for.

• The place. He was born on this farm and died on it. She outlived him by eleven years.
• The provenance. Ground out of Middelwater, transferred the year after his death.

What does not support it, and has to be said as plainly:

• Nothing on the pictures says so. No name, no inscription, no photographer.
• Dress-dating gives a decade, not a person. It rules out a great many people and

identifies none.

• The Oosthuizens were not the only family on that ground. A farm of ten thousand

morgen carried more than one household, and the Klues themselves lived in that house for three generations after 1923. There is no reason a Klue portrait could not be in a Klue loft.

So: a strong circumstantial case and no evidence. The model records the identification as suspected, and the two media rows say so in those words.

What would settle it

• The backing. Portraits of this period frequently carry a pencilled name on the

reverse of the mount, under the frame. Nobody has taken these out of their frames.

• Another likeness. One photograph of either of them, from any year, would do it. The

family holds nothing of Ockert Almero that we know of.

• The Klue side. If Pieter Olckers can date the Klue family's own portraits, or knows

what hung in that house before 1923, the question may answer itself from the other direction.

• Permission. The images are held here and cannot be published. Asking is the first

step and has not been taken.

A note on how this arrived

This came off a Facebook post. It is a good reminder that the useful sources for a district like this are not all in archives: a man clearing a loft, a genealogy group, and somebody recognising a farm name is a research method, and on this occasion it produced two nineteenth-century faces that were otherwise lost.

It is also why the identification is being kept at arm's length. The temptation to say that is him is considerable, and the whole discipline here is that a suspected identification stays suspected until a document says otherwise.

What this story is about

• set on Middelwater
• about Ockert Almero Oosthuizen
• about Aletta Catharina Maria Helena Hitge

Sources

Everything this story rests on, with a link to the original wherever one exists. Where a citation is incomplete it says so, an incomplete citation is a research gap, not a formatting problem. If your work is here and the credit is wrong or thin, please tell us and it will be fixed.

1. "Klue van Klueplaas, Klaarstroom" - Pieter Olckers, South African Genealogy group Facebook, South African Genealogy groupPost of 27 Jul 2026, 13:07, with follow-up comments; two portrait photographs and a crop of a 1915 Prince Albert registry map

Research notes

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