The Oosthuizens of the Koup

Eight generations east, from a VOC soldier off the Land van Schouwen in 1685 to a farmer baptised at Prince Albert in 1909. An 1809 estate inventory shows a forge on the Olifants River and explains in one line why the family left: the farm was sold to the eldest son for 1 000 rixdollars, and the rest had to find ground elsewhere. After 1836 they stop moving, and title and a congregation arrive in the same two years.

This is the family the record here runs deepest on. They took up ground in the Klaarstroom basin and stayed, and most of the farm histories written so far are farms one of them held, bought, sold or was born on. That depth follows where the research has gone, and it is not a claim that they mattered more in this district than the families they married into and farmed beside.

Its direction is east. Eight generations run from a soldier stepping ashore at Table Bay in 1685 to a farmer baptised at Prince Albert in 1909, and for most of that distance the family moves one district per generation, in the same direction the colonial frontier was going. That is the opposite of the van der Merwes, who came out of the same Boland and went north-west into the Hantam. The two families ended up four hundred kilometres apart and did not meet until 1950.

The route is not a straight line, and the one kink in it is the most interesting thing here. The family goes east from Drakenstein to Tulbagh and Swellendam, then doubles back north-west to the Olifants River at Citrusdal, and then crosses the entire colony to Graaff-Reinet and down into the Koup. Why it did that is answered below, by an estate inventory.

The line, in one place

The last of them is a grandfather of Frans. Three of those eight men are called Ockert or Ockert Almero. Where two of them are in the same paragraph below, each is given his years.

The soldier who did not go home

Johannes Oosthuijsz entered the service of the Dutch East India Company as an adelborst on 13 May 1685 and sailed the same day from Texel on the Land van Schouwen. The ship anchored at the Cape on 17 September 1685, a hundred and twenty-seven days out. He sailed on a schuldbrief, which means the Company advanced his passage and his kit against his wages, so he arrived owing money and owning nothing.

He left the Company's service at the Cape on 15 August 1690, and the muster gives the reason in one word: vrijburger. A year later he was settled at Drakenstein on the same terms the Company was offering the Huguenots: sixty morgen rent-free, passage paid, all produce sold to the Company, five years' minimum stay. He married Johanna Maartens and died before 4 November 1730.

Where he came from is not settled, and no reading here has been able to settle it. The Company index says Woerden in Utrecht. The pay-book behind it is reported to say Werden, now part of Essen. His own will of 1722 is reported to read Weerl, most likely Werl in Westphalia. Two standard authorities list him as a German from Werden. On the weight of it he was probably a German in Dutch service, one of the thousands the Thirty Years' War had pushed west, but it is not proven. not yet verified His origin is told in full in The muster roll.

Out of the winelands, and a forge on the Olifants River

His son Jacobus was baptised at Drakenstein in 1722, married Dina Carolina Britz, and died in 1802. His son Ockert was baptised in 1755 and married Susanna Catharina van Tonder at Swellendam on 26 January 1783. They had thirteen children.

He was baptised plainly Ocker, with no Almero. The register says so: "t kint OCKER, vader Jacobus Oosthuijsen, moeder Diena Carola Brits, getuigen OCKER BRITS en Johanna Botha." His second son is named for his mother's father, and Ocker Brits is standing at the font. The Almero that runs down six generations of this family arrives one generation later, and where it comes from is a story of its own.

By the 1780s the household was on the Olifants River at Citrusdal, which is north-west of where they started and away from the frontier entirely. Family memory has it that the first Almero or his parents lived there, and the property still stands; the compiled tree independently gives the same death place. Two sources that have never met agree on a place string of the kind that is normally treated as hostile here.

And the estate inventory says what he did for a living, which no document ever states outright. He died intestate at de Modder Fonteyn on the Olifants River, and on 23 April 1809 the clerk walked the house room by room and wrote down what was in it. In the room he calls the winkel, which here means the smithy and not a shop, there is a complete forge: een oude blaasbalk, the bellows, een ballast yzer, twee voorhamers, a hand hammer, tongs, a vice and an iron balance with copper pans. Beside it, timber: twaalf stukken hout, four yellowwood planks, and eenige stukken wagemakershout, wagonmaker's wood, with an ox-wagon and een chais, DEFECT standing by. A broken chaise in a house with a forge and wagon timber is a job in progress.

This matters beyond the man. A forge is the opposite of trekking. It is fixed capital, it needs charcoal and water, and it makes its owner the man a whole district depends on for a wagon tyre, a ploughshare, a hinge. It is also a skill that travels, and the family that took up ground in the Koup a generation later carried a trade with them and not only stock. No document calls him a smith. The occupation is read off the tools, the timber and the name of the room, which is inference and is marked as such. not yet verified

A brother's children on the Sneeuberg

While that branch was on the Olifants River, another was already four hundred kilometres east.

Jacobus, the smith's father, had a brother: Jan Hendrik Oosthuijsen, christened at Paarl on 4 November 1714, married to Anna Botha, and dead by March 1780. His children did not stay in the west. They went north-east onto the Sneeuberg, the range that runs north of the Camdeboo, and they were there in the 1770s.

A heemraad sent out in 1775 to see who had settled beyond Bruijnshoogte wrote down the households on and against the Sneeuwberg, and two of the names are Jan Oosthuijsen d'oude and Jan Oosthuijsen de jonge, an elder and a younger of the same name. Their neighbour on that list is Cornelis Besuijdenhout, and five years later Besuijdenhout put his mark at the foot of the goods that Ana Boota, wedewe van Jan Oosthuijse de oude, gave in on the last day of March 1780. Ana Boota is Anna Botha. That the two men are Jan Hendrik and his son Johannes is supported by the epithet, the wife's name and the neighbour, and it is not proved: no document yet names Jan Hendrik on the Sneeuwberg in his own lifetime. not yet verified

What his widow declared in 1780 is the measure of that frontier. Fifty cattle, three hundred and eighteen sheep, a half-worn wagon, a chest, two pots, a meal sieve, a pair of silver buckles. No house on the list, no farm named, nobody enslaved.

Twelve years later the same family had an opstal. When his daughter Johanna Petronella died in September 1792 her estate opened with a building on the loan place de Groote Dam geleegen agter de Sneeuwbergen, valued at 333 rixdollars, with forty-one trek oxen and seventeen hundred breeding sheep. That same year her niece Maria Elisabet, married to Andries Hendrik Krugel, baptised a son at Graaff-Reinet. Another granddaughter, Aletta Johanna, is the woman whose 1823 estate opens with a loan place called Rondabel, in the Tarka.

So there were two roads east out of the Boland and they ran a generation apart. This branch took the northern one in the 1770s and got as far as the Sneeuberg and the Camdeboo. The branch this story follows stayed west until an estate account pushed it out in 1809, and then went further and south, over the mountain into the Koup. The wider country is told in The Koup before the grants.

Why the family left the west

The inventory also explains the move, and it explains it by arithmetic rather than by sentiment.

Ockert died about April 1809 leaving eleven heirs named with their ages, and his wife had died before him. The estate was wound up ab intestato and the farm was sold to his eldest son Jacobus Johannes for 1 000 rixdollars. One son got the ground. The others got a share of the money and had to find land somewhere else.

His son Ockert Almero (1786-1859) was not the eldest. He had married Adriana Cecilia Venter at Swellendam in October 1807, eighteen months before his father died. Seven years after the estate was settled his own son was born at Graaff-Reinet, which is about five hundred kilometres east of the Olifants River, and by 1821 he is on the Beaufort West tax roll. That is the whole trekboer mechanism in one household: the farm is indivisible, it goes to one son, and the rest go where ground is still to be had.

He is the root ancestor of this line, and two original records stand behind him. He was born on 24 April 1786 and baptised on 11 May as Ocert Almaro. His death notice, filed 8 March 1859, gives his age as 72 jaar 10 maanden en 2 dagen, his occupation as landbouwer and his status as weduwnaar: his wife had died eleven months before him. It also answers a question that had stood open for a long time. He died "in zijn eigen huis te Prins Albert", in his own house in the village, not on a farm. By 1859 he had come off the land.

His wife bore fourteen children between 1808 and about 1840, and that is told in Thirty-two years.

Where the name Almero comes from

The 1786 baptism has seven witnesses, and three of them are Venetian nobility: "Louij ALMARO PISANIE Baron de Felion van VENESIA IN ITALIA", "Alviese Almaro Pesanie", and a third Almaro de Felion de Venesie.

Almorò is a distinctively Venetian patrician name and it belongs to the Pisani family. The child was named for his godfather. So the Almero that reaches Almero Jacobus Hitge Oosthuizen in 1878, and two more men of that name after him, is a Venetian nobleman's name given at a Cape baptism in 1786. It is told in full in Almero.

The family's own version of this, told long before the register was read, is that the name came from an ancestor's rich friend, who said that a son named for him would inherit. The register does not mention an inheritance. It does show a man who was no relation standing godfather and giving his name, and the tradition gets the crucial thing right: he was a friend. not yet verified

The generation that arrives, and the one that stops moving

Jan Adriaan Oosthuizen was born at Graaff-Reinet on 20 November 1816 and baptised there on 16 June 1817. The register, the baptism index, his father's 1859 death notice and FamilySearch all write him Jan Adriaan; the compiled tree expands it to Johannes Adriaan. Both are the same name, Jan being the everyday form of Johannes, and Jan is very likely what was meant: by the Cape naming order the second son takes his mother's father's name, and hers was Jan Louis Venter, who then stood as a witness at this child's own son's baptism in 1837.

He married his first cousin, Susanna Catharina Oosthuizen, at Beaufort West in 1836. He served as a field cornet, which in this district meant he was the man who walked boundaries with the surveyor and vouched for who was occupying what. In 1868 he took Rondabel on perpetual quitrent jointly with S. J. Theron, who had married his sister: two brothers-in-law on one title. not yet verified

His son Ockert Almero (1836-1922) was born on Middelwater on 27 November 1836 and baptised at Beaufort West the following March. His four witnesses are exactly the two sides of the family: his father's parents, plus a Venter for his grandmother's line and a Strydom for his mother's mother's.

From him the Oosthuizens are a Prince Albert family and stay one. He was born in the same year the first parties of the Great Trek left the eastern frontier. They went north, and this direct line did not - though the family felt the pull: the root couple's second daughter, Susanna Catharina, trekked north in the van Zyl household and was dead by about 1840, and a nephew, Ockert Jacobus, helped lay out the first Marico farms in 1848, naming his own Klaarstroom for the home ground. That leaving is told in The brother-in-law who founded a town. Five years later, on 15 April 1841, the Crown turned a dozen Koup loan farms into perpetual quitrent on a single day, and Middelwater was among them: the ground his family had been grazing became ground they owned. The year after that his grandfather stood as a deacon at the founding of the Zwartberg congregation and bought five erven of the farm Kweekvallei, on which Prince Albert was laid out.

He died on 2 January 1922 at Church Street, Prince Albert, aged eighty-five, entered on the form as a retired farmer. Like his grandfather before him he ended in the village rather than on the farm, and the informant was his own son, present at the death, and living on Drooge Kloof.

The last two generations here

Almero Jacobus Hitge Oosthuizen was born at Prince Albert on 18 January 1878 and baptised on 10 February. By the naming order the third son carries his father's name, and he does: Almero, with his mother's surname Hitge added as a given name, which is how the Hitge got into this family permanently.

He is the earliest person in this line of whom a likeness survives. A studio portrait shows a young man of about eighteen, inscribed on the back Almero Jacobus [Hitge] Oosthuizen +/- 1896, in a hand later than the print. He was buying Rondabel ground in 1919 and 1921, was living on Drooge Kloof in January 1922, and died on 29 October 1961.

His son Hendrik Lodewyk Malherbe Oosthuizen was born on 17 August 1909 and baptised at Prince Albert on 12 September by Ds D. Wilcocks, the same minister who had consecrated the Zeekoegat church two years earlier. Six witnesses stood at that font and four of them were Malherbes, including the Hendrik Lodewyk he is named for. He was called Hennie. not yet verified He farmed Vischat, and he Anna Tobia Jeanne Joubert" data-date="1946-05-25" tabindex="0">married Anna Tobia Jeanne Joubert at Bellville on 25 May 1946. He died on 27 June 1979 and is buried in the Prince Albert church cemetery, beside her.

He is the eighth of this line in the country and the third born in the Prince Albert district. What happened when he married is the subject of Four grandparents, four countries.

What the run of it shows

Set the birthplaces in order and the shape is plain. Drakenstein 1722. Swellendam 1783. The Olifants River 1786. Graaff-Reinet 1816. Middelwater 1836. Four moves in four generations, the last of them the length of the colony, and then nothing: from 1836 to 1909 every birth in the male line is in one district.

Two things stop a family moving, and both arrived at once. Title, on 15 April 1841, which turned a revocable annual grazing licence into something that could be inherited and mortgaged. And a congregation, founded in the village in 1842, which meant a child could be baptised without a journey to Beaufort West.

As far as the records gathered here go, no man in this direct line was born outside the Prince Albert district after 1836.

What this story is about

• about Johannes "Jan" Oosthuijsz (stamvader)
• about Jacobus Oosthuizen (b.1722)
• about Ockert Oosthuizen (b.1755)
• about Ockert Almero Oosthuizen
• about Johannes Adriaan Oosthuizen
• about Almero Jacobus Hitge Oosthuizen
• about Hendrik Lodewyk Malherbe Oosthuizen
• set on Middelwater
• set on De Modder Fonteyn (Olifants River)

Research notes

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