Rondabel No. 124: a farm history

From a loan-farm widow who signed with a mark to the Marincowitz farm of today: the full documented history of Rondabel No. 124 - the Venter household of 1829, the twelve-farm grant day of 1841, the Oosthuizen-Theron partnership of 1868, the 1910-34 subdivisions, and the two graves by the huis nobody has read.

The farm is known today as Rondawel, the modern Afrikaans spelling. The historical spelling Rondabel is used here, as it is the form the records carry.

The place

Rondabel lies on the Traka. Khoi for "river of women", in the dry country east of the Swartberg, in the old Field Cornetcy of Traka of the Beaufort district, later the Prince Albert division. Its western neighbour is Middelwater No. 169; Kopjes Kraal lies to its east, Rhemhoogte and Klip Gat to the north, and to the south the ground ran out into Government land, the open Koup. The modern cadastral farm 124 measures 13,883 ha.

The name drifts through the records the way all Karoo names do: de Rondabel (1818), Rondabel in Tarka (1823), the place Rondavel (1829), Rondable on the Surveyor-General diagrams, Rondabel in the cadastre, and Rondawel today.

The loan-farm era (before 1841)

The earliest documents are three estate inventories from the Master of the Orphan Chamber. Two are probably another farm's; one is beyond doubt.

The record that is beyond doubt (MOOC8/44.48). Jan Adriaan Venter (b. 1794) died on 23 July 1829. The inventory opens like this, and it is worth having in full rather than clipped, because the whole of its value is in how specifically it places the household:

A true and perfect inventory of all and every the goods, chattels, wares and merchandise as well moveable as not, debts, credits and other personal effects of Maria Catharina Elisabeth Venter and deceased husband Jan Adriaan Venter which latter died at the place Rondavel on the 23:rd July last between the hours of 11 and 12 p:m: within the field cornetcy of Hermanus van der Westhuisen in the Traka district of Beaufort

Farm, ward, region and district all named. This is the earliest household on the Koup Rondabel that can be placed with certainty, four years before the first survey. And it was family ground already: his widow, Maria Catharina Venter, was the elder sister of Adriana Cecilia Venter, wife of Ockert Almero Oosthuizen (1786–1859), whose descendants would take title to this same farm a generation later.

The inventory is a portrait of a young frontier family living thin: one bed, three chairs, four plates, a defect ox wagon, and 707 sheep and goats, their whole wealth on four legs. No cash, no credits, and every debt owed to the widow's own Venter family, who were carrying them. Five children aged two to ten, their birthdates recorded to the day; the second son, Jan Louis, born at Wolve Kraal on his father's own birthday, twenty years before Wolwekraal's 1841 grant to Johannes Hendrik Venter, most probably the widow's brother not yet verified. The widow signed with a mark: she could not write. How the farm passed from her household to the Strydoms by the 1833 survey, a widow with five small children likely could not hold the place, is an open question.

Two earlier records, probably a namesake farm. In 1818 the estate of Ignatius Michael du Plessis was taken on a "leeningsplaats genaamd de Rondabel gelegen aan de Tarca" (MOOC8/64.12a), half the opstal, a widow, Aletta van Heerden, three children under five. In 1823 the estate of Jan de Bruin and his widow Aletta Johanna Oosthuizen listed "1 leeningsplaats Rondabel gelegen in Tarka" first among its goods (MOOC8/38.12). But these two records name no field cornet, no Traka, no Beaufort, and the de Bruin estate sold its sheep to a Grahamstown butcher. The case the other way is real and once closed this question here: Rondabel's own 1833 diagram stands in the Field Cornetcy of Traka, and Traka for Tarca is ordinary spelling drift. It was reopened because proving a Traka in the Koup says nothing about a Tarka in the east. The working position is that the inventories describe an eastern-Cape namesake farm not yet verified. One finding survives either way: the 1823 widow has been identified as Aletta Johanna Susanna Oosthuizen (c. 1775–1834), a second cousin of Ockert Almero Oosthuizen. If her farm resolves east, she loses the farm but stays in the family.

Survey and title (1833–1841)

In August 1833 surveyor Charles Lennox Stretch measured Rondabel for Johannes Strydom: 11,352 morgen, bounded north by Rem Hoogte, south by Witte Water, east by Witte Klip, west by Droege Kloof (SG diagram 366/1833). It was one farm in a two-season campaign. Stretch surveyed Middelwater, Vrolykheid, Klaarstroom and Varsche Fontein in the same seasons, walking each boundary with the occupier and the field cornet.

Then, after seven years in which the paper shows nothing, came 15 April 1841: the Crown converted at least twelve Koup and Gouph loan farms to perpetual quitrent in a single administrative act. Rondabel went to David Jan Strydom ("Daniel son"), folio 989, the full story of that day is told in The fifteenth of April, 1841. The district's map was drawn in two seasons of fieldwork and ratified in an afternoon.

The farm comes to the Oosthuizens (1863–1872)

In November 1863 the farm was resurveyed at 16,151 morgen, some 4,800 morgen more than Stretch's figure, and on 21 January 1868 it was granted anew on perpetual quitrent to Jan Adriaan Oosthuizen and Stephanus Johannes Theron (SG diagram 502/1867). These two were brothers-in-law: Theron had married Jan Adriaan's sister at Prince Albert in 1851, and Jan Adriaan is almost certainly the Johannes Adriaan Oosthuizen born at Graaff-Reinet in 1816, son of the Middelwater household not yet verified. The partnership divided on paper on 17 July 1872, when a portion went to Theron alone (diagram 922 of 1872, framed from actual survey on 6 June 1872 and copied from the diagram relating to Transfer 208 of 17 July 1872); every later subdivision descends from that Theron portion.

Sold, not inherited, and the dates say so

The obvious reading of a farm changing hands is that somebody died. Here that reading is wrong, and one date rules it out.

David Jan Strydom died on 11 January 1882, fourteen years after Rondabel left his hands, aged eighty-three. He held the first title from 1841, and he was alive and outlived the 1868 grant by a decade and a half. Whatever moved the farm to Oosthuizen and Theron, it was not his estate.

That narrows it usefully without closing it. The 1868 instrument is not itself a sale: it is a fresh perpetual-quitrent title following the November 1863 resurvey, which found 16,151 morgen where Stretch had measured 11,352. The Crown was re-titling a re-measured farm, and the men named on the new title are the men who held it by then. So the actual change of hands sits somewhere in the twenty-seven years between 1841 and 1868, and the deed that carried it is not held here. What can be said is what it was not: not an inheritance from the first titleholder.

The manner of the acquisition is legible even where the deed is not. Two brothers-in-law took it together. Theron had married Jan Adriaan's sister Dina Magdalena Oosthuizen at Prince Albert on 27 January 1851, seventeen years before the two men appear on one title. This is how ground moved in this district: not a purchase by a stranger with capital, but two households pooling what they had, with a marriage already holding them together. And it did not hold. On 17 July 1872 the partnership divided, Theron taking a portion in his own name, and every later subdivision of Rondabel descends from that split.

What their lives looked like in 1868

They were not young men taking a first farm. At the January grant Johannes Adriaan Oosthuizen was fifty-one, Theron thirty-nine, and Dina Magdalena thirty-five, seventeen years married. Strydom, letting it go, was sixty-nine.

And they were buying into the best years the Karoo would have. The decade around that title is the district at its most prosperous, and the record here shows it from several directions at once:

• Wool was the money. In June 1870 a million kilograms of wool went

out through the poort in a single season. Sheep on this veld were paying for land.

• Ostriches were arriving. Wire fencing and lucerne had made feathers farmable, and the

first feather boom was building through the 1860s.

• The mineral revolution had just begun somewhere else. Diamonds were found at Kimberley

in 1867, the year before the grant, and in August 1871 an aardvark turned up the first gold nugget on Spreeuwfontein, forty kilometres away.

• The colony was changing shape. Responsible government came to the Cape in 1872, and the

railway reached Beaufort West in 1880.

So 1868 sits at a hinge. These two men took a re-measured 16,000-morgen quitrent farm in the last decade in which the Karoo's wealth still came entirely off its own back, wool, and then feathers, and before rails, mines and a world depression rearranged what a farm was worth. The Long Depression began in 1873, five years after they signed.

Neither of them saw much of what followed. Theron died at Willowmore on 7 January 1879, aged fifty, out of the district and eleven years after taking the farm; his estate's disposal is the deed this history is still missing. Strydom died on 11 January 1882 and Oosthuizen on 11 August 1882: the man who let the farm go and the man who took it, seven months apart. Dina Magdalena outlived her husband by twenty-nine years, to 1908.

Subdivision (1910–1934)

The Theron portion broke up across a quarter-century, and the buyers tell the district's story in miniature:

Almero Jacobus Hitge Oosthuizen (1878–1961), the fourteen-year-old who drove the schoolteachers over the Swartberg Pass in 1892, bought 4,311 morgen of Rondabel ground in 1919–21, a great-grandson of the Middelwater generation buying back onto the farm his forebear had been granted in 1868. Gerolm Samuel Marincowitz (1870–1941), son of Nicholas James Marincowitz and Catharina Maria Oosthuizen, brought the Marincowitz name onto the farm in 1934, already carrying Oosthuizen blood.

The surveys left their own record of the ground. J.A. Loubser's 1919 beacon report found cairns four feet high, three beacons missing, a stone wall that agreed with the diagram angle, and recorded his "very grave doubt as to the accuracy of Surveyor Luttig's distance". His field sketch names the beacons like a poem of the veld: Klip, Camp, Honing Nest Poortje, Meerkat, Fontein, Gravel Krantz, Hartebeest, Skeur, Witbaken, Predikant Rand.

The Marincowitz farm

The farm settled into the Marincowitz family in three movements. They surrounded it. Kopjes Kraal and Oude Muure, on Rondabel's east, are Marincowitz farms. They married in, from Nicolaas James Marincowitz's 1866 marriage to an Oosthuizen, the two families intermarried in every generation. They bought in. Klein Elandsfontein in 1934 is the first documented purchase; the deed that carried the Remainder into Marincowitz hands is still missing from the record not yet verified.

Gert Annis Oosthuizen Marincowitz, "Tokkie" (1919–2003), farmed Rondabel until his death. His middle names were earned twice over: his grandfather married Catharina Maria Oosthuizen in 1866, planting the surname inside Gert Jan Oosthuizen Marincowitz (1875–1952); Gert Jan then married Anna Margaretha Oosthuizen in 1918, so Tokkie carried the name from two successive Oosthuizen mothers. Close to the farmhouse lie two graves, remembered from family holidays on the farm but never read, most likely werf burials from the Marincowitz or Oosthuizen–Theron eras, and the farm's missing burial record. The farm remains with the Marincowitz family today.

The chain of ownership

Open questions

Who lies in the two werf graves. The 1868 deed itself. Which Rondabel the 1818/1823 inventories describe. How the farm passed from the Venter widow to the Strydoms. The Theron estate's disposal after 1879, and with it the deed that carried the Remainder into Marincowitz hands.

The 1867 resurvey was a batch, and Rondabel was in it

Rondabel's second title rests on diagram 502/1867 and quitrent P.A.Q.1-21, granted 21 January 1868. The 1833 Klipfontein diagram carries a cancellation stamp: "VIDE Subst. Dgm. 501/1867, P.A.Q. 1-22".

Consecutive diagram numbers. Consecutive title folios. These two farms were resurveyed and retitled in the same operation, and Rondabel's "granted anew" of 1868 was not a thing that happened to Rondabel alone, it was one farm's share of a district-wide tidying-up. Whoever next works the Rondabel chain of title should ask for 501/1867 at the same time; it is one sheet away.

Rondabel's 1841 folio is probably mistranscribed

Seven farms surveyed by C. Lennox Stretch in August 1833 carry titles dated 15 April 1841, and their diagram numbers and quitrent folios rise together on every legible pair: 349→5-7, 351→5-10, 354→5-17, 356→5-30, 369→5-43.

Rondabel's diagram is 366/1833, which sits between 356 and 369. The pattern therefore predicts a folio between 31 and 42. What is transcribed is 5-2?, somewhere in the twenties, below the farm on either side of it, and in a slot Spreeufontein has already taken at 5-26.

So either the pattern breaks here, or the second digit has been read low and the reference is 5-3-something. The doubt is in the transcription rather than in the archive, and it can be settled by looking at the diagram again rather than by ordering anything. not yet verified

What this story is about

• set on Rondabel
• set on Brand Kraal (Rondabel No. 124 Ptn 3)
• set on Hartebeest Voedpad (Rondabel No. 124 Ptn 5)
• set on Elandsfontein (Rondabel No. 124 Ptn 6)
• set on Klein Elandsfontein (Rondabel No. 124 Ptn 7)
• about Jan Adriaan Venter
• about Maria Catharina Venter
• about Jan Adriaan Oosthuizen
• about Stephanus Johannes Theron
• about David Jan Strydom (Daniel son)
• about Almero Jacobus Hitge Oosthuizen
• about Gerolm Samuel Marincowitz
• about Gert Annis Oosthuizen Marincowitz

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. Surveyor-General diagram, 366/1833, August 1833 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 366/1833
2. Surveyor-General diagram, 502/1867, November 1863 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 502/1867
3. Diagram verso, 502/1867 (verso) Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 502/1867 (verso)
4. Surveyor-General diagram, 922/1872, 6 June 1872 Landmeter-Generaal, KaapstadNo. 922/1872 (written over a struck 161/1872); framed from actual survey 6 June 1872 by J.W. du T. Melvill, Govt. Surveyor; examiner L. Marquard; deducted 29 June 1872, Fred Ruysch, Govt. Sur.; copied from the diagram relating to Transfer Deed No. 208 dated 17.7.1872; Sheet BL-2
5. Estate inventory, deed MOOC8/38.12, 13 June 1823 Cape Town Archives RepositoryMOOC8/38.12
6. Estate inventory, deed MOOC8/64.12a, 2 May 1818 Cape Town Archives RepositoryMOOC8/64.12a
7. Surveyor-General diagram, 1654/1910, August 1910 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 1654/1910
8. beacon_report, 1654/1910, 16 September 1910 Surveyor-General1654/1910
9. Surveyor-General diagram, 270/1919, January 1919 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 270/1919
10. Surveyor-General diagram, 1872-23-208, 1919 Surveyor-General1872-23-208
11. Surveyor-General diagram, 1919 Surveyor-General
12. Surveyor-General diagram, 891/1921, 1921 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 891/1921
13. beacon_report, 891/1921, 10 March 1921 Surveyor-General891/1921
14. Surveyor-General diagram, 3273/1933, January 1919 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 3273/1933
15. Estate inventory, deed MOOC8/44.48, 29 October 1829 Cape Town Archives Repository (KAB), Master of the Orphan Chamber; TANAP transcription (within corpus SRC-128)MOOC8/44.48
16. Rondabel No.124 original grant diagram (1833) Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 366/1833
17. Rondabel No.124 diagram 502/1867 Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 502/1867
18. Rondabel No.124 - reverse: deduction table Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 502/1867 (verso)
19. SG Dgm 922/1872 - Portion 1 of the farm Rondable No. 124, Prince Albert Landmeter-Generaal, KaapstadNo. 922/1872 (written over a struck 161/1872); framed from actual survey 6 June 1872 by J.W. du T. Melvill, Govt. Surveyor; examiner L. Marquard; deducted 29 June 1872, Fred Ruysch, Govt. Sur.; copied from the diagram relating to Transfer Deed No. 208 dated 17.7.1872; Sheet BL-2
20. MOOC8/38.12 - Jan de Bruin & Aletta Johanna Oosthuizen, 13 Jun 1823 Cape Town Archives RepositoryMOOC8/38.12
21. MOOC8/64.12a - Ignatius Michael du Plessis & Aletta Elisabeth Dorothea van Heerden, 2 May 1818 Cape Town Archives RepositoryMOOC8/64.12a
22. Rondabel Portion 3 "Brand Kraal" diagram Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 1654/1910
23. Rondabel Portion 5 "Hartebeest Voedpad" diagram Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 270/1919
24. Rondabel Portion 6 "Elandsfontein" diagram Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 891/1921
25. Rondabel Portion 7 "Klein Elandsfontein" diagram Surveyor-GeneralSG Dgm 3273/1933
26. MOOC8/44.48 - Inventory, estate of Jan Adriaan Venter & Maria Catharina Elisabeth Venter, taken at the place Rondavel, Traka, district of Beaufort, 29 Oct 1829 Cape Town Archives Repository (KAB), Master of the Orphan Chamber; TANAP transcription (within corpus SRC-128)MOOC8/44.48

Research notes

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