The van Rensburgs of the dry north

Nine generations, of which eight are names and years, and then a boy orphaned sixteen months apart in 1896 and 1898, given to a family called Vos, and turned out at twenty-five with a horse. He bought a boring machine and sold windpumps through the worst droughts the region records. The line that lost the Janse from its surname in one generation.

Of Frans's four grandparent lines, this is the one with the fewest farms and the best story. Nine generations run from a man who died at the Cape in 1728 to Maria Magritha van Rensburg, born at Williston in 1928, who married into the van der Merwe line and came south to the Prince Albert district with it.

The country is Bushmanland and the Hantam's northern edge: Vosburg, Van Wyksvlei, Williston, Brandvlei. This is the driest ground any of these families lived on, drier than the Koup and drier than the Calvinia farms, and it is worth saying plainly what that means. There is very little surface water. What a household has depends on what it can lift out of the ground. Hold on to that, because it turns out to be this family's actual trade.

For eight of the nine generations the record is thin: names, years, and a marriage. It is thin for a reason that is itself part of the story, and the reason arrives in 1898.

The line, in one place

Everything above Albertus Gerhardus rests on a compiled family tree and not on a register, so the early generations stand as that tree gives them and are not treated as documented. not yet verified One of them is striking enough to flag: Daniel Jacobus is entered as born in 1793 and dead in 1893, which would make him a hundred. On a compiled tree that is as likely to be two men merged into one as it is to be a long life.

The first crossing, in the 1700s

The first man here, Claas Jansz van Rensburg, married Aeltie van der Merwe, who was born in 1684 and died in 1729, a year after he did.

That is worth noticing now because of what happens at the end of this story. When Maria Magritha van Rensburg married a van der Merwe at Williston in 1949, it was not the first time those two names had joined in this ancestry. It was the third. How the two families kept meeting is set out in Four grandparents, four countries.

Sixteen months in 1896 and 1898

Albertus Gerhardus Janse van Rensburg was born on 7 January 1860 and married Martha Gertruida Olivier on 1 December 1884. They had a son, Petrus Gideon, born 7 May 1891.

She died on 8 September 1896, when the boy was five. He died on 1 January 1898, when the boy was six. Sixteen months apart.

All three of those dates are recorded. No cause for either death is. The years are hard ones in the interior: rinderpest swept southern Africa in 1896 and took most of the cattle in the country, and the district was two years off a war. Whether either had anything to do with these two deaths is not recorded anywhere, and the coincidence of dates is not evidence. not yet verified

What the deaths do explain is the surname. From this point on the family is recorded as van Rensburg and not Janse van Rensburg. A boy taken into another household at six keeps the name he is called by rather than the one written on his dead father's papers, and that is how a three-word surname loses a word in a single generation. Both forms are kept here as the documents write them, and they are one family.

The other consequence lasted a lifetime. Maria Magritha van Rensburg went through her whole life without knowing who her father's parents were. They were found only recently, by her grandson.

The boy, the Vos family, and the horse

What happened to Petrus Gideon between 1898 and 1916 is known from one document, and it is not an official one. His daughter sat down in 1987 and wrote her father's childhood out by hand. It is the only account of those years, and it is a primary source in the only sense that matters here: she heard it from him.

He and his sister Martha were given to a family called Vos. They schooled him a few years and worked him on their farm. He got black coffee without sugar, and bread without jam, while the family's own children were fed otherwise. At twenty-five he left. For all those years' work they gave him a horse.

Which Vos family is still an open question, and the two death dates give it a place and a date to search: an orphan placed in the Van Wyksvlei or Calvinia area between September 1896 and January

1. It is LEAD-0142.

The marriage register catches him three years later and confirms the account exactly. On 10 November 1919 he is entered as aged twenty-eight, a jonkman and a werkman of Williston: a working man, not yet in business for himself. not yet verified

A man from dry country who sold water

He bought a boring machine with what he had saved.

That is the sentence the whole story turns on, and it needs its country to be understood. A man raised without property in a district with almost no surface water bought the machine that finds water underground, in the years when the Karoo was learning that boreholes and windpumps were the difference between holding stock and losing it. He then took agencies: Steward & Lloyds windpumps, Wellstood stoves, Venetian blinds. He ran his own mill at Williston.

He was selling water machinery through the worst run of dry years in the region's records: the 1926 drought, when Beaufort West measured 6.3 cm of rain in the year, and the great drought of 1930. The business was not incidental to the country. It was the country.

And his wife ran it with him. Maria Margaretha Walters, called Malie, was born at Williston on 6 December 1900. She had taught at a farm school at Soetwater before she married, and her own daughter's account of her is unambiguous: "'n baie slim en hardwerkende vrou. Sy was uitstekend met besigheid en het agentskappe van Steward + Lloyds en baie ander gehad en die hele dorp en distrik voorsien." A very clever and hard-working woman, excellent at business, who held the agencies and supplied the whole town and district. She is not described as helping. She is described as running it.

They met at a funeral. He always said she had been wearing a red coat with fur round the collar.

About 1940 they sold the business, and the Landbou Ko-op at Williston began that year. Whether the one bought the other is not recorded. He sent money to orphanages for the rest of his life, and his daughter remembered his love of sweet things, which is the sort of detail that only comes from somebody who was in the room.

He died on 31 October 1971, having outlived by three years the son-in-law who married his daughter.

Williston, 1949

Maria Magritha van Rensburg was born at Williston on 28 October 1928, one of eight children, and she is the only one of Frans's four grandparents to see this century: she died on 3 April 2019.

She married Frans Jacobus Wilhelmus van der Merwe at Williston on 17 January 1949, and about a year later the household came south to the Prince Albert district and onto Vredendal. That is the move that ends four hundred kilometres of separation between two families, and it is told from the other side in The van der Merwes of the Hantam.

He died on his forty-fourth birthday, 8 April 1968. She was thirty-nine, with three children.

What she did afterwards is the part of her life the deeds record. She married Gert Annis "Tokkie" Marincowitz, and in 1973 she bought the Varsche Fontein Remainder and Welbedacht under her married name, deed T30432/1973. She never lived on Varsche Fontein. The purchase completed a plan she and her first husband had held for a long time, and she carried it out five years after he died. The ground went into a family trust in 1997.

One disagreement about her is recorded rather than resolved: a published Calvinia genealogy gives her as Maria Magdalena, born 23 October 1928, against the Maria Magritha, born 28 October 1928, recorded here. Five days and a different second name. LEAD-0155. not yet verified

What this line is missing

Eight of the nine generations here have no farm, no death notice and no register page. The van Rensburgs are a family known almost entirely through other people's documents: a marriage register, a deed of transfer, and a daughter's typescript.

That is not the same as a family without a history, and the difference matters. Three of Petrus Gideon's siblings are named in the 1987 account, Hester, Koos and Martha, and none of them has a record here. LEAD-0163 is open on them. The Vos household has no name. And above 1860 there is nothing but a compiled tree.

The one thing this line does have, and the other three do not, is a childhood told in the first person. Nine generations of names, and one boy with a horse.

What this story is about

• about Claas Jansz van Rensburg
• about Willem Janse van Rensburg (1717-1746)
• about Willem van Rensburg (1741-1800)
• about Barend Johannes Jansen van Rensburg (1766-1801)
• about Daniel Jacobus Janse van Rensburg (1793-1893)
• about Jacobus Jansen van Rensburg (1815-1895)
• about Albertus Gerhardus Janse van Rensburg
• about Petrus Gideon van Rensburg
• about Maria Magritha van Rensburg

Research notes

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