Estate inventory, deed MOOC8/40.55, 23 February 1826

Inventory of the joint estate · taken on Rondabel, 23 February 1826

Inventaris van alle zoodanige goederen en effecten, als behoord hebben tot den gemeenschappelyken boedel van wylen Fredrik Jacobus Botha en nagelatene weduwe Maria Petronella Venter en door eerstgem: op den 11:e November 1825 ab intestato met er dood zyn ontruimd en nagelaten geworden, te weten

This is a poor household, and the contrast with the de Bruin estate on the same farm three years earlier is the point of reading them together.

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Losse goederen — Moveable goods

Forty-odd objects, and one of them is a bed. No watch, no guns, no books, no mirror. An adze, an auger and a wagon box — the wagon trade again, at subsistence scale.

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Slaven — The two enslaved women

1) de slavin Rachel van Mosambique 2) de slavin Spaas van Mosambique

Both taken from Mozambique. Named and nothing more. Transcribed as written, for the same reason as in MOOC8/38.12 — this line is the only record of them.

That a household this poor — a single bed, five plates — nevertheless held two enslaved women is the plainest statement in this folder of how slavery actually worked at the Cape frontier. It was not a mark of wealth.

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Beestiaal — Livestock

148 sheep, against 1,540 on the same farm three years before.

Contanten des boedels

nihil

Baten des boedels — Credits due

All three debtors are in the George district — the family's connections run west, not east.

Schulden des boedels — Debts

Two lines are worth stopping on.

"aan Dan:l Peffer, huur als schoolmeester" — 16 rixdollars owed to Daniel Peffer, hire as schoolmaster. A family with one bed and five plates was paying a private tutor to come and teach the children on the farm. There was no school within reach; you hired a man and he lived with you. The same instinct as Jacobus Johannes Oosthuizen's promise in 1809 to have his seven orphaned siblings onderwezen.

"aan d:r Couse, doktors loon" — 35 rixdollars, doctor's fee. Fredrik Jacobus Botha died on 11 November 1825; a doctor was called and had not been paid by February.

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Erfgenaamen — Heirs

The eldest daughter's name, Hester, is also the creditor's name — Hester Venter, widow of F. Botha — the grandmother from whom the farm was bought and not paid for. The vernoemingspatroon, again, doing exactly what it should.

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Closing formula

Aldus gedaan en geinventariseerd ter plaatse Rondabel gelegen aan Tarka op den 23 February 1826 volgens op en aangave van die in den hoofde dezes gemelde wed:e Botha …

Als getuigen: J:F: Ziervogel, G: Aldrich Maria Pieternella Venter In kennisse van my: W:M: Mackay

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What this record establishes

1. A schoolmaster was being hired onto a Tarka farm in the 1820s — the strongest evidence in this folder for how education actually reached these families.
2. Rondabel changed hands hard and often. Du Plessis 1818, de Bruin 1823, Botha 1826 — three estates in eight years, with flocks of 538, 1,540 and 148. The land held; the households did not.
3. The George connection. Every credit is owed from the George district, which is the road back west toward the Langkloof and the Cape — not the Grahamstown-facing trade of the de Bruin estate.
4. George Aldrich witnesses both this and the 1823 inventory, three years apart. The same handful of literate men signed everything in the district.

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Filed 29 July 2026. Transcription © Cape Town Archives Repository; publication permitted only with repository and reference number named, as done above.