Estate inventory, deed MOOC8/28.63, 23 April 1809

Inventory of the estate · taken 23 April 1809 · on the farm

Inventaris van alle zodanige goederen, beestiaal, etc:a als er door wijlen den manh:e Ockert Oosthuijzen ab intestato met er dood ontruijmd en nagelaaten, mitsgaders heeden opgenoomen en in waren weezen bevonden zyn geworden, te weeten

Op de plaats de Modder Fonteyn en aldaar

Inventory of all such goods, livestock etc. as were left at his death intestate by the late Ockert Oosthuijzen, taken today and found to be truly as follows. On the farm de Modder Fonteyn, and there.

This is the document the whole site begins in. It names the farm, and — in its closing formula rather than its text — it also names the official who presided, which is the only thing here that bears on where the farm stood.

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The house, room by room

The clerk walked through the house in order. That order is the floor plan.

In 't voorhuis — In the front room

Twenty-two spoons and twelve forks in a house of thirteen people. And one silver watch — the only object in the whole inventory that is not either a tool, a container or a piece of furniture.

In de kamer ter regterhand — In the right-hand room

In de kamer ter linkerhand — In the left-hand room

The left-hand room is the dairy. Butter is being made here at scale — two vats, two tubs, a churn.

In de combuis — In the kitchen

In de winkel — In the workshop

A bellows, an anvil iron, two sledgehammers, tongs and a vice. This is a forge. Winkel here is not a shop — it is the workshop, and the man who died on this farm was a smith.

Op de werf — In the yard

Wagemakershout — wagonmaker's wood — is not firewood and not building timber. It is stock in trade. Together with the forge inside, it says the trade plainly: smith and wagonmaker. And in the credits below, a neighbour owes money over gekogte wagemakershout — he was selling it.

That is the skill this family carried east into the Karoo, where a wagon was the only thing between a farm and everywhere else.

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Beestiaal — Livestock

Two hundred sheep in 1809, on the Olifants River, a generation before the merino boom reached the Karoo.

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Baten des boedels — Credits due to the estate

The last line is the sale of the farm. The eldest son bought his father's place out of the estate for 1,000 rixdollars, and by 11 December 1810 had paid off 344 of it. That is OWN-000051 in the model.

The second line from the bottom but one is the root ancestor of this whole project, aged 23, owing 56 rixdollars on a wagon he bought from his own father — marked vold:, paid in full.

Lasten des boedels — Debts of the estate

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Erfgenaamen — The eleven heirs

Heirs 5 to 11 are bracketed in the original with a single note: "alle woonachtig bij denzelver broeder Jacobus Joh:s Oosthuijsen" — all living with their brother Jacobus Johannes.

De laatstgem: zeven onmondige zijn op speciaal verzoek van Jacobus Johannes Oosthuizen die bij 't afsterven van zijne ouders heeft belooft dezelve te zullen nazigneemen en doen onderwijzen tot dat zij hunne mondige jaren zullen hebben bereykt, besteed.

The last-named seven minors were placed at the special request of Jacobus Johannes Oosthuizen, who at the death of his parents promised to take them in and have them taught until they should reach their majority.

He was twenty-five years old. He bought the farm for a thousand rixdollars and took on seven children, the youngest two, and undertook to have them schooled.

Note the phrase "bij 't afsterven van zijne ouders" — at the death of his parents, plural. The mother was already dead. These children were orphans outright.

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Closing formula

Aldus gedaan en g'inventariseerd ter plaatse genaamd de Modder Fonteijn gel: aan d' Oliphants rivier op den 23 April 1809, ende zulx op 't op en aangeeven van de burgers Jacobus Johannes en Ockert Almoro Oosthuizen, dewelke verklaarde zig hierinne ter goeder trouwe gedragen en huns weetens niets versweegen of te rug gehouden te hebben van al 't geen tot den boedel en nalatenschap behoord … ende zulx in 't bij weezen van den clercq Johannes Dorotheus Camijn en den eerste gerechtsboden Hendrik van As junior als getuijgen.

Als getuygen: J:D: Camijn, H: van As junior Voor de opgaave: Jacobus Johanes Oosthuysen, Ocker Almero Oosthuysen Ten mynen overstaan: A:A: Faure

"Ocker Almero Oosthuysen" — the root ancestor's own signature, 23 years old, in 1809. He signs himself Ocker, the noemnaam, not Ockert.

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What this record establishes

1. The farm is named and the district is not. De Modder Fonteyn, gelegen aan d'Olifants rivier — PAR-000065, the family seat before the trek east. The family knows it as the Citrusdal place, and the signature block argues against that: see below.
2. The trade. Smiths and wagonmakers, with a forge in the house and wagonmaker's wood for sale in the yard. Not only stock farmers.
3. Two hundred sheep, in 1809, before the Karoo.
4. The earliest documented address for the root ancestor, PER-000001 — on a river called the Olifants, and there are two of them.
5. The family were literate. Two brothers sign their own names; a promise to have seven siblings onderwezen is made and recorded.
6. No slaves are listed. Unlike his father's 1802 estate and the three Tarka inventories in this folder, this household held none — or none survived to be inventoried. not yet verified

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Rd 1000 for a place nobody owned

Added 18 August 2026.

The estate's credit list has the eldest son buying the farm: den burger Jacobus Johannes Oosthuizen, over koop van de plaats de Modder Fonteyn — den 11 Dec:r 1810 in mindering betaald Rd:s 344, against Rd 1000. Money plainly changed hands. The 1816 opgaafrol records a Modder fontyn held in leening [SRC-459], and five other Modderfontein estates in this same series are each entered as een opstal staande op de leeningsplaats [SRC-467]. Those look like they contradict each other and they do not.

On a Cape loan place the ground stayed the government's, held at an annual recognitie. What a man owned, sold and left to his children was the opstal — the house, the kraals, the werf, the improvements, and with them the occupation. That is why the Orphan Chamber values an opstal in every one of those estates: Rd 10 on the Kafferkuils in 1776, Rd 50 in 1792, Rd 133:16 at Welbedagt, Rd 1000 at Bruintjieshoogte in 1804. Rd 1000 here is the same order as the last of those.

So the two records agree. What Jacobus Johannes bought in 1809 was the opstal and the right to sit on the ground; seven years later the ground itself was still held on loan. It also explains why no farm number can be found for it: a loan place that was never converted to quitrent was never surveyed, and the name died with the occupation.

**And the entry is under Baten, the estate's assets.** He did not inherit the place. He bought it out of his father's estate and still owed Rd 656 of the price on 11 December 1810, which is the last trace of him there.

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A third Oosthuizen line, in one line of the account

The same list carries den burger Pieter Corn:s Oosthuizen Piet:r z:, over contant geleende, Rd 16:2 — Pieter Cornelis Oosthuizen, Pieter's son.

These brothers were Ockert's sons. A Pieterszoon is not one of them, and the likeliest man is the Pieter Cornelis born in 1788 to Ockert's brother Pieter Cornelis, who was about twenty-one. not yet verified A cousin, in other words, doing business with the estate on the day it was taken.

It is also a patronymic, written by a clerk, in this family's own papers in 1809 — which is the habit the disputed word on the 1833 Vrolykheid diagram turns on. See LEAD-0213.

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The signature block is the district evidence, and it was read last

Added 17 August 2026.

Ten mynen overstaan: A:A: Faure. Anthony Alexander Faure was landdrost of Swellendam, and a landdrost's authority was territorial: the farm he presided over stood in his district. The office is stated inside this same series — MOOC8/28.22, three weeks after this inventory, names den landdrost te Zwellendam de heer A:A: Faure [SRC-549]. His tenure dates of 1798 to 1810 are still web-sourced [SRC-465] not yet verified, but that he held the office on the date that matters is documentary.

Citrusdal did not. It lay in the district of Tulbagh, and from 1808 in the new district of Clanwilliam, four hundred kilometres away across two other magistracies.

The southern Olifants — the one that rises on the Traka north of the Swartberg and runs past Oudtshoorn [SRC-460] [SRC-462] — was Swellendam ground in April 1809, and stopped being so on 23 April 1811, when George was proclaimed a separate district because the Swellendam magistracy was too large, taking in what are now Mossel Bay, Calitzdorp, Oudtshoorn, Uniondale and Knysna.

Which is why the same households stand in the George opgaafrol of 1816 [SRC-459] without having moved. The district came to them.

Four records now name one district: Ockert married at Swellendam in 1783, his son Ockert Almero married at Swellendam in 1807, the 1867 death notice [SRC-451] gives Jacobus Johannes's birth in 1784 as the Division of Swellendam, and this inventory was taken before Swellendam's landdrost.

The men beside him are the harder evidence

The two witnesses are named: den clercq Johannes Dorotheus Camijn and den eerste gerechtsboden Hendrik van As junior. They are not incidental. At MOOC8/25.40, on a farm expressly onder 't district van Zwellendam, the same Faure presides attended by den eerste boode alhier Hendrik van As de jonge and countersigned by the secretary J.H. Frouenfelder — the Swellendam drostdy's own establishment, on its own ground [SRC-549]. So the presiding officer here is the district's landdrost and not a commissioned member of the Orphan Chamber sent out from Cape Town, which was the other ordinary reading of ten mijnen overstaan.

And the same three men were at the Cango four days earlier. MOOC8/28.25, 19 April 1809, the estate of Helena Dorothea Schoeman, widow of Stephanus Johannes Bekker, taken ter plaatse genaamd d' Oude Muragie gel: op 't eynde van de Cango — closing on a formula word for word identical to this one, same clerk, same first gerechtsbode, same Ten mynen over staan: A:A: Faure [SRC-549].

That is an itinerary, and it is a harder argument than the river's name, because it does not turn on how the Orphan Chamber generally used the words d'Olifants rivier. It turns on where three men physically stood on two dated mornings.

A landdrost's circuit did not cross the Colony and come back inside four days in April 1809.

What is settled and what is not. The district is as well evidenced as this series can make it. Where along the southern Olifants the farm actually stood is not: it was a loan place never converted to quitrent, so it was never surveyed and carries no number [SRC-467] [SRC-510]. The Cango estate is the new handle — a dated, named neighbour 32 km away. See LEAD-0220.

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Filed 29 July 2026. Transcription © TANAP / Globalise; publication permitted only with repository and reference number named, as done above.