Kweekvallei

· on record 1812 · show on the map

District

Prince Albert

This parcel has no matched survey polygon, so it cannot be drawn on the map. That is a gap in the cadastre match, not an absence from the record.

Why this farm is here

Samuel de Beer (b.1762) lived on this ground. Connected to the Oosthuizen, Marincowitz or Van der Merwe lines BY MARRIAGE, not by blood, 3 steps on the shortest path. Not yet placed on the map.

1. Samuel de Beer (b.1762)
2. parent of Matthys Andries de Beer (b.1799)
3. parent of Zacharias Johannes Hendricus de Beer
4. married to Catharina Petronella Oosthuizen

Each step is a recorded parentage or marriage in this model, and the shortest one the record supports, follow the names to check it.

• story A written history is set on this ground Frikkie Oosthuizen builds a church at Zeekoegat, 65 km from town, 1906
• story A written history names this ground Oom Frikkie's eighty-one thousand morgen, 1856-1937
• story A written history names this ground From Modder Fonteyn to the Koup, 1809-1841
• story A written history is set on this ground The Koup before the grants, 1762-1841
• …and 2 more, listed in full further down this page.

Stories

• set here Frikkie Oosthuizen builds a church at Zeekoegat, 65 km from town, 1906
  Three generations of Oosthuizens in the Zwartberg church, and the rich farmer who built a chapel 65 km out on the dirt for a hundred people.
• mentions this farm Oom Frikkie's eighty-one thousand morgen, 1856-1937
  Frederik Simon 'Oom Frikkie' Oosthuizen died in 1936 holding, by one account, 81,000 morgen around Zwartkraal - about a quarter of all the ground on this map. This project holds not one deed in his name. What the money was probably in, what it was certainly not in, and the one document that would settle it.
• mentions this farm From Modder Fonteyn to the Koup, 1809-1841
  A clerk from the Orphan Chamber rode out to de Modder Fonteyn on the Olifants River on 23 April 1809 and wrote down what was in the house, room by room, including a complete forge in a room called the winkel. The owner had died intestate and his wife before him. Eleven children are named with their ages, and the seven youngest were placed with their eldest brother, aged twenty-five, who had promised to raise and school them. He bought the farm for a thousand rixdollars; the other ten had to find ground elsewhere. Twenty-five years later Oosthuizen households held two of three adjoining farms along the north foot of the Swartberg; the middle one was a du Preez's.
• set here The Koup before the grants, 1762-1841
  The district in the Dutch East India Company's own minutes, from the Swartberg being taken as a jurisdictional wall in 1770 to more than a hundred places standing abandoned in 1791. The Koup is named, given an officer, bounded by rivers and emptied, all before the grants of 1841 that this record otherwise begins with.

What the record holds, in order

1. 1812–1814 lived here Samuel de Beer (b.1762) (before 1762-11-02–?)
   report

Research notes

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

Open questions

• A story: the de Beers of Kweekvallei, the family the town of Prince Albert was built on priority 1 · LEAD-0073

  Can the de Beer line be traced continuously from the 1762 loan farm Queeckvalleij to the families this project follows - and is that the earliest thread in the whole history?

  What would settle it The 1762 loan-farm grant naming Zacharias and Dina, and a line of descent from him to Matthys Andries de BeerM (b. 1799), the field-cornet candidate.

• Who held De Claar Stroom between 1777 and 1833, and why did the Oosthuizens come to this ground? priority 1 · LEAD-0216

  The loan farm De Claar Stroom was granted in 1777 and ran from Middelwater to Vrolikheid. No holder is recorded for it before Petrus Oosthuizen in 1858. Who had it in between, and is there a tie between that household and the Oosthuizens of the Olifants River that would explain why they came to exactly this ground rather than anywhere else in the Karoo?

  What would settle it A named holder of De Claar Stroom in the 1810s, and any tie of marriage, witnessing or trade between that household and the Oosthuizens before 1818.

• Was Hilletje Elizabeth de Beer, who married an Oosthuizen about 1807, of the Kweekvallei de Beers? priority 2 · LEAD-0217

  Jacobus Johannes Ockert Oosthuizen (b.1789, d. 16 Feb 1874), son of Marthinus of Tulbagh and a first cousin of the brothers who took up ground in the Koup, married Hilletje Elizabeth de Beer (b. about May 1788, d. 12 Dec 1873) around 1807. Was she of the de Beer family that had held Kweekvallei in the Koup since 1762? If she was, this marriage is a channel by which an Oosthuizen household could have learnt what ground was open behind the Swartberg.

  What would settle it A document naming Hilletje Elizabeth de Beer's father.

What the record is missing

• Nobody is on record as ever having held this third order · B8 never-held

  Kweekvallei is in the model, and carries no ownership record of any kind, not a grant, not a transfer, not an occupation.

  What would settle it The Surveyor-General's diagram for the farm number names the grantee and the date; the deed reference on it opens the transfer chain.

Found by breaks.py reading the model against itself, not written by hand, each one is a shape of missing record, not a fault in the data. The whole set is on the questions page.