Willem Venter
17 May 1819 – ? · Venter line
Names
- Surname
- Venter
The formal baptismal name and the name a person was actually called are both kept, and neither is derived from the other. Spelling drift between records is evidence, not noise.
Three generations around this person
Work out how this person is related to somebody else →
Click any name and the same three generations are drawn around that person instead. There is no first couple here and no top to the tree: it is only ever the family standing closest to whoever you are reading about, and a blank is a gap in the record rather than a statement about anybody.
Immediate family
- Father
- Jan Adriaan Venter
- Mother
- Maria Catharina Venter
- Brothers and sisters
- Married
- Anna Christina Oosthuizen before 1839
A life in the record
- before 1839 married Married Anna Christina Oosthuizen
- 17 May 1819 born Born
- 7 October 1839 witness Witnessed a baptism
- 25 December 1848 witness Witnessed a baptism
- 7 July 1850 witness Witnessed a baptism
- 2 October 1859 witness Witnessed a baptism
Who stood with them
Who signed at a baptism, a will or a survey is not incidental. It is the clearest surviving record of which families stood close to which.
- they stood for Maria Elizabeth Catharina Swanepoel baptism · 25 December 1848
- they stood for Willem Frederik Swanepoel baptism · 7 July 1850
- they stood for Dirk Jacobus Swanepoel baptism · 2 October 1859
- they stood for Maria Salomina baptism · 7 October 1839
Others of the same name
Afrikaans naming repeats hard, and the Cape Dutch naming pattern reuses a name on purpose, a child who died young has the name given again to a later sibling. These are different people. Never match on a name alone.
What we don't know
- No death date is recorded.
- No dated record ties this person to a specific piece of ground.
- 1 other person in this model carry the same name. Never match on a name alone.
A sourced gap beats an unsourced fill. These are the open questions on this person, stated rather than papered over.
Sources
- 'n Tak van die Swanepoel-familie in Suid-Afrika, 1699 tot 1999: 'n genealogiese en kultuurhistoriese studie Universiteit van Stellenbosch (SUNScholar)MA thesis, Departement Geskiedenis; studieleier Dr M Burden; April 2003; handle 10019.1/53526
- Beaufort West NG Gemeente, Baptisms 1819-1844 (doopregister) FamilySearch, "South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Records (Stellenbosch Archive), 1690-2011"; citing Genealogiese Instituut van Suid-Afrika (GISA), StellenboschSouth Africa > Cape > Beaufort West > Baptisms 1819-1844 > 302 images. Waypoint wc=M64H-PNL:13850901,13850902,14731201,14762701; cc=1392488. Last image (302 of 302) is ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-68TW-GKL. Held here: 91 distinct page images, filed under their ark suffix in sources/registers/beaufort-west-baptisms-1819-1844/
Research notes
[TREE] Added 2026-07-31 by kin_sweep.py under the one-degree rule: child of Jan Adriaan VenterL. Thin record, name, dates and the family link only. NO PLACE IMPORTED: the tree's place strings are systematically wrong and are not evidence.
[3 Aug 2026, SRC-200] STOOD AS A BAPTISM WITNESS at Beaufort West in 1839 (BWB-225-05), in the veldkornetskap Veldcornetschap Mocke. Identified on name + date + tree id, never on the name alone: 22 of 52 unique-name matches from this register were rejected because the person's own dates forbade it. [TO VERIFY]
These are working notes, not finished prose: they carry the reasoning, the corrections and the things still marked to verify. They are kept here so the page itself can read as what is known.
Open questions
-
Willem Venter and Anna Christina Oosthuizen stood as witnesses together four times over twenty years
priority 2 · LEAD-0087
Who were they, and were they a married couple? Four joint appearances between 1839 and 1859 make them the most active godparent pair in the register.
What would settle it A marriage entry naming both. Failing that, a baptism where one of them is a parent rather than a witness.
Elders
FamilySearch profile 972T-NY8