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Person PER-001405

Martha van Heerden

? – 1843

Names

Surname
Heerden

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.

A life in the record

  1. 1843 died Died
  2. 5 March 1843 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.

What we don't know

A sourced gap beats an unsourced fill. These are the open questions on this person, stated rather than papered over.

Sources

  1. 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

[3 Aug 2026, SRC-200] THIN RECORD, created because this person STOOD AS A BAPTISM WITNESS at Beaufort West in 1842 (BWB-277-04, veldkornetskap C de Clercq, page 277) AND is connected to the families this project is built on. KINSHIP PATH, 7 steps to Ockert Almero and Adriana Cecilia: sibling of Pieter Willem van HeerdenM -> parent of Albertus Lambertus van Heerden -> married to Engela Elisabeth Helena van Heerden -> child of Catherina Maria Pretorius -> child of Engela Elisabeth Smit -> sibling of Johanna Jacomina SmitM -> parent of Adriana Cecilia VenterM. IDENTIFIED ON NAME + DATE, not on the name alone: the name is unique among 44,143 people in the private tree and the tree's dates put this person alive and adult at that font. 22 of 52 unique-name matches from this register were REJECTED because the chronology forbade them. [TO VERIFY] Nothing beyond the tree's own dates and this one appearance is claimed here.

[15 Aug 2026, FS] FamilySearch id filled from the FamilySearch id field of the family tree exports, matched on this row's own tree id and accepted only because the tree's NAME AND YEARS agree with this row. It is a door to the sources, not a source: nothing here is taken from the profile.

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.

Elders

FamilySearch profile 2CBY-MT5