Petrus Jacobus Malherbe (b.1871)
28 March 1871 – 16 July 1938
Names
- Called
- Pieter
- Given
- Petrus Jacobus
- Surname
- Malherbe
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.
Photographs
Three generations around this person
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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
- Hendrik Lodewyk Malherbe
- Brothers and sisters
A life in the record
- 28 March 1871 born Born
- 16 July 1938 died Died
Stories
- mentioned The war reaches the Koup
- subject Two Malherbe brothers write to their sister before going to war, 5 October 1899
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 dated record ties this person to a specific piece of ground.
- 2 other people 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.
Research notes
The other brother who came through the war; died at Plumstead, Cape Town. [TREE]
[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.
[16 Aug 2026, SRC-446/447] "PIETER", THE YOUNGEST, and the one who wrote it down. In 1899 he was a young attorney at Boksburg, a partner of General Beyers. He fought at Spioenkop, helped carry his brother Jan's body down, and rode that night with the escort taking the prisoners to Elandsfontein. He and Hennie ended the war as prisoners at Groenpunt.
THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER, from Plumstead on 2 January 1937, he wrote his sister Bettie a long letter correcting a published account of the battle, and it is the fullest first-hand narrative this project holds of anything: SRC-446. He is plain about what he was and was not - "I was no volunteer; we had our orders from superior officers" - and about what the day did to him: "One grew callous, one's senses got hardened."
He died on 16 July 1938, eighteen months after writing it.
[17 Aug 2026, TREE] NOEMNAAM FROM THE FAMILY TREE EXPORTS, which carry alternate NAME records typed aka. Taken only where the alternate is a SHORT SINGLE NAME that is not a spelling variant of the formal one - the sweep turned up 26 candidates and most were spelling drift (Strijdom for Strydom, Izaac for Isaac), which 5a keeps as evidence but which is not a noemnaam. CONFIRMED INDEPENDENTLY: he signs himself "Pieter" at the foot of his 1937 letter, SRC-446, and the newspaper article calls him Pieter.
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 GHVV-PL7