Jacobus Alewyn van der Merwe (1804-1870)

11 January 1804 – 20 May 1870 · van der Merwe line

Names

Called: Kwaai Koos Welbedacht
Given: Jacobus Alewyn
Surname: van der Merwe

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.

Immediate family

Father: Carel Aaron van der Merwe (1771-1850)
Mother: Elsje Johanna van Heerden (1778-1828)
Brothers and sisters: 1794Schalk Willem van der Merwe (1794-1866)

1796Johanna Sophia van der Merwe (1796-1872)

1798Carel Petrus van der Merwe (1798-1847)

1802Louisa Jacoba van der Merwe (1802-1845)

1808~Izaak Johannes van der Merwe (1808-1839)

1830Elizabeth Maria van der Merwe (1830-1920)

1833Nicolaas Francois van der Merwe (1833-1857)
Married: Elisabeth Maria Theron (1805-1855) 7 November 1824
Children: Elsje Johanna van der Merwe (1835-1882)

A life in the record

11 January 1804 born Born
7 November 1824 married Married Elisabeth Maria Theron (1805-1855)
20 May 1870 died Died

Stories

mentioned The van der Merwes of the Hantam

What we don't know

No dated record ties this person to a specific piece of ground.

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

Research notes

[TREE, via a FamilySearch fan chart Name, dates and the FamilySearch id only. NO PLACE IMPORTED: the tree's place strings are systematically wrong and are not evidence (see PER-000760).

[11 Aug 2026] HE HAD A BYNAME AND IT NAMES HIS FARM: "KWAAI KOOS WELBEDACHT", recorded as a note on his FamilySearch profile in 2021 by another researcher. Kwaai is hard, sharp, bad-tempered; Koos is Jacobus. A man known by his temper and his ground. It is family memory at one remove and is not a document. [TO VERIFY] AND WELBEDACHT IS ALL OVER THIS HOUSEHOLD ONCE YOU LOOK. His daughter Elsje Johanna was BORN there in 1835 (SRC-405), MARRIED there in 1854 (SRC-404), and gave it as her birthplace on her own death notice; his wife DIED there in January 1855. So the byname is not decoration, it is where this branch lived. The farm is not yet a parcel in this project. LEAD-0169. Dates sharpened from bare years to 11 January 1804 and 20 May 1870.

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 G7YZ-1N5