Willem Schalkz van der Merwe (d.1716)
? – 12 July 1716 · van der Merwe line
No birth date is recorded for this person. The family puts an outer limit on it: born no later than 1657, because their child born 1673, so at least 16 years earlier. That is a hard limit, it cannot be otherwise. It is an upper bound and not a birth year, and nothing in the model records it as one.
Names
- Given
- Willem Schalkz
- 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
- Married
- Adelheidis "Elsie" Klauten Cloete (d.1702) 9 September 1668
A life in the record
- 9 September 1668 married Married Adelheidis "Elsie" Klauten Cloete (d.1702)
- 12 July 1716 died Died
What we don't know
- No birth date is recorded.
- 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
[20 Aug 2026, SRC-533 + the private tree] DIRECT ANCESTOR, admitted under scope rule R3 which takes direct ancestry back unbounded. TWO SOURCES THAT HAVE NEVER MET AGREE: Laura Mitchell's 'Belongings' (Columbia UP, 2008) ch. 5 tells this family's story in prose, and the private tree carries the dates. Neither cites the other. THE VAN DER MERWE STAMVADER. Mitchell: an arquebusier who came from the Low Countries aboard the DORDRECHT, was released from Company service the next year and granted burgher rights, and married in 1668 - linking himself to the Cloetes, 'a prominent local landowner and a nascent colonial dynasty'. She also records that he had a child with a slave before the marriage. Thirteen children, ten of whom married.
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.