Adelheidis "Elsie" Klauten Cloete (d.1702)
? – 22 January 1702
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
- Called
- Elsie
- Given
- Adelheidis
- Surname
- Cloete
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
- Willem Schalkz van der Merwe (d.1716) 9 September 1668
A life in the record
- 9 September 1668 married Married Willem Schalkz van der Merwe (d.1716)
- 22 January 1702 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. MITCHELL CALLS HER ELSIE CLOETE AND THE TREE CALLS HER ADELHEIDIS KLAUTEN. Cloete is the Dutch form of Klauten and the two records are the same woman: both give the marriage as 1668 and both give her father's death as 23 May 1693. Born in Europe, she came to the Cape with her parents and her brother Gerrit. BOTH FORMS ARE KEPT: the display name carries the one this project will search on and the other is recorded beside it, not normalised away.
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.