Jacob Klauten Cloete (d.1693)
? – 23 May 1693
No birth date is recorded for this person. The family puts an outer limit on it: born no later than 1652, because their spouse born 1627, within 25 years. That rests on an assumption about ordinary childbearing ages, not on a document. It is an upper bound and not a birth year, and nothing in the model records it as one.
Names
- Given
- Jacob
- 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
A life in the record
- 23 May 1693 died Died
What we don't know
- No birth date is recorded.
- Neither parent is recorded, so this person is not attached to the tree above them.
- 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 AND THE TREE AGREE ON THE DAY HE DIED, AND IT IS HOW THE TWO RECORDS WERE JOINED. She writes that Jacob CloeteM arrived at the Cape in 1652, was one of the first free burghers, received a farm on the Liesbeeck River in 1657, went back to Europe and returned as a corporal, and was MURDERED - 'the governor's official journal entry of 23 May 1693 describes his murder and acknowledges the respect Cloete commanded as one of the men who helped to found the colony'. The tree gives Jacob Klauten, died 23 May 1693.
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.