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Source SRC-259

Anna Boeseken and Margaret Cairns, The Secluded Valley - Tulbagh: 't Land van Waveren 1700-1804

published local history · consulted 2026-08-04

Type
published local history
Repository
Perskor, 1989; ISBN 0 628 03346 X. Facsimile scan, 2024, 164 pages
Reference
ISBN 0 628 03346 X; 164 pp
Consulted
2026-08-04

The citation as it was given

THE RIGHT BOOK FOR THE TULBAGH QUESTION (LEAD-0077). Its period, 1700-1804, covers both ends of the movement this project has just traced - the Drakenstein tail and the whole Tulbagh phase - and Boeseken and Cairns worked from the opgaafrolle, transfers and estate papers rather than from compiled genealogies, which is exactly the kind of source the aggregate needs testing against. NOT YET READ, AND THE REASON IS TECHNICAL. The PDF carries a text layer but it is unusable: 17 fonts and only ONE ToUnicode CMap, so the glyph codes cannot be mapped back to characters and a search returns gibberish. Only the cover decoded cleanly. Rendering the pages as images needs poppler, which is not installed on this machine. So the book is CATALOGUED here and its contents have NOT been consulted - nothing in this project may cite it until it has actually been read. | [4 Aug 2026] A text extraction was tried and CONFIRMS the diagnosis rather than fixing it: the .txt is 2 160 characters - the title page, the copyright page and the table of contents - out of a 164-page book. Only the front matter decodes, because only the font used there carries a character map. The body is not recoverable as text and will need the pages rendered as images and read. THE CONTENTS PAGE IS ITSELF USEFUL and is kept at sources/local-history/SRC-259-secluded-valley-frontmatter.txt. Three parts of the book matter to this project: CHAPTER 9, "Selected Loan Farms", pages 79-97, which is the method and the ground; CHAPTER 4, "Early Settlers", page 36; and above all the INDEX at page 154, which would answer in ten pages whether Oosthuizen, Venter, de Beer, Theron, Joubert, Strydom and van Zyl appear in this book at all. Also worth noting for citation: this is the VASSA facsimile, 2024, published with the permission of Elizabeth Stiekema (born Cairns) and Philip Stiekema, and marked "Not to be sold or used for commercial purposes". The original is Perskor, 1989. Quote sparingly and cite both. | READ, 4 AUGUST 2026. FOUR FINDINGS OF SUBSTANCE: (1) PIETER JANSZ SWANEPOEL holds a loan place from 1709 "below Witsenberg in the land of Waveren" and is granted NIEUWMUNSTER, 61 morgen, in freehold in 1716 - with his own census return of 27 April 1716, one slave, 60 muids of corn, and his sheep "stolen by the Hottentots". He was wounded in the leg by an assegai in the 1715 raid. His only daughter ROSA married JOHANNES CONRADIE, who bought the farm in 1747. (2) LOUIS OF BENGAL, a FREED SLAVE, is named as the grandfather of Clara Herbst, wife of Jan Harmensz Potgieter - which independently supports the descent the tree gives for one of the ten enslaved ancestors in STO-0021. (3) MARTHINUS OOSTHUIJSEN appears in 1738 among five men the authorities warned the valley farmers against, described as "landlopers" - vagabonds - during a period of cattle theft. Not identified with anyone in this model. (4) OCKERT BRITS helps compile the 1744 inventory of Rachel Joubert, widow of Dirk Crafford, on Romans River - which puts a Brits in the valley in the 1740s. RIGHTS: the 1989 edition reserves all rights and the 2024 VASSA facsimile is marked not for sale or commercial use. Quote sparingly, cite both editions, and do not republish the text. The PDF is post-1936 and is withheld from the site by the scan gate in any case.

Kept verbatim. This project contradicts published genealogies and corrects a family's own oral tradition, so every claim has to be checkable by someone who was not in the room.

What rests on this source

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