← The land

Source SRC-459

George district opgaafrol, 1816 (volume J 97) - four Oosthuizen brothers, a sister and their Strydom, Venter and Schoeman spouses on one opening, and a farm entered as Modder fontyn

opgaafrol · an original record · consulted 2026-08-17

Type
opgaafrol
Repository
FamilySearch film 008145125, images 43, 45 and 46 of 746. THE FILM'S OWN TARGET CARD, photographed by , reads: microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Salt Lake City at GOV ARCHIVES CAPE TOWN RSA; LOCALITY OF RECORD "GEORGE, CAPE PROVINCE"; TITLE OF RECORD "OPGAAFROLLEN"; "CENSUS - TAX"; VOLUME/S "J 97"; YEAR/S INCLUDED "1816"; operator C. Marais, filmed 10 May 1978, emulsion 5460-394-361, project S-AF 20 B, roll 13.
Reference
Film 008145125, image 45 of 746 (households); image 46 (landeryen and mortaliteit columns); image 43 (preceding page)
Consulted
2026-08-17

The citation as it was given

*** [17 Aug 2026] THE CITATION WAS WRONG FOR A DAY AND THE FILM CORRECTED IT. *** This row first said "Graaff-Reinet landdrosdistrik list, 1816-1826, series B. J97 (verv)-J106", which is how the film was described in conversation. Frans then photographed the TARGET CARD at the head of the film and it says GEORGE, OPGAAFROLLEN, VOLUME J 97, YEAR 1816. Not Graaff-Reinet, not a range of years, and not a "list" - an opgaafrol, which is exactly the record LEAD-0221 said would settle where the household was. 5a-ii, twice in one project: the READING was sound from the first screenshot and the CITATION was somebody's description of a file. | *** ALSO [17 Aug 2026] THIS ROW WAS FIRST WRITTEN AS SRC-458, WHICH WAS ALREADY TAKEN by the eGGSA gravestone library - a row referenced 133 times in cemeteries.csv. Renumbered to SRC-459 the same hour; checks.py now tests every id space for a repeat. *** | WHAT AN OPGAAFROL IS, AND WHY IT IS BETTER THAN THE BAPTISMS: a household is enrolled by FIELD CORNETCY, with the man, his wife, sons, daughters, servants and stock counted, and on the facing page the LANDERYEN - the farms or erven he holds, how far they lie from the drostdy, and under which landdrostdij they sort. A baptism says which congregation a family was within reach of. This says where they were living and what they held. | STRUCTURE OF THE OPENING, read off the running totals. Image 43 closes with a carried total of 65 men, 48 women. Image 45 continues with three more households (Corns Mostert x Catharina Oudehuysen[?], Steph. de Beer, Jan Muller x Martha Sus: Pelser) and then a subtotal line reading VELDCORNETSCHAP BOVEN OLYPHANTSRIVIER, 66 men, 50 women. So Boven Olifants Rivier is the veldcornetcy that CLOSES there - the Oosthuizen block below it opens the NEXT veldcornetcy, whose own subtotal (19 men, 14 women) stands at the foot of the page with its name in the left margin, which is cut off in the photographs. THE OOSTHUIZENS ARE NOT IN BOVEN OLIFANTS RIVIER; they are in the veldcornetcy immediately after it. That distinction is the difference between a finding and a confident wrong answer, and it is legible only from the arithmetic. | THE HOUSEHOLDS, in order, with what I cannot read marked as 5a requires: (1) "Jacob Oosthuysen Ock[?]" x "Anna Magd: Strydom", 1 man 1 woman 4 sons 2 daughters. The short word after the surname is a PATRONYMIC, not the "verlof" first proposed - it begins Ock and is one glyph from "Ocksz", Ockert's son. I cannot read the final letters. (2) "Piet: Marth: Oosthuyzen", 1 man, no wife entered. (3) "Corn: And[s] Oosthuyzen" x "Joh: Petron: Strydom", 1 1 1. (4) "Petrus Joh[?] Venter" x "Joh[?] Cec[ilia] Oosthuyzen", 1 1 3 1 - the wife reads as a Joh/Jan name here and as "Corn: Petron:" on an earlier lower-resolution crop, and the two readings disagree. UNSETTLED, and it matters: this model has Cornelia Petronella married to Petrus JACOBUS Venter (UNI-000090) and a different sister, Dina Magdalena, married to JAN LOUIS Venter (UNI-000089). (5) "Dan: Jacob Strydom" x "Anna Magd: Pelser", then "Dani: Jac: Strydom Jun[ior]", "Joh: Matth: Strydom", "David Joh: Jac: Strydom" - four Strydom households in a row, the family the two brothers married into. Further down the same page: "Gerrit Adr: Oosthuyzen" x "ANNA Cath: Schoeman"; "Marth: Pet: Jac[s] Oosthuizen" x "[Els/Chr]: Anna Senekal"; "Joh: Pet: Jac[s] Oosthuizen" x "Cath: van Staden"; and among the neighbours "Steph: vd Merwe Pzn" x Martha Magd: Engelbrecht, "Pet: Jaco: Schoeman" x Sara Soph: vd Merwe, "Hend: Fred: G[?]" x Hel: Cath: vd Merwe, "Ign: Mich: Ferreira" x Joh: Jacom: v Rooyen, and Bezuidenhouts, Clasens and Marxes. Image 43, the page before, has "Frederik Geyzel" x "Dorot[?] Cath: Oosthuysen". | A CORRECTION TO THE EARLIER MATCHING: the Schoeman woman on this page is ANNA Catharina and she is GERRIT ADRIAAN'S wife. She had been matched to Catharina Elisabeth Schoeman (PER-001271), Pieter Marthinus's wife, who died 20 October 1818. Pieter Marthinus's own line carries NO wife at all, which is its own question. | THE PATRONYMICS ARE THE FINDING FOR LEAD-0213. Three of the six Oosthuizen households on this one page are written with the father's name attached - Ock[?], Pet: Jac[s] twice - because there were too many Oosthuizens in one veldcornetcy to tell apart otherwise. That is precisely the practice the 1833 Vrolykheid diagram uses when Stretch, who wrote "Senior" on every other sheet that month, wrote a patronymic on that one. It does not read the word on the diagram; it establishes that the habit was this family's, in this decade. | AND ON THE FACING PAGE, IMAGE 46, THE LANDERYEN COLUMN CARRIES AN ENTRY READING "MODDER FONTYN", with a figure of 152 in the distance-from-the-drostdy column and a two-line entry in the "tot welke landdrostdij gesorteerd" column that I cannot read. WHICH HOUSEHOLD'S ROW IT IS CANNOT BE FIXED FROM THESE PHOTOGRAPHS: the frame overlaps image 45 by two columns and the entry falls one or two rows below the Boven Olifants Rivier subtotal, which is where the Oosthuizen block begins, but "one or two rows" is the whole question. This needs the full-resolution image with the two frames aligned on a ruled line. See LEAD-0220, reopened. | NO SCAN IS HELD. Supplied as screenshots; the images should be pulled from the film at full resolution. | *** [18 Aug 2026] *** The header block on image 46 divides 'Waar op welke afstand van de drostdy of hoofdplaats onder welke dat zelve sorteerd de plaatsen of erven gelegen zijn' into three sub-columns - IN EIGENDOM, IN ERFPACHT, IN LEENING - and the same three repeat under 'tot welke landdrostdij'. THE 152 FALLS UNDER *IN LEENING*. | So the Modder fontyn of that row was held ON LOAN from the government, not owned and not on quitrent. That is independent of the opstal argument and reaches the same place: a loan place never converted leaves no survey and no farm number, which is why the cadastre cannot find it (LEAD-0220). | WHAT THE 152 MEASURES IS STILL OPEN. The unit is not on the crop. Cape opgaafrolle normally give this distance in UREN, and 152 uren would be a very long way - but the figure has to be read against its neighbours before it means anything. THE CHEAP TEST IS THE SAME COLUMN ON THE OTHER HOUSEHOLDS ON THAT PAGE: if they show single digits and this shows 152, the place is far off; if they all show three figures, the unit is something else and 152 is ordinary. | And the row alignment is still not fixed. The Modder fontyn line sits one row below the veldcornetschap subtotal, which is where JACOB OOSTHUYSEN OCK[?] x ANNA MAGD: STRYDOM stands on image 45. If that holds, the eldest brother still held Modder Fonteyn in 1816, seven years after buying it out of his father's estate for Rd 1000. | *** [23 Aug 2026] THIS READING WAS DOUBTED AND IS VINDICATED, AND THE MISSING WARD NAME MAY NOW BE RECOVERABLE. *** SRC-564: the 1813 roll runs the same way, and Frans's rule - a page's first line repeats the previous page's last - confirms that a ward name on a transport or subtotal line marks a CLOSE. So 'the veldcornetcy immediately after' Boven Olyphantsrivier, whose name this row records as cut off in the photographs, is in 1813 DE CANGO. Whether it is still called that in 1816 is worth checking on the page after the Oosthuizen block.

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

Farms

People

Stories