The district history of the Olifants valley: Stellenbosch to Tulbagh (1808) to Worcester (1822) to Clanwilliam (1837)
reference · · consulted 2026-08-20
- Type
- reference
- Repository
- Ancestors Research South Africa, 'Clanwilliam History'; corroborated by Wikipedia, 'Clanwilliam, South Africa'
- Reference
- https://www.ancestors.co.za/clanwilliam-history/ ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanwilliam,_South_Africa
- Consulted
- 2026-08-20
The citation as it was given
Fetched 20 Aug 2026 to answer Frans's question: what district was 'het Vaale Water' in at the time of the 1811 roll. | THE SEQUENCE, as these sources give it: the Olifants valley originally formed part of the district of STELLENBOSCH. On 1 FEBRUARY 1808 the Earl of Caledon annexed the part lying NORTH OF THE BERG RIVER to the new district of TULBAGH and declared it a SUB-DROSTDY, with Daniel Johannes van Ryneveld as assistant magistrate at Jan Disselsvlei. On 21 JANUARY 1814 Sir John Cradock renamed the sub-magistracy CLANWILLIAM after his father-in-law. In 1822 the magistracy of Tulbagh moved to WORCESTER, and on 1 JANUARY 1837 Clanwilliam was separated from Worcester and proclaimed a district in its own right. | *** SO IN 1811, VAALWATER (Clanwilliam 73 in the modern cadastre) LAY IN THE TULBAGH DISTRICT, under the Clanwilliam sub-drostdy. *** Not Stellenbosch, not Worcester, and not Clanwilliam-as-a-district, none of which existed there in that year. | WHY IT MATTERS: if the 1811 entry 'Wanhoop geleegen by het Vaale Water aan Oliphants Rivier' (SRC-522) is that Vaalwater, and if image 93 is really in the GEORGE roll, then the landerijen block's LANDDROSTDIJ column should read TULBAGH - which is exactly the case that column exists to record. That is now a testable prediction rather than a hope. | LAYER: authored, not original. These are secondary summaries and the dates should be confirmed against a proclamation before anything is built on them. [TO VERIFY]
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.
Nothing in the model cites this source yet.