Eight stones on Varsche Fontein

Eight marked graves on the Remainder of Varsche Fontein, from 1848 to 1922. Two Storms in consecutive years seven years after the grant, an infant of 1874 buried apart from the rest, three more children, and finally the patriarch under the only bought stone in the cemetery. None of the families in it appears in the farm's title deeds. A second burial ground twenty kilometres away, on Vredendal, carries the same surnames and shows the families are one intermarried community rather than six.

There is a small cemetery on the Remainder of Varsche Fontein, out in the veld with a fence line behind it. Eight of the graves carry writing. Several more are low rectangles of packed stone with nothing on them at all.

The eight cover seventy-four years, from 1848 to 1922. Read in order they tell you something the title deeds do not, which is who was actually living on this ground.

The two oldest stones are not Beukes

1848. A slate slab set upright in a ring of stones, scratched with three things and nothing else:

B. STORM · 1848

1849. A second slab, broken in two, both halves lying flat among the kerb stones. Put side by side they read:

M STORM · 1849

The farm was granted on 15 April 1841. These two burials are seven and eight years after that, and they are twelve months apart. One stray grave on a farm can be an accident of the road, somebody who died while travelling. Two in one family in two years is a household.

We still do not know which Storms they were. No Storm in the records gathered here has a given name beginning with B, and none is recorded as dying in 1848 or 1849.

What is known now is the family. Four death notices have come to hand, and between them they put a Storm household in this district for sixty-five years.

Hendrik Willem Storm was born at Stellenbosch in 1797, married Magdalena Frederica Botes at Beaufort West in 1819, and died at Prince Albert on 19 August 1855. The ledematenregister of the Prins Albert congregation records his death for the church year 1854–1855, in a list of six, as Hendrik Willem Storm Senr.

Magdalena outlived him by twenty-nine years. Her own death notice says she was born in the Gouph, district of Beaufort West, which is the Koup, the ground this whole history sits on. She died at her own house at Prince Albert on 10 April 1884, aged 87, a farmer's widow, leaving movable and immovable property to be sold and the account filed.

Two of their sons left notices as well. Jan Willem Storm, a cattle farmer of three-and-twenty, died on 14 September 1862 owning one wagon, ten horses and seventy-five sheep. Hendrik Jacobus Storm died in February 1879 on the farm Groenvontein in the district of Ladybrand, in the Orange Free State, leaving thirteen children.

So some of the family went north and the mother did not. She was here from before 1819 until 1884.

Where the Botes came from, and when

Magdalena's own parents are known, and they push this family back a generation further into the district. She was a daughter of Jacobus Abraham Botes (1768–1852) and Elsje Dorothea Gouws (1775–1833), who had fifteen children between 1792 and 1816.

Her father was almost certainly the Jacob Abraham born to Antonie Botes of Enkhuizen and Engela Erasmus, who married on 26 March 1766, a birth in 1768 fits that marriage exactly, and Jacob Abraham is one of the nine children published for it. Antonie's own father, Wietse Botes, came from Enkhuizen in the Netherlands and reached the Cape in 1744.

So the line runs: Enkhuizen, 1744 → Antonie and Engela, married 1766 → Jacobus Abraham, born 1768 → Magdalena Frederica, born about 1799 in the Gouph → the Storms of this ground.

The middle step of that is an inference and is marked as one. Neither Antonie nor Engela is documented here, so the join from the stamvader to Jacobus Abraham rests on a date fitting a marriage rather than on a document.

Her death notice is what dates the arrival. It says she was born in the Gouph, and a woman born about 1799 to a father born in 1768 means the Botes were on this ground by the 1790s, before the first of these farms was surveyed, and two generations before the two slabs at the top of this page.

One name is worth following. Her mother was a Gouws, and Gouws is the second commonest surname on the unidentified stones gathered here. And Engela, the name of Antonie's wife in 1766, is still being given four generations later, to the woman whose stone stands on Vredendal: Engela Susara Niehaus geb Botes.

The first ground a Storm can be put on

Hendrik Jacobus Storm's first wife was Catharina Jacoba Magdalena Niehaus, and she was his first cousin: her mother, Neeltje Johanna Storm, was his father's sister. A Storm daughter married into the Niehaus at Paarl in 1813, and her daughter married back into the Storms a generation later.

She died on 23 December 1862 at the residence at Jan Willemsfontein, aged 44, leaving six minor children. The estate was 114 oxen, 360 sheep, 8 horses, a wagon, a cart and household furniture. That is a working farm.

Jan Willems Fontein No. 32 is the most-named farm in this district's boundary lists, a name off six neighbours' diagrams carrying a polygon and nothing else. It now has a household, a date and an inventory.

It lies seventeen kilometres from this cemetery.

That does not put a Storm on Varsche Fontein in 1848 or 1849, and it should not be read as doing so. It is the first ground in this district that a Storm can be placed on at all.

The Storms are not only here

Twenty kilometres away, on the farm now called Vredendal and then called Spreeufontein, there is another small burial ground. The oldest stone in it reads:

Hier rust het lijk van ENGELA SUSARA NIEHAUS geb BOTES overleden op den 24 July 1886 met den ouderdom van 49 jaar 2 maanden en 22 dagen

She married Hendrik Willem Storm Niehaus at Prince Albert in October 1855 and had fifteen children. His middle name is his mother's maiden surname: Neeltje Johanna Storm, married at Paarl in 1813.

So the surname on the two oldest stones at Varsche Fontein turns up again on the next farm, inside a man's given names. His wife's own mother was not a Storm: she was Anna Magdalena Pieterse. The Storm comes in on the husband's side, one generation up. Storm, Botes, Niehaus, Botma, Beukes and Freysen are not six families on six pieces of ground. They are one intermarried community that buried its dead wherever it happened to be living, and the burial grounds only make sense read together.

Then a gap of twenty-five years, and a child on his own

June 1874. A thin sandstone slab, hand-cut, standing by itself in the veld away from the cemetery. The surname runs over three lines because the stone is narrow:

1874 · G F · BEU KES · Juny

Gerhardus Francois Beukes, the man who is buried in the cemetery proper, lived from 1838 to

1. So this is not him.

It is almost certainly his son. He and Aletta Sophia Jacoba Niemann married at Prince Albert in September 1862 and had twelve recorded children, arriving at two-year intervals. There is a three-year break between the child of 1872 and the child of 1875, and 1874 sits inside it. Then in 1877 a son was born and given the name Gerhardus Francois, his father's own.

In the Cape naming pattern the third son carries the father's name, and a name is used again on a later child when the first one dies. The first son here is Barend Hendrik, named exactly for the father's father, so this family was following the pattern closely. A G.F. Beukes who died in June 1874, and a G.F. Beukes born in 1877, is that rule working.

He appears in no compiled family tree. The only record of him is a stone in the veld.

Four children in twenty years

June 1902. A hand-cut sandstone headstone, the letters scratched rather than carved, the spelling written as the words were said:

MARIHA ELIESABET FREYSEN · GEBOR 6 OCTO 1901 · OVERLEID [4] JUNY 1902

Maria Elizabeth Freysen, eight months old. Her mother was Elizabeth Elsje Petronella Beukes, eldest of those twelve children. So the child is Gerhardus Francois Beukes's granddaughter, and she was buried in his cemetery twelve years before he was.

3 August 1907. A sandstone slab with a ruled border and an incised cross, the first line in a rough cursive and the name in capitals:

[Ter ge]dachtenis aan … M·J·BEUKES … O 3. 8. 1907

The word before the initials cannot be read, and it is the word that decides who is buried here. If it is van, then M.J. Beukes is the parent and the child is not named. Mattheus Johannes Daniel Beukes, the fifth of the twelve, was forty in 1907.

March 1913. A sandstone slab, leaning, hand-cut in the same phonetic spelling as the 1902 stone:

JACOBES : JOHANES BEUKES · GEB 26 MAAIE 1912 · OVERL 10 MAART 191[3]

Nine and a half months old, a grandchild or great-grandchild. Under the dates, cut by the same hand, is 2 Kings 4:26. It is the Shunammite woman answering the prophet's servant after her son has died:

IS HET WEL MET 'T KIND · HET IS ALLES WEL

Whoever cut that stone knew exactly which verse they wanted. They cut the answer as well as the question.

The last two are the parents' generation

14 October 1914. A bought marble headstone, machine-lettered, the only one in the cemetery that somebody ordered:

GERHARDUS FRANSOIYS BEUKES · GEB. 30STEN JUNIE 1838 · OVERL. 14 DEN OCTOBER 1914

January 1922. A marker made of cement, with the letters scratched into it before it set. It has broken up and no longer stands on anything. Two words survive: TER, and BEU.

It is Aletta Sophia Jacoba, his daughter, born 1872 and carrying her mother's name, married to Pieter Jozua Opperman at Prins Albert in 1900. Her death notice says she died at Varsch Fontein on 13 January 1922. The stone and the notice agree from opposite ends.

She is buried under cement. Her father, eight years earlier, is under marble.

What the eight stones say that the deeds do not

The ownership record for this farm runs: Charl du Toit, 15 April 1841. J.R.G. Luttig, 1903. Then a further transfer in 1973, and a family trust in 1997.

No Storm appears in it. No Beukes appears in it. Yet a Storm household buried two people here in 1848 and 1849, and the Beukes buried six between 1874 and 1922, and Gerhardus Francois Beukes's daughter was still dying on this farm in 1922, nineteen years after the deeds hand the place to somebody else.

Between the grant of 1841 and the transfer of 1903 there is a sixty-two year gap in the ownership record of Varsche Fontein. Both burials of the 1840s fall inside it. Whatever the Storms and then the Beukes were on this ground, whether tenants, bywoners, or holders under a transfer nobody has yet found, the graves are the evidence that they were here and the deeds are silent about them.

That is worth stating plainly, because it cuts both ways. A farm's history written only from its title deeds is a history of four names in a hundred and fifty years. The cemetery on the same ground holds eight.

Three things to notice about the stones themselves

Four of the eight are small children. An eight-month-old, a nine-month-old, an infant of 1874, and probably a fourth in 1907. That is not a remarkable proportion for a Karoo farm before antibiotics. It is what the ground looked like.

Three of the eight are in no compiled family tree. The 1874 child, the 1907 burial and the 1912 child are recorded nowhere except on these stones. Online trees drop children who died young, because the records they are built from often did not catch them. A hand-cut stone in the veld is a better witness to a short life than any profile.

Seven of the eight were made at home. Slate and sandstone off the farm, scratched with whatever was at hand, the spelling as the words were spoken: gebor, overleid, Juny, Maaie. One stone was bought and lettered by a mason, and it is the patriarch's. The habit of cutting your own did not stop when the family could afford otherwise. His daughter, eight years after him, was buried under cement somebody mixed.

What this story is about

• set on Varsche Fontein No. 27 Remainder
• set on Varsche Fontein
• about Gerhardus Fransoiys Beukes
• about Aletta Sophia Jacoba Opperman (born Beukes)
• about Maria Elizabeth Freysen (infant)
• about Jacobus Johannes Beukes (infant)
• about Engela Susara Niehaus, born Botes
• set on Vredendal (Spreeufontein No. 26 Ptn 1)

Research notes

The research behind this page, kept separate from it: dated working notes, open questions, and what is not yet settled.