Four grandparents, four countries

How four grandparents out of four lines met: three weddings in four years at Bellville and Williston, and a fourth marriage that tied two of them back together after both were widowed. Each line has its own page; this one is the join. Of the four countries the title promises, this record can point at one on a map.

Everybody has four grandparents, and they tend to get remembered as one thing: the old people. Set these four side by side and they are not one thing at all. Two of them came out of the Karoo from opposite ends of it, four hundred kilometres apart, and had never heard of each other. One came out of the winelands and never lived in the Karoo. One was born at Williston, on the edge of Bushmanland.

Each of the four has its own page. This one is about how they met, which took three weddings, four years, and one man who married into two of them.

The four, and where each line comes from

The first two married each other at Bellville in 1946. The second two married each other at Williston in 1949. A generation later their children married.

The four countries

The title promises four countries. The evidence keeps one of them outright.

One is documented. François Renier Duminy was born at Lorient in Brittany on 4 October 1747, and the record says so, with a date and a port.

One is disputed between two. Johannes Oosthuijsz sailed from Texel in 1685, and the Company index says Woerden in Utrecht while the pay-book behind it is reported to say Werden near Essen and his own 1722 will is reported to read Werl in Westphalia. He was probably a German in Dutch service. It has never been settled. not yet verified

Two are not established at all. The van der Merwes can be reached at Paarl in 1735 and the van Rensburgs at the Cape in 1728, and in neither case is there anything here about where the family was before that. The compiled trees go further. The documents gathered here do not.

So: four grandparents, four lines, and one origin that can be put on a map. The rest is a research question rather than a fact.

Two grounds, four hundred kilometres apart

By the 1940s two of these families had been in the Karoo for a long time and neither knew the other existed.

The Oosthuizens had been at Prince Albert since 1836, when Ockert Almero was born on Middelwater. Four generations, one district, and by 1946 the family had held ground there for over a century.

The van der Merwes had been in the division of Calvinia at least as long. They held Oude Muur and Lokenburg, and one of them died on Lokenburg in 1866 on ground that had come into the family through his wife. That man, Schalk Willem, was the great-great-grandfather of Jacobus Johannes Gideon, who was in turn the father of the grandfather in the table above. Four generations lie between the man who died on Lokenburg and the man who came south.

Between the two families lay four hundred kilometres of the Great Karoo, and so far as the records gathered here go, neither had heard of the other.

Three weddings

They join in the space of four years, and not in the Karoo. Two of the three weddings are at Bellville, outside Cape Town, in the district the brides' family had never left.

Bellville, 25 August 1945. Frances Duminy Joubert marries Gert Annis "Tokkie" Marincowitz, who farms Rondabel in the Prince Albert district and runs the district's Landbougenootskap. She is the younger sister of the woman in the next line.

Bellville, 25 May 1946. Anna Tobia Jeanne Joubert marries Hendrik Lodewyk Malherbe Oosthuizen of Vischat. Two sisters, one town, nine months apart, both marrying men from the same small district four hundred kilometres away. Their aunt Maria Johanna Duminy had done the same thing in 1904, marrying a farmer at Zeekoegat.

Williston, 17 January 1949. Frans Jacobus Wilhelmus van der Merwe marries Maria Magritha van Rensburg. About a year later the household comes south to the Prince Albert district and onto Vredendal. That is the move that puts all four of these lines in one district for the first time.

The fourth marriage

The three weddings are joined by a fourth, and it is the strangest fact on this page.

Frances Duminy Joubert died on 10 September 1965. Frans Jacobus Wilhelmus van der Merwe died on 8 April 1968, on his forty-fourth birthday. Both left a spouse.

Tokkie Marincowitz then married Maria Magritha van Rensburg. So one man married, in succession, the sister of one of these grandmothers and then the other grandmother. He is the maternal step-grandfather and the paternal grandmother's brother-in-law, and those are the same man.

The date of that second marriage is not recorded here. It is bracketed at both ends: she was widowed in April 1968, and in 1973 she bought the Varsche Fontein Remainder and Welbedacht under the name Marincowitz, deed T30432/1973. She never lived on Varsche Fontein. The purchase completed a plan she and her first husband had held for years, and she carried it out five years after he died.

The same surnames, on both sides

Set the two maternal lists of surnames beside each other and three of them appear on both, and one crosses to the Oosthuizen side. None of this is proven kinship. These are surnames in common, in a colony where a few dozen families married each other repeatedly, and a name alone does not join people. What they say is where to look.

van der Merwe and van Rensburg had married twice before. Aeltie van der Merwe (1684-1729) married Claas Jansz van Rensburg, who died in 1728; Susanna Sophia van der Merwe (1768-1840) stands in the same ancestry two generations above Petrus Gideon. So the 1949 marriage at Williston was the third joining of those two names in this pedigree, not the first.

Burger. Hester Johanna Burger (1792-1852) brings the name into the van der Merwe line through her daughter Anna Magdalena Lubbe, and her grandson is christened Schalk Willem Burger van der Merwe with her standing at the font. On the van Rensburg side there are five Burgers, running back through Hester Burger (1745-1806) and Anna Sophia Burger (1723-1798) to Barent Burger (1665-1705). And the 1782 estate that holds Tygerhoek is a Burger estate: one daughter married a van Rensburg, two married Lubbes.

Louw crosses the other way. Anna Jacoba Louw (1793-1868) married the Schalk Willem who died on Lokenburg. Margaretha Elisabeth Louw (1783-1847) stands in the Oosthuizen ancestry, on the Klaarstroom side of the country.

Theron occurs on both maternal lines: Wouter Theron (1777-1840) and Elisabeth Maria Theron (1805-1855) among the van der Merwes, Maria Susanna Theron (1724-1797) among the van Rensburgs.

The Burger question is the one with a document behind it already, because the 1782 Tygerhoek estate names eleven children and their marriages, and two of those marriages are into families held here. not yet verified

What they had in common

Very little, and that is the point of setting them out together.

One line crossed the whole colony eastward and stopped. One went north-west and stopped. One never moved at all, and reached the Karoo three times by sending its daughters. One has almost no ground in it and one very good story.

Then three weddings in four years, at Bellville and at Williston, and a fourth that tied two of them back together after both had been widowed. One joined the Koup to the winelands. One joined the Hantam to the dry north. And a generation later their children married.

What this story is about

• about Hendrik Lodewyk Malherbe Oosthuizen
• about Anna Tobia Jeanne Joubert
• about Frans Jacobus Wilhelmus van der Merwe
• about Maria Magritha van Rensburg

Research notes

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