The Oosthuizens of Swellendam, 1749-1811

Before Modder Fonteyn it is Swellendam. All thirteen children of the 1749 marriage belong to that district, which then ran east over the mountains and took in the Little Karoo

Thirteen children were born to Jacobus Oosthuysen d'oude and Dina Carolina Brits after their marriage at Tulbagh in 1749, and every one of them belonged to the district of Swellendam - a district that then ran east over the mountains and took in the Little Karoo. Their estates show what these people actually owned: not land, but the opstal on a loan place, valued at ten rixdollars in one case and a thousand in another, with the rent to the Company years in arrears. The generation closes in six years, between 1799 and 1809, and it is their children who cross the Swartberg.

On 27 April 1802 a clerk sat down at the place of Pieter Cornelis Oosthuysen and wrote out what his parents still owned. A large chest and a wagon box. Two chairs and an old table. A tea kettle, twelve assorted plates, seven pewter spoons, a pepper box. Two axes, a plane, a pick, a spade and an iron for digging wild onions. A gun, and a cane with a silver mounting.

Jacobus Oosthuysen d'oude was dead and his widow, Dina Carolina Brits, had moved in with a son. So MOOC8/24.27 is not the inventory of a working household. It is what an old couple still had after they gave up their own roof.

No farm appears in it. The estate came to Rd 1382:5, and Rd 1082:5 of that was money owed by their own children. More than three quarters of what these two had left was out on loan inside the family, and the ground had gone to the next generation already.

Jacobus and Dina Carolina, and their thirteen children

Jacobus Oosthuysen and Dina Carolina Brits married at Tulbagh on 10 April 1749. Thirteen children followed over twenty-six years, and the family this site is built on descends from the third of them, Ockert, who is the father of the household that later crossed the Swartberg.

Two of the thirteen are absent from the 1802 heirs list, and an heirs list carries a dead child's own children in that child's place. Jacobus Petrus and the second Jacobus had therefore both died before April 1802 with nobody surviving them. not yet verified

Their son Marthinus, the eighth child, had died in 1799, and his eight children are entered in his place. The clerk records where each of them was living: two with their uncle Pieter Cornelis, two with Johannes Mattheus Calitz, the rest elsewhere. Nobody went to an institution. There was none within reach, and there did not need to be.

One district, and it is not the district on the map today

Every one of these thirteen belonged to Swellendam.

Ockert married Susanna Catharina van Tonder there on 26 January 1783. The death notice of his eldest son, Jacobus Johannes, written sixty-four years later, still gives that son's birthplace as the Division of Swellendam. [SRC-451] His second son, Ockert Almero, married Adriana Cecilia Venter at Swellendam in October 1807. And the estates of Jacobus the father and Ockert the son were both handled from the same drostdy.

The 1802 inventory ends Mij present: A: Stockenstrom, Secret:s. The 1809 one ends Ten mynen overstaan: A:A: Faure. Anthony Alexander Faure was landdrost of Swellendam from 1798 to 1810, and in March 1796 General Craig had appointed Anders Stockenström as his secretary. [SRC-465] So Jacobus's estate went through the secretary and Ockert's through the landdrost: the same office, the same two men, seven years apart.

What that district contained is the part a modern map hides. Swellendam then ran east over the mountains and took in the Little Karoo and the Langkloof, and it was still growing. On 23 April 1811 the government cut George out of it because the magistracy had become too large, and the new district took in what are now Mossel Bay, Calitzdorp, Oudtshoorn, Uniondale and Knysna. A family that never moved could be Swellendam people one year and George people the next.

What a man actually owned

Almost none of this ground was owned. It was held on loan from the Company at an annual recognitie, and what a man could sell or leave to his children was the opstal: the house, the kraals, the werf, the improvements. The land underneath stayed the government's.

The values in the Orphan Chamber's books make the point better than any description. [SRC-467] When Willem Marthinus Oosthuizen died in 1776 his opstal on the loan place de Modder Fenteijn, on the Kafferkuils River, was taxed at Rd 10. In 1792 the opstal on Welbedagt in the Attaquaskloof came to Rd 133:16. In 1809 the whole place at de Modder Fonteyn on the Olifants was sold to Ockert's eldest son Jacobus Johannes for Rd 1000, of which Rd 344 had been paid off by the following December.

A rented house, in other words, and the rent ran behind. The Welbedagt estate owed the Company ten years and six months of arrears on its place. That is not carelessness. It is what holding ground on credit looked like when the nearest drostdy was a week away.

One of the family's loan places can now be found on a modern map, and it carries a family name. The 1805 roll's farm column puts Ockerts Kraal against the household of Gerrit Johannes Oosthuizen — Ockert's own brother — read across the gutter on the wife's name, Susanna la Gransie [SRC-497]. In August 2026 the farm's diagram surfaced: Ockerts Kraal is No. 502 in the Swellendam division, 3,706 morgen on the Touw and Doorn Rivers below the Warm Water Berg, in the field cornetcy of Groote Swarteberg [SRC-574]. By the time it was surveyed in 1838 the grant went to a Forie, not an Oosthuizen — the family had left or lost the place — and whether the name itself is older than the family's tenure, and whose kraal it first was, is an open question of this record.

The Olifants River

The direct line had its own ground on this river. In 1765 Jacobus took the loan place Gamthous Bergh, on the Canna, the water its own survey of 1818 calls the Kandelaarsrivier. [SRC-667] [SRC-668] Ockert Olivier's Armoed lay between it and Welbedagt, nine kilometres the one way and ten the other, and in 1773 the two families married.

The Orphan Chamber's clerks wrote d'Olifants rivier seventy times in the volumes that have been transcribed, and in this district they usually meant the southern one: the river that rises on the Traka north of the Swartberg and runs west past Oudtshoorn to the Gouritz. They write it agter de Cango, inde Attaquascloof, aan de Kaukoe, districkt George. Fifteen of the mentions place themselves that way and one places itself at the Piquet Berg. [SRC-467]

A tax roll settles the geography that the phrases only suggest. The George roll of 1813 heads its wards in the order the field cornet rode them, and the order runs Boven Oliphants Rivier, then de Cango, then Attaquas Kloof. [SRC-564] Those are the same three names the Orphan Chamber's clerks reach for, standing in a line along one river. The upper Olifants, the Cango behind it, the kloof at the end: a ward sequence, not a scatter of guesses.

Oosthuysens were living on that river before this generation had finished raising its children. In 1792 the widow of Marthinus Oosthuysen Jansz was left with five children and the loan place Welbedagt in the Attaquaskloof. The loan-farm register puts him on it from 1780, after Ockert Olivier, who had held it since 1772; the arrears run from about 1782. He had married Hester Cicilia Olivier in 1773, so the place came to him the way ground usually moved, with a marriage. The inventory was made on the ground and signed there: Aan de Oliphants Rivier op voorn: plaatz den 18 Maij 1792. One of the three men who appraised it was an Oosthuysen, and another was Ockert Olivier himself.

That Marthinus was Jan's son and this family are Jacobus's, and the two fathers turn out to be brothers. Jan Hendrik Oosthuijsen, 1714 to 1780, married Anna Botha at Stellenbosch on 23 October 1735 and had ten children; his own parents are Johannes Oosthuijsz and Johanna Martens, who married at Drakenstein about 1702 and whose nine children include Jacobus of 1722. [FS]

So Marthinus of Welbedagt is a first cousin of Ockert, and Willem Marthinus of the Kafferkuils Modder Fenteijn is his brother. Two cousins of this household, holding two loan places sixty kilometres apart, one on the Olifants and one on the water that runs to the sea.

The farm name was ordinary too. Modderfontein turns up ten times over in these volumes, on the Kafferkuils, behind the Piketberg, behind Bruintjieshoogte, on two different Riet rivers and once in Namaqualand. The name identified nobody, which is exactly why a clerk always added the water.

Four deaths, and the ground goes

Marthinus, the eighth child, died in 1799 and left eight children to be parcelled out. Jacobus the father died in 1802. Adriaan died next, and his estate was taxed at the Weeskamer on 16 August 1804: a widow, Catharina Petronella Horn, and five children aged eight, six, five, two and ten months. The whole of it came to Rd 448. A bed, three chests, two chairs, a plough, an ox-wagon, eleven trek oxen, four head of cattle, a mare, 124 goats and 43 sheep. No opstal, no loan place, no ground of any kind.

The following year the Chamber inventoried the estate of a Jacoba Cornelia Oosthuizen, on 28 December 1805, and it was her brother Pieter Cornelis who took it. She had married twice, to Jan Emmenes and then to Jacob van den Bank, and one of her daughters carries her mother's name, Dina Carolina. She is the sister born in 1777: the estate names her brother as the man who appraised it, and the model carries her death from this sheet rather than from the 1870 the compiled trees once gave her.

Then Ockert, in April 1809, at de Modder Fonteyn on the Olifants, leaving eleven children of whom seven were still minors.

Where it goes from here

Three of Ockert's eleven crossed the Swartberg: Jacobus Johannes, Ockert Almero and Pieter Marthinus. By 1816 the whole connection was enrolled in the George district, in one field cornetcy, four Oosthuizen households deep with four Strydom households beside them, and two further rows that one reading makes Oosthuizen and another makes Olivier. [SRC-459] [SRC-468] By 1833 three brothers held three adjoining farms on the north side of the mountain, and that is where this site begins.

The generation in this piece never made that move. They married at Swellendam, farmed on loan places between the Kafferkuils and the Olifants, buried each other within six years, and left their children a wagon, a plough and a debt to the Company. What Jacobus Johannes bought at de Modder Fonteyn for a thousand rixdollars was not a farm. It was a house on somebody else's ground, and a promise to raise his brothers and sisters.

• From Modder Fonteyn to the Koup follows the three brothers who left.
• The Oosthuizens of the Koup takes the line on to the twentieth century.

Where to read on

What this story is about

• about Pieter Cornelis Oosthuizen
• about Jacobus Oosthuizen (b.1722)
• about Dina Carolina Britz
• about Catharina Oosthuizen
• about Johannes Jacobus Oosthuizen (b.1753)
• about Ockert Jacobus Oosthuizen (b.1755)
• about Jacobus Nicolaas Oosthuizen
• about Jacobus Petrus Oosthuizen
• about Gerrit Johannes Oosthuizen
• about Dina Johanna Oosthuizen
• about Marthinus Oosthuizen
• about Jacobus Oosthuizen (b.1769)
• about Dina Johanna Magdalena Oosthuizen
• about Adriaan Oosthuizen
• about Jacoba Cornelia Oosthuizen
• set on De Modder Fonteyn (aan d'Olifants rivier)
• about Willem Marthinus Oosthuizen (1739-1776)
• about Marthinus Oosthuizen (b.1743)
• about Jan Hendrik Oosthuijsen
• about Johannes "Jan" Oosthuijsz (stamvader)
• about Johanna Martens

Sources

Everything this story rests on, with a link to the original wherever one exists. Where a citation is incomplete it says so, an incomplete citation is a research gap, not a formatting problem. If your work is here and the credit is wrong or thin, please tell us and it will be fixed.

1. MOOC8/24.27 - Inventory of the estate of Jacobus Oosthuysen d'oude and his widow Dina Carolina Brits, taken 27 April 1802 Cape Archives (KAB), Master of the Orphan Chamber; transcription published by TANAP / Globalise (Huygens KNAW)MOOC8/24.27, {18020427} | *** THE PAGES THEMSELVES SEEN 20 Aug 2026, supplied by [FAMILY] Three openings, the item number 27 written in the margin of the first, and 'Faded Document' on the archive's own slip. ***.view it online →
2. MOOC8/28.63 - Inventory of the estate of Ockert Oosthuijzen, taken at de Modder Fonteyn on the Olifants River, 23 April 1809 Cape Archives (KAB), Master of the Orphan Chamber; transcription published by TANAP / Globalise (Huygens KNAW)MOOC8/28.63, {18090423}view it online →
3. Death Notice 3999½ - Jacobus Johannes Oosthuizen, died 29 October 1867 at Grootfontein, division Colesberg FamilySearch, "Cape, Probate Records of the Master of the High Court, 1822-1990" [TO VERIFY - the collection is inferred from the form and the hand, matching SRC-077; no breadcrumb, waypoint, film or DGS number has been seen]Death Notice no. 3999½, filed 19 December 1867; two images, seen as image 1213 of 2192 [TO VERIFY] Citation incomplete: Supplied as a screenshot. The ark and film/image numbers were never captured, so the original cannot be ordered from this entry alone.
4. 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 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.Film 008145125, image 45 of 746 (households); image 46 (landeryen and mortaliteit columns); image 43 (preceding page)
5. Who A.A. Faure was, and what the district of Swellendam contained in April 1809 Secondary and tertiary web sources, consulted 17 Aug 2026 - Geni and WikiTree for Faure; the town of George's published histories and Wikipedia for the 1811 divisionFaure's TENURE DATES (1798-1810) and the 1811 George proclamation are still [TO VERIFY] against an archival source - the Cape almanacs or KAB 1/SWM, and the proclamation itself. That he held the office of landdrost te Zwellendam IN 1809 is no longer web-sourced: it is stated in MOOC8/28.22, 26.65 and 25.18. SRC-549.view it online →
6. A sweep of the whole published MOOC8 for Modderfontein, for the Olifants river, and for every farm named in an Oosthuizen estate TANAP / Globalise (Huygens KNAW), Cape transcriptions, Orphan Chamber MOOC8Volumes searched: MOOC8_1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-45, 46-50, 51-60, 71-75 - every group the collection index publishes. MOOC8/61-70 and 76+ ARE NOT TRANSCRIBED, so the sweep is complete for what exists online and not for the series.view it online →
7. A second transcription of film 008145125 images 45-46, supplied as a spreadsheet Supplied 18 Aug 2026 as Opgaafrol_GraaffReinet_img45-46_transcription.xlsx. Three sheets: Transcription (23 households), Column structure, Source & caveats.Film 008145125 images 45 and 46; the sheet gives the ark for image 46 as 3:1:3Q9M-CSK8-LPT7
8. The ward sequence of the 1813 George roll - Boven Oliphants Rivier, de CANGO, then Attaquas Kloof - and the rule that reads it FamilySearch, film # 008145124; George district opgaafrollen, volume J 90, year 1813Film # 008145124, IMAGES 123, 124, the page following 124, 132, 181, 185, 187 and 192 of 545 - the title leaf, the roll's first household page, and the heads of successive openings showing their 'P:r Transport' lines.

Research notes

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