Three counts of Swellendam

The heemraden of Swellendam counted their district on 15, 16 and 17 March 1770, and their predecessors had done it on the same three days of the year in 1751. Between those two identical weeks the district went from 639 burghers to 1,692, while the Cape grew by a fifth. This is what the three opgaafrollen of 1751, 1760 and 1770 show: a frontier district doubling every eleven years, 720 enslaved people to 1,692 burghers, 76,129 sheep and not one leaguer of wine, twenty-seven households under a woman, and twenty-six Cape burghers holding ground they did not live on.

On 15 March 1770 the heemraden of Swellendam began counting their district, and it took them three days. The clerk closed the volume with the date written out: Den 15, 16, en 17: Maart 1770.

Nineteen years earlier his predecessor had done the same work on the same three days of the year, and had finished it in ten folios. The 1770 roll runs to twenty. In between, the number of burghers living in the district had gone from 639 to 1,692.

Those two volumes and the one taken in 1760 are the closest thing there is to a photograph of the country the Oosthuizens and the van der Merwes were living in before they came over the Swartberg. They are tax rolls, so they are dull on purpose. They are also the only documents here that count everybody at once.

What the roll counts, and what it does not

An opgaafrol is a census and a tax return in one. The householder swore to it, the heemraden witnessed the oath, and the columns run left to right in a fixed order: Mannen, Vrouwen, Zoons, Dogters, Knegts, then the enslaved in four columns, then horses, cattle, sheep and pigs, vines and leaguers of wine, then wheat, rye and barley each sown and reaped. It ends on the weapons: Snaphanen, Deegens, Pistolen.

There is no column for the farm. Not in 1751, not in 1760, not in 1770. The form gained one somewhere between 1770 and 1808, and that changes what these three volumes can be asked. They place a household in a district. They cannot say which ground it stood on.

For a record built around land that is a real limit and it is worth meeting early. Everything below is about who was in Swellendam and how many of them there were.

1751

The Swellendam roll of 1751 was sworn on 15, 16 and 17 March and runs to ten folios plus the Somma. Six hundred and thirty-nine burghers, counted as men, wives, sons and daughters.

Folio 3 has Jacobus Oosthuijsen and Dina Carolina Britz at line 12, two years after their marriage at Tulbagh on 10 April 1749. He is the earliest of these families to appear in the series, and he is one line among six hundred.

The roll checks itself, which is why any of this can be relied on. Every folio opens on a Pr Transport carried forward from the last page and closes on a Transporteere, so the difference is that page's own count and a reading can be tested against it before anything is built on it.

1760

Fourteen folios, and a Somma of 274 men, 169 women, 290 sons and 301 daughters. One thousand and thirty-four people. The certification is made before Landdrost Jan Andries Horak.

Folio 6 is the interesting page. It carries four Oosthuizen households together with Ockert Brits: Ockert Brits at line 12, then Jacobus Oosthuijsen and Dina Brits at 15, Jan Oosthuijsen de oude and Anna Botha at 16, Jan Oosthuijsen d'Jonge and Maria Coetser at 17, and Willem Maarten Oosthuijsen at 18. Seven consecutive lines.

The roll is ordered by ground rather than by name, so households entered together were living near one another. Four Oosthuizen households and the family they had married into, all inside seven lines, is a neighbourhood.

Ockert Brits is a caution as well as a neighbour, and he is the reason this page is careful about names. He is Dina's father, and the compiled trees give his death as 11 November 1737, which the Drakenstein roll of 1751 makes impossible: he is heading a household on it, with Catharina Pijl beside him. He stands at a grandson's baptism in May 1755.

The man here in 1760 is not him. A register leaf headed 1759 names de wed: Ockert Brits at Swellendam, and a widow of his means he was dead before this roll was sworn. So the Ockert Brits on folio 6 is a son of the same name, and the wife's name was saying so all along: the 1751 entry gives Catharina Pijl and this one a Johanna. The 1770 roll writes her surname clearly, as Johanna Gous.

What the father gains from the correction is a window rather than a date. He was alive on 11 May 1755 and a widow of his is recorded in 1759, which is four years wide and rests on documents instead of on a compiled tree. not yet verified

1770

Twenty folios, 485 entries, and the count the district had grown to: 432 men, 278 women, 505 sons and 477 daughters. One thousand six hundred and ninety-two people.

The rest of the Somma says what kind of place it was.

The grain and vine columns are blank down the whole district. Swellendam in 1770 sows nothing this roll records. Seventy-six thousand sheep and not one leaguer of wine is a description of a livelihood, and it is the reason the district could keep absorbing people: stock needs ground, and ground was the one thing there was more of to the east.

The district against the colony

The 1770 volume closes with a summary of the whole colony, which puts the Swellendam figures in proportion.

Across the nineteen years from 1751 the Cape district grew by about a fifth and Stellenbosch by about a quarter. Drakenstein doubled. Swellendam grew by 165 per cent, and went from an eighth of the colony's burghers to a fifth of them.

The growth was on the frontier. That is a fact about the whole colony read off one district's tax roll, and it is the setting for everything these families did next. A household moving east after 1770 was not striking out alone into empty country. It was joining the fastest-filling part of the colony, along with everybody else.

Who was in the district

Four hundred and eighty-five entries, of which 459 are households actually living in Swellendam. The other 26 are marked voor Swellendam and counted in no column at all, not even Mannen: men holding ground in the district while living somewhere else. Twenty-four of them come in a block that closes the roll, and among the names are Marten Melk, Jacobus van Reenen, Willem Morkel and Hendr. Oostwald Eksteen. Cape burghers, with Swellendam ground.

Twenty-seven of the 459 resident households are headed by a woman. Most are widows, and the roll gives them a dash under Mannen and a mark under Vrouwen, which is how it says that the household continues and the man does not. Jacoba van Eerden, widow of Gerrit van der Merwe d'oude, opens the roll on folio 1 with four sons and four daughters still counted to her, and two grown sons entered alone on the lines immediately after: Schalk Willem and Hendrik, both Gerritsz. A third, Pieter Schalk Gerritsz, opens the next folio with a wife and two sons of his own. On folio 10 the widow Susanna Rooy heads her household with three sons and a daughter, and Pieter, Jan, Andries and Stephanus Cronje follow her one after another.

A second kind of entry puts a woman at the head. Elisabeth Nortje, getrouwt met Caspari, is a married woman running a household, and her husband is a Company soldier, which is to say not a burgher for the roll to count. There are five of these. On folio 5 the pattern shows from the other side: Maria Elisabeth Caspari is somebody's wife on an ordinary line.

And on folio 7, Cornelia van de Caab is entered as the wife of Jan Adam Boriet. At the Cape in 1770 a woman named by a toponym rather than a surname was born into slavery or freed from it. The roll gives no more than that, and it counts her exactly as it counts every other wife.

Seven hundred and twenty people the roll does not name

The enslaved population of Swellendam stands in four columns headed Slaven, Slavinnen, Jongens and Meijsjes: 500 men, 159 women, 36 boys, 25 girls.

Two enslaved people for every five free ones, in a district of 1,692 burghers. The roll writes out the name of every householder and every wife over twenty folios. It names none of the 720. That is the form the Company issued.

Oosthuizens, van Vuurens, Swanepoels

The 1770 roll carries fourteen Oosthuizen entries across six folios, and they do not sit together. Six men and a married daughter are on folio 2, and a second group is on folio 9, and on a roll ordered by ground seven folios is a long way.

The folio 9 group is the one that can be reached. Gerrit Oosthuijsen d'oude is entered with Magdalena Ne[e]ff and five sons, and immediately after him come Jan Hendrik Oosthuijsen Gerritsz and Gerrit Oosthuijsen de jonge, each alone, then Sara Oosthuijsen as the wife of Salomon Pienaar. The patronymic is the join. Gerritsz means the son of a Gerrit, and the Gerrit in this family old enough to be a grandfather by 1770 is Gerhardus Oosthuijsen, born 1703. not yet verified

Folio 2's six carry no patronymic at all, which is why nothing is claimed about them here.

Elsewhere on the roll, six Oosthuizen women are married into other families. Catharina is the wife of Jan Craffort on folio 2 and a second Catharina the wife of Cornelis Besuijdenhout on folio 4. Petronella is married to Fredrik Botha Willemsz. Johanna Magdalena and Elsje are the wives of Fredrik and Coenraad Scheepers, six households apart on folio 8. Nelletje is newly married to Cornelis Vermaak de jonge on folio 17, with no children counted and his father on the line above with five sons at home.

The van Vuurens are one of the larger families on the roll: Lucas and Johannes Gerhardus on folio 11, the three brothers Johannes, Petrus and Roeloff on folio 15, Johannes Petrus on folio 19, and Anna Elisabeth and Maria Elisabeth married out. The Swanepoels appear in two groups two folios apart, Jacobus with his son Pieter Jacobsz on folio 11 and Pieter d'oude with three sons on folio 13.

None of them can be identified from the roll alone. Ockert Almero Oosthuizen as a bare string already answers to eight different men, and a name in a census with no date and no ground beside it cannot settle which one it is.

Where to read on

The Oosthuizens of Swellendam follows the family itself through this district and out of it, on the estate papers rather than the tax rolls. How the Oosthuizens came to the Koup puts the Swellendam years in the road that runs from Table Bay to the Swartberg. The Koup before the grants picks the story up on the other side of the mountains.

By 1805 the form had grown its farms column, and the Swellendam roll of that year names each household's ground. That is a different kind of document and it is the one that will finally say where these people stood.

The three days in March are the last thing worth noticing. The clerk of 1751 and the clerk of 1770 both began on the fifteenth and finished on the seventeenth, and between those two identical weeks the district they were counting had grown by a thousand and fifty-three people.

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. SWELLENDAM opgaafrol 1751 - NA 1.04.02 VOC inv. 4183 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, 1.04.02 Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). CC0.inv. nr. 4183. District SWELLENDAM, year 1751.view it online →
2. SWELLENDAM opgaafrol 1760 - NA 1.04.02 VOC inv. 4220 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, 1.04.02 Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). CC0.inv. nr. 4220. District SWELLENDAM, year 1760.view it online →
3. Swellendam opgaafrol 1770 - NA 1.04.02 VOC inv. 4262 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, 1.04.02 Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). CC0.inv. nr. 4262. District SWELLENDAM, year 1770. Scans 0090 to 0109; the colony summary is at 0110.view it online →
4. DRAKENSTEIN opgaafrol 1751 - NA 1.04.02 VOC inv. 4183 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, 1.04.02 Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). CC0.inv. nr. 4183. District DRAKENSTEIN, year 1751.view it online →
5. Swellendam opgaafrol J 318, 1805 - the Oosthuizen section, film 008145384 images 39-42 FamilySearch, "South Africa, Cape Province, Probate Records / Opgaafrollen" - microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah at GOV ARCHIVES CAPE TOWN RSA, operator C MARAIS, 25 Jul 1978, film unit ser. no. 3385, project S-AF-20-B, roll number 65. Original at the Western Cape Archives (KAB).Film # 008145384, images 39, 40, 41 and 42 of 519. Target card transcribed as printed: LOCALITY OF RECORD SWELLENDAM / CAPE PROVINCE; TITLE OF RECORD OPGAAFROLLEN / CENSUS - TAX; VOLUME/S J 318; YEAR/S INCLUDED 1805. Entries 767-790. | *** THE SECTION IS NOW BOUNDED AT BOTH ENDS, 20 Aug 2026. *** BEGIN card at IMAGE 4, END card at IMAGE 66, both reading identically: LOCALITY OF RECORD SWELLENDAM / CAPE PROVINCE; TITLE OF RECORD OPGAAFROLLEN / CENSUS - TAX; VOLUME/S J 318; YEAR/S INCLUDED 1805. Filming block on the begin card: MICROFILMED BY THE GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY, SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, AT GOV ARCHIVE'S CAPE TOWN RSA; OPERATOR C MARAIS; REDUCTION X 18; DATE FILMED 25 JUL 1978; FILM EMULSION NUMBER 5460-417-231; FILM UNIT SER. NO. 3385; PROJECT NUMBER S-AF 20 B; ROLL NUMBER 65. So IMAGES 4 TO 66 ARE VOLUME J 318, and images 39, 40, 41 and 42 sit securely inside it.view it online → 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.
6. Death register leaf for 1759, by Woonplaats - naming 'De wed: Ockert Brits' at Swellendam [TO VERIFY] - supplied by Frans as a screenshot, described as a 1759 death register. No repository, volume, film or image number has been seen.[TO VERIFY]. The leaf is headed 1759 and runs Swartland, Swellendam, Cabo, [?]Waveren, then Swellendam again. 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.
7. Opgaaf Rolle der Colonie Zwellendam van den Jaare 1808 - the title page, and the full LANDERIJEN opening for entries 397-435 FamilySearch, from the Cape Archives J-series (Swellendam opgaafrollen). Film # 008145384.Film # 008145384. TITLE PAGE at image 319, in a display hand: 'Opgaaf Rolle der Colonie Zwellendam van den Jaare 1808'. The opening transcribed here carries entries 397-435, Pr: Transport 211 and Transporteere 235, with the right-hand leaf giving the Landerijen columns. Supplied by Frans as screenshots
8. Target card - Swellendam opgaafrol J 322, 1808 (the citation for film 008145384) FamilySearch, "Opgaafrollen, 1692-1844"; Cape Archives J-series census returns. SWELLENDAM, CAPE PROVINCE - volume J 322 - year 1808.Film # 008145384, image 318 of 519. The NEW BEGINS card; an END card faces it at image 317.
9. The FARMS column of an opgaafrol - loan places at the Swartberg and the Groote Rivier, page 115 supplied as an image, unidentified [TO VERIFY]Foot of page numbered 115. No title, folio, film or repository visible on the crop.
10. The FARMS column of the roll - film 008145384, images 356 and 357, entries 724-734 FamilySearch, "Opgaafrollen, 1692-1844"; Cape Archives J-series census returns. SWELLENDAM, CAPE PROVINCE - volume J 322 - year 1808.Film # 008145384, images 356 (names and counts) and 357 (right leaf, farms). Page numbers 13 and 14 at the outer edge of image 357.

Research notes

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