THE DU PLOOYS IN THE NETHERLANDS

The progenitor of the South African Du Plooys was Simon du Plooy of Krommenie in North-Holland.

The name Du Plooy was originally the Dutch name PLOIJER: a name indicating the trade of brushmaker. A "ploijer" was, in the dialect of the Zaanstreek, where Krommenie is, a brush or broom with soft, long bristles. The brushes were oval and often had handles of silver or horn.

Mr and mrs Henk Hendrikse and Ms Annie Hendrikse-Borremans did research in North Holland to discover whether the Dutch family Ploijer (of Ployer) of Krommenie and the South African Du Plooys are the same family, and they concluded that this was indeed the case.

I don't intend to go into all the details of their research here: it is available in Familia XIX 1982 no 3, obtainable from the SA Genealogical Society in Stellenbosch.

Note how the people didn't use formal surnames: their identity is indicated by a patronymic or by their place of origin or by their occupation.

 Willem Pieters or Pietersz indicates that Willem is "Pieter's son", or "Pieters-zoon". By the same token, Maria Willems, Willemsd of Willemsdr indicates that she is Maria "Willemsdochter" or "Willem's  daughter".

The oldest generations of  Ploijers in North-Holland that the Hendrikses could find, are as follows:

1. Claes PLOIJER (no record of his life story, but we know his name as his son's name is recorded as  "Claeszoon".)

2. Pieter Claeszoon PLOIJER, born about 1595 at Neck near Purmerend. He died before 1659.

He resided in "De Heylige Weg", Krommenie. His property was 11 roods in size and he paid  16 stuivers en 8 duite per year "verponding".

The word" verponding"  is an archaic one meaning rates, rent or mortgage. "Stuivers" and "duite" are something like ha'pennies and farthings. Interestingly enough, there is a saying in Afrikaans: "Dit is nie 'n duit werd nie", meaning it is not worth anything. Only now do I realise what a "duit" is!  

There is a record of a notarised document in connection with a dispute Pieter Claeszoon PLOIJER had with the neighbours, about the upkeep of a bridge between De Heyligland and Het Madt at Krommenie. The brush business must have been fairly lucrative!

Hy was married twice:

i.       Aftgen Christiaans,  married 26.12.1621

ii.      Ytje Simons (widow) married 5.3.1628

Pieter and  Aftgen had two daughters, Annetje (1622) and Trijntje (1624); and with his second wife, Ytje, Pieter had three more children, Grietje (1628), Marytje (1632) and lastly our ancestor, Pieter Pieterszoon PLOIJER.

3.  Pieter Pieterszoon PLOIJER was baptised at Krommenie 24.2.1636. His occupation was "borstelmaker" (brushmaker), and he died between 1673 and 1695.

i.       On 26.11.1656, when he was 20 years old,  he married Risje Willems. She was the daughter of Willem Jansz of Cnollendam and his wife Piryne Michiels. Risje died 23 Februarie 1668.

ii.      His second wife was Guurtje Claesdr, the widow of Teunus Arentsz. She was the daughter of Claes Pietersz and Geertje Taams. He was 33 and his bride was 27 when they were married in Krommenie on 14 April 1669.

Pieter en Risje had six children: two girls, Aafjen (1659) and Aagt (1661), and three sons: Willem (1657), Michiel (1662) and our ancestor, 4. Symon Pietersz, baptised at Krommenie 29 August 1666.

With his second wife, Guurtje, Pieter had 2 more children: Pieter (1671) and Risje (1673.

4. Symon Pietersz Plooijer (a.k.a. Simon Du Plooy) was next heard of at the Cape.

THE DU PLOOYS AT THE CAPE

According to De Villiers/Pama, the genealogy of the Du Plooy family in South Africa starts with Symon Ploijer ( a.k.a. Simon du Plooy), of Krommenie in North-Holland, bapt. 1666, died 1733. He was first married to  Adriaantje, (parents unknown) and secondly to Catharina Koopman, parents also unknown.

4.  Symon Pieterszoon PLOIJER, or

     Simon Pieters DU PLOOY

He was baptised at Krommenie 29 Augustus 1666. On 22.9.1715 he married Catharina Koopman, his second wife and our ancestress. At that time his age was 49. 

DeVilliers/Pama states that Simon's first child was a son: Pieter Simon.  No dates are given. This Pieter was probably the son of Adriaantje, Simon's first wife, because the second child, Willem, was baptised on 5 Januarie 1716,four months after the marriage to Catharina.

DeVilliers: "Geslachtregsiters van de Oude Kaapse Familiën"  gives Simon's children as follows:

          (i) Pieter Simon

          (ii) Willem, baptised 5 Januarie 1716, married 30.9.1742 Johanna Petronella Basson. They had 4 children.

          (iii) Michiel, bapt. 31.3.1717, married 25.5.1755 Aletta van Wijk. They had 10 children.

          (iv) Maria, bapt11.8.1720, married Johannes Frederick Botha.

          (v) Adriana, bapt 5.9.1723, married  Cornelis Vermeulen.

          (vi) Cornelis, our ancestor (see 5. Cornelis DU PLOOY  below).

5. Cornelis DU PLOOY: bapt 1 February 1744. He was a citizen of Stellenbosch and married  (i) Margaretha WILLEMSE 17 April 1768.

His second wife was (ii) Anna Sophia CAMPHER, whom he married 24 August 1788, when he was 44 and she was 19 years old. (SEE NEXT POST FOR HER STORY)

6. Dirk Wouter DU PLOOY married Catharina Susanna ROUX, a daughter of Pieter Hendrik ROUX and Elizabeth STEENBERG. She was born 31 July 1796 in Tulbagh, and died at Maartenspan, Hopetown, 23 October 1868, four days before her husband. (Why? What happened? There's a story here, if only we knew it!)

Dirk Wouter and Catharina had 4 children:

i.       7. Cornelis Willem DU PLOOY born 21 December 1813, Beaufort-Wes (our ancestor)

ii.      Pieter Hendrik Rudolf, born  5 December 1816, Beaufort-Wes

iii.     Catharina Susanna Petronella, born 28 Jan 1821, Beaufort-Wes

iv.      Willem Andries, born  22 Feb 1823, Beaufort-Wes

7. Cornelis Willem DU PLOOY:  born  21 December 1813 in Beaufort-Wes, baptised 13 Feb at 1814 Graaff-Reinet.

On 3 Februarie 1837, when he was 24 years old, he was offered the appoinment of field cornet for the Gamka District. He turned it down because he was about to leave the Colony. He left in July 1837, joining the trek of Jacob de Klerk. Hy was present at the Battle of Blood River.         

(source: Voortrekker Stamouers - J C Visagie, page 61.)

On 3 July 1837 at Beaufort-Wes (aged 34) he married Johanna Marguerite Jacoba Susara NEL, born 13 December 1820: a daughter of Jacobus Frederick NEL and Maria Johanna WILKERS. The bride was 17 years old.

He died on 2 June 1881 at Maartenspan, Hopetown, at the age of 68.

Cornelis Willem DU PLOOY and Johanna M.J.S. NEL had eleven children: 6 sons and 5 daughters.The third child and second son,  Jacobus Frederick, is our ancestor.

8. Jacobus Frederick DU PLOOY: born 29 July 1843, baptised 2 October 1843 at Colesberg. He married Cornelia Carolina DU PRE. Their children were:

i.       Cornelis Willem born about 1870 at Hopetown.

ii.      Jacobus Frederick

iii.     Rudolph

It is possible that there were more children, but we don't know of any.

Cornelis Willem is our Oupa Neels who married Ouma Annie de Villiers.

Anna Sophia CAMPHER

Anna Sophia was of French, Norwegian and German descent, and could also count a slave among her fore-mothers.

Her parents were Frans Hendrik CAMPHER and Johanna LEKKERWYN. Johanna's birth name was Jeanne LECREVENT: she was the daughter of the French Huguenot Ary LECREVENT.The name soon became LEKKERWYN among the Dutch at the Cape, "lekker wyn" meaning "delicious wine".  More of the LEKKERWYN / LECREVENT family history later.

Frans Hendrik CAMPHER was the son of Cornelis CAMPHER and Dorothea OELOFSE.

Dorothea was born  in 1695, the daughter of Andries OELOFSE of Norway, and his wife Sara VENGEYSELEN.

Cornelis CAMPHER's parents were Lorenz CAMPHER, born 1650 in Germany, and his wife Ansela van die Kaap. Ansela was a former slave who was freed by Lorenz CAMPHER - they lived on the farm Murasie near Koelenhof, and they had 4 children: the only son, Cornelis CAMPHER, was the eldest, followed by his sisters Agnetie, Anthonietta and Jacoba. 

Cornelis DU PLOOY had 19 children, eight by his first wife, Margaretha, and eleven by Anna Sophia CAMPHER.

Cornelis's ninth child and Anna Sophia's eldest, was our ancestor:

6. Dirk Wouter DU PLOOY: bapt. 6 Desember 1789 at Swellendam. He lived at Uitkyk, in the Gamka district of Beaufort. He was a Voortrekker and probably left the Colony in July 1837 with the party of Jacob de Klerk. He was present at the Battle of Blood River, and later settled in the Hopetown District, where he died 27 October 1868 on the farm Maartenspan.                                                 

(Source: J.C. Visagie: Voortrekker Stamouers, page 62)

EARLY DAYS AT THE CAPE

In our patriarchal society, our family trees always follow the male line and often we don't know a lot about the origins of our ancestresses. Here we also look at some of the women who married DU PLOOY men:

Our DU PLOOY heritage starts with Ary LECREVENT and Marie De LANOY, a Huguenot couple whose great-granddaughter married Cornelis DU PLOOY.

First generation

Ary (or Hary)  LECREVENT was one of the French Huguenots who came to the Cape to start a new life, little knowing that his new life would end in murder. 

He married Marie, who had arrived at the Cape in 1688 with her parents Nicolas and Marguerite DE LANOY, her three brothers Nicolas, Matthieu and Francois and her sister Suzanne. The family came from Guines, Pas de Calais, France.

In 1690 they settled on a property in the French Hoek district of Groot Drakenstein, built a gabled house and planted fruit orchards. Ary called his farm Lecrevent, but it soon became known as Lekkerwyn (Dutch for delicious wine).

The Lekkerwyn Estate is a guest house today. See the pictures of Ary and Marie's gabled  house at their website www.lekkerwyn.com.

 Ary and Marie's neighbour, on the farm Delta, was a certain SILBERBACH, a German immigrant of dubious background. SILBERBACH had had a rather chequered career but seemed to settle down to family life in Fransch Hoek.  His wife was a widow, Ansela, who had four children from her previous marriage to Lorenz CAMPHER. She was a former slave, known as Ansela of the Cape and owned by Campher until he freed and married her. Marrying SILBERBACH as a second husband probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

Ansela of the Cape is the ancestress of the CAMPHER family of South Africa, and our family is also descended from her, through her grandson Frans Hendrik Campher, as you will see below.

In the course of a violent disagreement,  SILBERBACH beat Ary Lecrevent to death with a  piece of wood and fled to escape punishment. He was declared an outlaw and banished in absentia. No trace of him was ever found. It is surmised that bushmen or wild animals got him. And serve him jolly well right.

Second generation

Ary LECREVENT and  Marie LANOY's eldest son, Nicolas LECREVENT (baptised 18 June 1696) was a burger at Drakenstein and married Johanna GERRITS, the widow of Hendrik WEYERS.

Third generation

Nicolas and Johanna had two children, a son, Adriaan (1739), and a daughter, baptised on  17 Nov 1743: Jeanne Marguerite LECREVENT,  or as she was known in the Dutch form of her name, Johanna Margaretha LEKKERWYN. She married Frans Hendrik CAMPHER.

Fourth generation

Their daughter, Anna Sophia CAMPHER, married 5. Cornelis DU PLOOY (see above),  a son of Simon Ploijers of Krommenie.

Sources: The French Refugees at the Cape : Colin G. Botha

Cape Dutch Houses and Farms : C. de Bosdari

 Geslachtregisters der Oude Kaapsche Familien : De Villiers and Pama

www.geocities.com/sa_stamouers

www.familysearch.org

NEELS and ANNIE

Cornelis Willem DU PLOOY, born Hopetown c. 1870, died Kimberley c. 1963.

married 10 January 1898 at Hopetown

Anna Catharina DE VILLIERS born 8 August 1880 Hopetown died December 1958 Kimberley

Ouma Annie had a gentle nature and very blue eyes. She was a daughter of Genl P.J. de Villiers. During the Boer War, the family saw little of him because he was away on Commando. They were constantly worried that he would be captured. Being a citizen of the Cape Colony, a British possession, he was officially a rebel and could be shot out of hand.

Ouma married Oupa Neels du Plooy in 1898, when she was 18 years old. On the marriage certificate his trade is given as "wagon maker", but on his daughter Nellie's marriage certificate, his trade is  "blacksmith".  In the early 20th century, the motor car was starting to take over from the wagon as a means of transport and Oupa had to find another way to make a living.

He later went into the building trade: there are still farmhouses in the Kimberley district that were designed and built by him. A gable at the front of the house was his trademark, and no two were alike. They are all dated, and bear his initials in an unobtrusive spot.

Gables became fashionable among the local gentry and Oupa's designs were the in thing. He was in great demand by the local landowners, or more likely their wives, who wanted something a bit swish.

Ouma had several miscarriages, but raised six children, three boys; Koos, Piet and Neels and three girls, Sue, Nellie and Ann.

They lived in Hopetown, then in Douglas and later in Kimberley, first in a rented house in Adam Street, and then in 16 Tapscott Street.

For their Golden (50th) wedding anniversary, December 1948, the Queen sent a telegram! I like to think of Her Gracious Madge scurrying into the Post Office at Sandringham during a break in the Christmas festivities.

Ten years later they celebrated their Diamond Wedding. The Queen went round to the Post Office again.

In October 1918, when the Spanish 'Flu swept the world like a twentieth-century Black Death, Kimberley did not escape. Between the middle of 1918 and the middle of 1919, the worldwide pandemic killed at least 21 million human beings -- well over twice the number of combat deaths in the whole of World War I.

The whole town was stricken. The streets were deserted. 15-year old Nellie was the only one in the family who didn't succumb. She hardly slept, spent her days and nights nursing her parents and her five siblings and washing the bedclothes which were constantly sodden because of the high fever of the patients.

They all pulled through. When they were a bit better, Nellie queued every day at the soup kitchen in the Town Hall with a milk can, which she lugged back home full of soup to feed them. Then she herself got sick, not with the 'flu, but "a fever" … today we would call it stress and exhaustion.

Shortly afterwards, the family moved to 16 Tapscott Street, where Ouma and Oupa lived until 1953 when they moved to a house at 28 Synagogue Street.

SHOPPING WITH OUMA

Ouma Annie was a notable cook, like her sister Auntie Nellie. But unlike Auntie Nellie who had the produce of a farm at her disposal, Ouma had to shop.

I liked going to the shops with Ouma. She would put her hat on, skewering it to her hair, which she wore on top of her head, with a hatpin. On our way to the shops, I got to carry the basket. Ouma carried it back, when it was full.

We went to the local butcher, or sometimes to Suzman's the fishmonger. They both knew Ouma and told her what was good that day.

Then we went on to the grocer, called Ho Bew and Co. It was owned by a Chinese couple, known to their customers as Joe and Mrs Joe. Why people couldn't just have called them Mr and Mrs Ho, which was no doubt their name, I don't know. Ouma asked for half a pound of tea and a shilling's sugar or whatever, and it was weighed out and put in brown paper bags. Ouma would get me a ha'penny stick of barley sugar to suck. Barley sugar is made from glucose and is good for you, she said, as long as you brush your teeth afterwards.

What I really wanted was a niggerball. (Shock, horror! ... but fifty-odd years ago we knew no better, that was just its name. In fact, as an Afrikaans child I called them "niekerbôls" and had no clue what it meant other than a candy).

It was a round black confection nearly the size of a ping-pong ball: you had to yawn to get it into your mouth.  As you sucked it, the layers of colour changed from black to pink, green, yellow, mauve, and so on. Every now and then you could take it out of your mouth to check the current colour, or if you had a friend with you, you could clench it between your front teeth, draw your lips back and ask "Wha' cull ishhi' nah?"

Ouma would never buy me a niggerball (four for a penny), on the grounds that I would get my fingers sticky taking it out of my mouth, or it would slip down my throat and choke me, or both. My mother, to my annoyance, also subscribed to this theory. Such is the irony of life that in due course I, too, avoided letting my small daughter have what was by then more acceptably referred to as bull's eyes, (two cents each) in case she should choke or get her fingers sticky.

We did not have to shop for vegetables or milk - they were delivered. Ouma left a metal milk can out on a little table on the front stoep. It was scoured until it shone like a mirror. The milkman brought the milk in 2-pint glass bottles sealed with cardboard disks that fitted into a slot running round the edge. He had a metal skewer which he thrust through the cardboard, flipped the disks out and poured the milk into Ouma's milk can. Ouma took 4 pints of milk every day. The can was kept in the back yard cooler and the milk decanted into a milk jug covered by a crocheted doiley edged with blue glass beads, as needed.

Out in the back yard, under a tree, Ouma had the "cooler". It was a cabinet on four sturdy legs, with double walls of chicken wire, which were filled with coke. Not the sort you drink or sniff, this was black like pieces of coal. Air could flow freely between the pieces of coke.

The chicken wire was covered on both sides with hessian. On top of the cooler was a shallow metal tray, always kept topped up with water. The tray had small holes round the edges, so water dripped down and kept the hessian wet. The whole thing worked with evaporation and was very effective. Even in Kimberley’s very hot summers, it kept the butter firm and the milk from curdling.

The vegetables were brought twice a week by the Indian greengrocer, in a horse-drawn wagon with sides that flipped down like a counter. There were scales with weights, and a whole lot of small wicker baskets hanging on hooks at the top. The housewives came out to make their choice, which was placed in the baskets and carried into the house by the assistant. The baskets were suspended from a pole across his shoulders.

Most greengrocers were Indian and all were known as "Sammy". The name eventually became a generic term for greengrocer: Long after the Sammys with their wagons were no more, people would still refer to the local greengrocer in the shopping centre as "the Sammy."

We had a skipping rhyme:

Sammy, Sammy, what you got?

Missy, Missy, penny apricot.

OUMA'S GARDEN

Ouma Annie liked to garden: she was often to be found on her knees, weeding the flowerbeds in front of the house or the veggie garden at the back. She had a potting bench at the side in Oupa's shed in the back yard.

Twice a year, when she needed a lot of digging and cleaning out to be done, she would get "the convicts". You could arrange with the local jail to send you half a dozen convicts for the day. They didn't send the serial killers; what you got were the ones who had copped thirty days for drunk and disorderly. They came trotting up the street on the appointed day, singing, with their warder.

The convicts wore red-striped shirts and khaki shorts and the warder wore a khaki uniform. They were all sorts, but the warder was always a Zulu. He carried a knopkierie and assegai (knobbed stick and short stabbing spear) but it was all just for show, they obviously enjoyed the outing and worked away diligently. Ouma gave them bread and jam and coffee for elevenses and at lunchtime they had a pot of stew and more bread and coffee. They brought their own tin plates, spoons and mugs which they rinsed under the garden tap afterwards.