Van Blerk Genealogy

Name

Lived in Kalk Bay towards Clovelly in area known as "Die Trappies" in house named "The Clouds Rest" - address is now 232 Main Road. Most of children born here.
Records show that J,P.S. van Blerk was a member of the Village Management Board when it was formed in 1891 and he was elected among the first councilors when the Municipality was formed in 1895.
Involved in transporting dimaonds and said to have made money this way - from Kimberley to Mafikeng.
Only had one arm - many stories about how he lost the one !!!

Building Kalk Bay: on his section of Die Trappies Kop, Jan built some twenty wooden fishing cottages, using timber collected by wagon from old sailing-ship wrecks along the coast, and hired them out to fishing families who had previously had no accommodation beyond the caves on the mountain. His son John remembered him as a good landlord who never charged rent in a season when bad weather or scarce fish had left a family with nothing to pay. At Lakeside, on a farm bought with money made transport-riding between the diamond fields at Kimberley and Mafikeng, he built a second life: a vegetable and dairy farm, a grocery shop, a butchery, a blacksmith's shop, and a bakery, with an eight-roomed house above it -- Oasis -- where his youngest son John was born in 1902.

Three versions of how he lost his arm survive, none verifiable, each passed down by a different branch of the family: (1) son John's version -- a lion roared in the night, and grabbing for his loaded gun by the barrel, the trigger caught and the shot tore through his arm above the elbow; (2) daughter Helene's descendants' version -- a coloured driver named Baron, retrieving the gun from under a wagon seat near Beaufort West, discharged it by accident, and it was in the Beaufort West hospital that Jan met the matron he would later marry; (3) daughter Babes's family's version -- Jan, climbing in the mountains at Hout Bay, picked up a baby baboon, was confronted by its furious mother, and discharged his own gun by accident while fleeing and falling. His artificial arm, imported from England, was buried with quiet ceremony in a lead-lined wooden box in the garden at Oasis on the evening he died.

A Haunted House: family stories about Oasis, recorded by son John. Cries and groans at night, pots and pans moving with no one there; his sister Matty and brother Nicolaas avoided sleeping there when they could help it. A week before Jan died, the family dog Toby sat outside his bedroom window and howled, returning to the same spot every time he was taken away. On the evening Jan died, John recalled the double front doors of Oasis swung open on their own -- first one, then the other, with no wind to explain it -- at the hour his body was carried out through them the following night. The house was said to have been built partly over the site of an old, collapsed tomb, whose scattered bones Jan had gathered and reburied behind a retaining wall before construction. Family tradition throughout, recorded by son John -- not archival record. Source: a family memoir compiled by R.V. Richardson (2005), from John van Blerk's own written recollections and interviews with surviving family and Kalk Bay locals including Vincent Cloete; quoted in From Blerick to the Cape, Chapter Nine.