Christoffel Snyman - Was he actually ever a slave?

Thanks all for such spirited & interesting engagements; and thanks Delia for the timely update.

Christoffel Snijman- so now you are a Viking hmm? :-) I hope this means you're putting a cruise to Scandinavia in your future holiday plans :-)

I have provisionally changed the Curator Note to: "Christoffel was the only half-caste men who married into the white community" - Pending approval from this Discussion
Although I hear & completely agree with what Alexander said about the evils of the slave trade - (the downplaying of the rapes of the owned women, being amongst the greatest of South African genealogy's omissions) - to me it still seems that Christoffel & his mother's stories of rising up out of this impossible situation should be acknowledged and credited.

Francois Cornelius Swart, i3j5 has added this to the process of thinking about wording:

Managers of Christoffel Snyman,

I am contacting you about this profile: Christoffel Snijman

All ye political correct people. Here is the definition of half-caste:

"Half-caste is a term for a category of people of mixed race or ethnicity. It is derived from the term caste, which comes from the Latin castus, meaning pure, and the derivative Portuguese and Spanish casta, meaning race, and is now considered offensive."

Enjoy!

:-) Lol Francois - Damned if you do & damned if you don't hmm? :-)
Okay, back to the drawing board - Let's ask everyone what wording they want.
love the befuddled cuzz :-)

Kornelius Snyman - sorry I tagged your ancestor, not you, in the following comment above = so now you are a Viking hmm? :-) I hope this means you're putting a cruise to Scandinavia in your future holiday plans :-)=

I was busy adding links to other Snyman men on Geni whose DNA might help confirm Christoffel's ancestry to the SA Y-DNA project: http://www.geni.com/projects/South-African-Y-DNA-Male-Progenitors/1..., so must have clicked the wrong link without looking.

Re: Half-caste, as this term is considered offensive, couldn't the curator message be conveyed in a more political correct manner by referring to Christoffel as "mixed race" instead?

I like it. Doing that.

Now reads: "Christoffel was the only mixed race man to have married into the white community at the time"
Comments? :-)

My Curator note is trying to alert people to the remarkable social jump that Christoffel & his mother managed to make - so I'm not invested in saying he was a slave. He obviously grew up as a free man. What a pity our society didn't have more of these mixed marriages - Apartheid might never have happened.

Sharon Doubell No wonder I liked Hagar the Horrible :-)
(Do you know if those Viking hats are for sale online?)

I'm happy with the curator note proposed, thanks.

No problem with the curator note.

Just wondering how one would practically treat these curator notes if:
1. One has also have a well based opposing view on the same aspect.
2. Others also have views on non related other aspects for the same person.

So I guess it is a matter of available space and overflow of other worthwhile observations
and whether the curator notes should contain views/opinions/observations etc or rather a condensed version of recorded facts?

Daan, I think you're making a Curator to Curator comment, as no one else can add Curator Notes.
One answer might be to do away with them altogether. I think that would be a pity myself, and I suspect many others find them useful too.

My solution would always be to let everyone participate in the decision as to what it says, if there is a query. You can't make all of the people happy all of the time, but you can try to be sure that you've made most of the people happy.

This Curator Note isn't my “view or opinion” though - which is that it's a pity there weren't more of these mixed marriages where the man was of colour because Apartheid might never have happened, and this profile would just be par for the course. I haven’t included that point, because it’s my personal opinion.

Historical significance is always more than the clerical notes, because it is a record about the person’s unique relevance to our communal past. On a genealogical tree it records a communal legacy to our South African family’s history.

The question is whether it is historically or genealogically significant enough to point out. I think it is. Others on the Discussion appear to agree.
The second question is whether it is too offensive to people on Geni to point it out. This discussion appears to suggest that it isn’t.

(But it interests me that so much roundabout effort is being made to excise it – even going so far as to suggest that it is insensitive to mention the man’s colour/status? Whose sensitivities are we protecting by jumping through hoops to get this fact ‘whitewashed’ :-)?
Why is it so important that the Snyman StamVader is not of mixed blood or slave ancestry - that we’re now suggesting that we don’t know the mother is correct? The only child born Christoffel (who will go on to sign his name Christoffel Snyman ) at the time of this Christoffel’s birth; is born to Groote Catrijn; who we know was the woman having sex with Hans Christoffel 9 months previously, because he was banished to Robben Island for it.

It makes me wonder why there has not been such indignation expressed before about the many Stam Moeders’ profile notes that reflect their slave/black ancestry.)

Sharon no argument with your argument lines.
Personal views might differ which could affect the wording in the curator note.
I know it is a curator function to add notes but this was not meant to be a curator to curator comment. It was meant to also show the considerations in dealing with these notes and accomodating other (non conflicting) material like in About me.
Although it is a curator function to add curator notes this interesting discussion started from a comment from a non curator and the input/feedback all users can make on curator notes.

True :-)

I totally agree with Sharon Doubell

Sharon, I would like to draw your attention to the following as you appear 100% sure about Christoffel Snyman's parentage.

The proposed father, namely Hans Christoffel Schneider, was banished to Robben Island on the 30th of July 1667 and the proposed baby Christoffel NN was baptized on the 9th of March 1669.

Groote Catrijn was baptized on 29th April 1668. Exactly 9 months after Hans Christoffel Schneider was banished to Robben island on 30th July 1667. Why did she not baptize her son when she was baptized as was the practice of the day. A baptized mother and a child unbaptized, why?

Christoffel was baptized on 9th March 1669.

Is it possible that Christoffel was born after Groote Catrijn was baptized? If so, then who was the father?

Alexander, I don't think it's possible to be 100% sure in these cases, and I take your point about the date of his baptism & the incarceration. But taken together with the fact of Catrijn's child having Christoffel Sniyman's name & there being noone else at the Cape with a similar name to confuse the issue, the circumstantial evidence is pretty overwhelming.
The DNA result pointing to a man of Snyman's German ethnicity is a strong further point in that direction.

The baptism dates could be explainable using Delia's point that at that time only slave children with a white parent were allowed to be baptised.
As Christoffel's baptism comes 2 years after Hans Christoffel's roughly 2 year sentence on Robben Island. I would infer from that that Hans Christoffel's consent might have been required for the baptism to take place.

Sharon Doubell Hans Christoffel Snijman's (the name which appears most frequently in the record) permission was not required ... remember that at the time Christoffel was a slave child owned by the VOC. In practice, the baptism of slave children was really quite haphazard. The date of his baptism would have depended on officials - Catharina's daughter Petronella was also only baptised more than 18 months after the death of her putative father Peter Everad - she was baptised Sept 1665 - he died March 1664. There is no pattern that shows that slave mothers baptised as adults were routinely baptised with their children.

Thanks for that info, Delia. This area of research is so interesting.

Delia, the example you give of Petronella's baptism is very different set of circumstances. Petronella was baptized before her mother was even baptized. Whereas Christoffel was born and unbaptized when his mother was baptized. This is strange.

Company slave children were baptized soon after birth and often before 7days after having been born. What you are referring to is private slave baptisms, owners were often reluctant to baptize their slaves due to the law of emancipation of Christian slaves and previous owners' financial obligations for the first 10yrs of a slave's freedom.

If Christoffel was the son of Hans Christoffel Schneider [Snijder] ... then he would have been born within 9months of his father's banishment to Robben island on July 1667.

This would mean that Christoffel was born before April 1668 but it is more likely to have been before this date as this was the date that his father was convicted and sentenced for sleeping with his mother.

Groote Catrijn and her son Christoffel were Company slaves, and the property of the VOC ... subject to the orders given by the Company. Baptism was an order that had to be followed by Company slaves who fulfilled the requirements. Speak Dutch and have Christian parents or convert by completing catechism in Dutch and showing piety.

Groote Catrijn was baptized into the Christian faith after her son's birth leaving her son unbaptized, against the Church's protocol of the time. This was also against Company protocol and would have been easier for her to baptize her infant purely as a matter of practicality and convenience ... as it was often done this way when a mother converted to Christianity.

Would Groote Catrijn leave her infant son unbaptized after having converted to Christianity and been baptized herself?

Private User This discussion is going in circles and frankly I have more important work to do. If you write an article meeting the publishing guidelines of Remarkable Writing in which you lay out the case for someone else being CS's father, I would be happy to publish it.

Well, I think there have been a lot of useful areas of the puzzle opened out to explore since this began with Alex encouraging Kornelius to have his DNA tested.

Delia's article has put what we know into the most academically plausible recounting of the facts by far, to my mind, but I do like the idea that there is still research to be done on filling out areas of the problem (that, I suppose, is an Historian mentality that sees the research journey itself as the destination :-);
And I very much like the idea of Alexander taking his research curiosity to the next stage of publishing. I'll be happy to collaborate with you Alex. Delia's Remarkable Writings is at the forefront of genealogical / historical research writing available on the Internet.

On the question of baptism delay - it may well be, as Delia says, a non-question; & if not, I still think Alex needs to examine how one went about getting the church to acknowledge that your child had a white father, before he poses it as a question at all.

The life of Catrijn strikes me as very interesting. She seems to have been a remarkable woman. Hans Christoffel, on the other hand, seems to me to to have been your typical petty criminal.

At the very least what we've done here is publicly logged the facts, opinions & aporias as we know them, in order to avoid the whole area of enquiry having to start from scratch again in a years' time when someone else discovers the profile and starts asking the same questions.

Well done everyone!

I liked the discussion and all the inquisitives.
At least what we have on the table has been thoroughly tested - and might even change if we discover more sources or could even get more plausible arguments.
I am really trying to get a sponsor for my DNA testing and trust I am what my paper study suggests :-)

Looking at all the input, and comments it seems to me that he wasn't just a special case, he is still a special case to this day!

As a matter of interest, Christoffel Snyman is just one of my mixed race origins, Both of my grand mothers have mixed race origins going back 200 to 300 years ago as well as my Paternal grandfather. According to my Family Finder DNA, I have 4% Eastern DNA and the rest Western European DNA.
Because of intermariage some of these Eastern Lines are multiplied - With at least 10 Eastern individuals going back 200 to 300 years ago, it explains the 4% Eastern origins on my Family Finder DNA, so I accept the historical facts as proven.

Greetings Dr Boshoff. Thank-you for your participation and please forgive me for referring to your DNA result without your permission. I assume that you do not mind discussing your DNA results here based on the previous comment where you discuss your results openly with us.

To clarify. This discussion refers to whether Christoffel Snyman was the biological child of Groote Catrijn from the Indian subcontinent (i.e. Pulicat or 'Pazhaverkadu', Bengal in South India).

Your DNA result states that you have 4% Middle Eastern DNA which is shown to originate somewhere between Egypt and the Arabian peninsula.

The Indian subcontinent is located in South Asia. You have no S. Asian

Thank-you,
Alexander Armenis

I also had my DNA done and I was somewhat puzzled that it showed some middle eastern ancestry. I then uploaded my results to GEDmatch
Which spelled out the middle eastern % as Baloch....muslims. The Baloch lived in Iran, were expelled from there in 580 A.D . settled in Aleppo Syria from there they went to Gugarat and Punjab India ..some migrating further south from there. Could Snyman's mother who was from India and a Muslim actually been of Baloch ancestry? Could many of the other VOC slaves from India also in fact be of middle eastern descent?

Petrus, I know we are related, Snyman among others. My DNA results
show 8.9% West Asian which is apparently Baloch, 0.50% South Asian
2.06% East Asian. I believe that the East Asian is probably Indonesian,
as I have traced some of my ancestors to some of the Batavian slave women. This Leads me to speculate that Groote Catrjin and others might actually be from Baloch who were originally from Iran but ended up in India. The rest is North Atlantic, Baltic, West and East Mediteranian, 0.47 northeast Africa .
Upload your family finder results to GEDmatch, it really helped me.

Private User thanks for very interesting information and suggestions.

It would be so interesting to get mtDNA results for a descendant of Groote Catrijn (Catharina van Paliacatta, SM/PROG).

Please see the discussion under Groote Catrijn's profile related to this:
Catharina "Groote Catrijn" van Paliacatta, SM/PROG

Hopefully there will be a time when we have enough DNA results on SA slave progenitors to be able to put this together with the historical context of the slave trade routes and create a 'spoor' map to help us track them. I'm sure Private User & Delia Robertson will help us put it together. But I do think it's years away still :-(

My mt/DNA takes me to Maria LeFebre, my paternal great grandmother Botha is my Snyman connection. I would be pleased to supply my results if helpful. I believe that it is my Afrikaans ancestors who contribute my Asian
DNA as my other ancestors were purely English, Irish and Scots.