Elsje Margaretha du Preez, b4c7d4

A woman with a fascinating background. Known as "Van Wijk," her genetic father had been Mijndert Claasen, and her stepfather was her mother's second husband, Roelof van Wijk. Her mother, Dorothea Esterhuijzen, was the premarital lovechild of Johanna Catharina Campher (later married to Willem van Wijk) and Andries Esterhuizen, who both went on to have large families with other partners. Through Claasen, Elsje is descended from three important enslaved progenetrixes.

[Ansela van de Caap, SM/PROG] was a half-slave born at Cape Town in the late 1660s, whose enslaved mother had arrived at the Cape aboard the Hasselt in 1558 from Grand Popo on the Gulf of Benin. Ansela married Lourens Campher, and they farmed at what was then De Drie Sprong, in Stellenbosch, today known as Muratie, which uses to promote the estate their romantic story, in which a gracious benefactor aided Ansela's transition from slavery to manumission, along with the several children Ansela and Lourens had already had.

In 1676, the progenitor Cornelis "Kees de Boer" Claasen, originally from Utrecht, had married Catharina (Catrijn) van Malabar, another genealogically important progenitrix of Indian origin, who had arrived enslaved at the Cape in 1657. Their granddaughter, [Johanna Catharina Campher,] married [Jan Andries Esterhuizen], a grandson of Catharina Wagenmakers van de Caep & Andries Beijers. Catharina "van de Caep", born a half-slave, was baptized on 9 September 1662; it is unclear who her enslaved mother or her European father were, but she became known as "Wagenmakers" after marrying Beijers, who was the colony's wagon maker. Both Catharina and Andries died in 1700 on their farm at Bottelary, then called "Weltevreden" but known at "Hartenberg" since the early 1700s, when ownership passed to their daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Christoffel Esterhuijzen.

Within this group of the ancestors of Elsje van Wyk, Johanna Catharina Campher went on to marry and have several children with Willem Willemsz van Wijk, and her sister Sophia married Christoffel van Wijk—both therefore becoming important "Stammoders" of the van Wyks of South Africa.

All of these families were clearly closely connected.