Joachim Blankenberg

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The Blankenberg Connection

Research by Gerda Pieterse into the de Wit family has unearthed a treasure of information on the influence upon the trade, banking and industrial sectors of early South Africa by the German Lutheran immigrants. Many of the important public servants were from this group.

A Gertrude Witt was born in 1672 in Hamburg, Germany. At the age of 13 she married Simon de Groot on 21 Oct 1685 in the Cape of Good Hope. But Simon, who had been born in Wittenberg, Germany died in 1688. So on 8 Mar 1688 Gertrude then married Hinrich Baumann of Dittmarsschen. They had a child Catherine Baumann.

Catherine Baumann married Johannes Blankenberg on 3 Jan 1706. He had been born in Berlin about 1680 and he died in “Meerlust” in the Cape of Good Hope. They had 8 children; the youngest was Johannes Henricus Blankenberg who on 18 Jul 1734 married Anna Margaretha Van de Heijden in Cape Town. They had a child Aletta Jacoba Blankenberg.

Aletta Jacoba Blankenberg married Petrus Johannes de Wit, who was the son of Jan de Wit and Maria Adriaansz, in Cape Town on 15 Feb 1756. Petrus died in 1778 in Cape Town. The 6th of the 10 children of Aletta Jacoba and Petrus Johannes was Willem Adriaan de Wit who married Maria Magdelena Kotze on 13 Feb 1791 in Cape Town. It is believed that Willem Adriaan and his wife both died in Batavia.

[ Their second child, Petrus Johannes de Wit, who was born at the Cape on 23 Oct 1796, left Africa before he was 20 and arrived in Malacca on 12 May 1816. He married the daughter of the then Governor of Malacca, Adriaan Koek, and became the founder of the DeWitt family of Melaka.]

However the 4th child of Willem Adriaan de Wit and Maria Magdelena Kotze remained in the Cape. He was Johannes Jacobus de Wit. He married Anna Cornelia Albetina de Villiers about 1834 in Cape Town, and it was their daughter Maria Magdelena de Wit who married John Thomson.