comes from
Where the name comes from
On 11 October 1671 a soldier called François Villion sailed from Texel aboard 't Huis te Velsen. He reached Table Bay on 14 February 1672 — sixteen years ahead of the Huguenot fleet that most people picture when they hear the word.
He was a Protestant leaving a France that was making life steadily harder for Protestants. Where exactly he was born is still argued about: Clermont, in France, for most of three centuries, though more recent work points instead to Maaseik, in what is now Belgian Limburg. Even the founder's home town is a matter of somebody else's record-keeping.
Nobody could spell it
The Company's clerks wrote him down as Francois Vilion. Then Francois Signon. Then Francoys Vijon. A man's name was whatever the man holding the pen heard that morning, and a French name in a Dutch office did not stand much of a chance.
What eventually settled was Viljoen — a Dutch ear's spelling of a French name, written down by a third party. It is the family's name now. It was never the family's choice.
Ida's Valley, 1682
He soldiered for about eighteen months, took his discharge, and became a free wagonmaker on 18 August 1673. In May 1676 he married Cornelia Campenaar, from Middelburg in the Netherlands.
Stellenbosch had been laid out in 1679. Three years later Simon van der Stel granted the couple a farm in Ida's Valley, on the north-eastern shoulder of the village — among the first free farms in the district. François worked it until he died in 1689.
They had six children: Pieter, Anna, Henning, Johannes, Cornelia and Francina. Nearly every Viljoen in South Africa comes down from those six.
Which is exactly the problem
The name took. It spread through the Boland and then the whole country, until Viljoen became
one of the most common surnames in South Africa. Which is why, three and a half centuries
later, there is not a free mail service left where you can simply be
johan.viljoen.
What you are offered instead is johan.viljoen87, or jviljoen4, or
whatever is still going once the system has checked its list. The name your family carries is
once again being decided by a clerk. The clerk is a database now, but the arrangement has not
changed.
So we hold the domain
viljoen.co.za has room for far more addresses than one family will ever use. Forwarding a message into the inbox you already read costs us close to nothing — there is no mailbox to store and no cost that grows as the register does — so the forwarding is free and stays free. A mailbox of your own has a mail server behind it, and that is the one we charge for. What it costs is on the home page.
Three hundred and fifty years is a long time to let other people decide how your name is written. This is us taking that back, one address at a time.
What we will not do
- We will not sell, rent, or publish the register. Nobody gets a list of who holds what.
- There is no advertising here, and nothing is scanned to sell you anything.
- We do not ask for an ID document or a copy of your passport. We read your request and make a judgement, which is slower, but it keeps us from holding papers nobody should have to hand over for an email address.
- Once a personal-name address has been released, it does not go to somebody else.
Who runs it
Safeman Solutions, in Cape Town, is the seller of record and carries the hosting and the support address. The domain belongs to the Viljoen family. Everyone here shares one domain and one mail reputation, which is what the acceptable use policy is for; the terms and privacy notice say the rest. If something goes wrong, a person answers — write to support@viljoen.co.za.
Dates and names above follow the standard genealogical record of the Cape progenitor, as kept by stamouers.com and the Huguenot Society's Viljoen descent tables. If your branch has better, write to us and we will correct it.