Christoffel Coetzee de Villiers (10 March 1850 – 4 September 1887), born in Swellendam as the fourth son of a wagon-maker, and married in Wellington where he then settled, spent his last years as a printer's clerk in Cape Town. His passion for researching his own family's history eventually grew into his compilation of Geslachts-Registers der Oude Kaapsche Familiën, a complete (in so far as it was possible) genealogy of colonists' descendants born at the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope during the Dutch period (1652–1806).