A home-grown coat of arms
by Mike Oettle
MANY Afrikaner families do not have a coat of arms they are entitled to bear.
That fact I have emphasised for years. But it doesn’t mean that you have to make do without a coat of arms your entire life.
Christo Welgemoed, a retired radio broadcaster who lived in Lorraine Manor, Port Elizabeth (previously part of Walmer), established that his family of German origin, had never borne arms – not in Germany, and not either as a result of the invention of a whole string of “family coats of arms” which N H Theunissen published in the 1940s in Die Brandwag.
Where no coat of arms exists, you’re free to draw one up yourself, and that’s exactly what Christo did.
First he familiarised himself with his family’s past. The founder of the South African family, Johann Gottlieb Wohlgemuth, was born at Königsberg in Prussia in 1760.
Until 1701 Königsberg was the capital of the duchy of Prussia in Poland. In that year Friedrich III
von Hohenzollern, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, proclaimed himself (as Friedrich I) King in Prussia. Later the title was altered to King of Prussia, and the name Prussia was used for all the Brandenburg possessions.
Königsberg was so important to the Hohenzollerns that each new king travelled there from Berlin to be crowned King of Prussia, even after the establishment of the German Empire in 1871. (The Kings of Prussia were additionally German Emperors until 1918.)
Königsberg was so important to the Germans that when the Soviet Union’s Red Army captured the city in 1945, they immediately demolished the entire city, expelled all the German residents from the northern half of East Prussia, and brought in Russian settlers. Today the city is called Kaliningrad, and although it lies quite a distance from the rest of Russia, it is still (since the fall of the Soviet Union) part of the Russian Republic.
Well, Johann Gottlieb was no Prussian aristocrat, merely a German who had to make a living, and he travelled to the Netherlands to join the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) as a boatswain.
The VOC sent him to the Cape, and in 1795 he retired from the company’s service. He found his way to the colony’s eastern frontier, and died in 1841 on his farm Welgevonden in the Uitenhage district.
Along the way (perhaps already when he was in the Netherlands) his name took on a Dutch form, and is found in Cape documents as Johan Godlieb Welgemoed. Cor Pama gives the meaning of his surname as “cheerful”.
The arms devised by Christo were registered by the State Herald on 20 April 2001. They can be blazoned:
Arms: Azure, a reversed Old English text letter W, accompanied in chief by four mullets of six points in fess, all argent, the whole within a border or.
Crest: An eagle displayed or, langued gules, charged on the breast with the letter from the shield in blue.
Wreath and mantling: Azure and or.
Motto: Immer Welgemoed.
The motto translates as “Always cheerful”.
Christo died in 2003, so these arms now belong to his son, Christo Jacobus Welgemoed, who is unmarried. Two of Christo’s three daughters are married, and if their brother does not marry, they will be entitled to pass their arms on to their children as a quartering. But he is a young man, and may yet find a wife and have children.
To see the arms of Christo’s four children, go to this page.
Comments, queries: Mike Oettle