Lerena
Horse people. From a river town in Argentina to the racetracks of South Africa — and one of the rarest names on Earth.
Nobody is quite sure yet. Lerena might come from the Basque country, where -ena means “the house of.” Or it might be a short way of saying Llerena, a town in Spain.
From you, all the way back
Start at the bottom. Every step up is one more generation into the past — a real person, in a real place, written down in a real book.
What do the numbers mean? “2× great-grandpa” is just a short way of writing great-great-grandpa. Once you get past three or four greats it is quicker to count them than to say them. So your grandpa’s grandpa is your 2× great-grandpa, and his grandpa is your 4× great-grandpa, and his grandpa is your 6× great-grandpa.
Look at them
Real photographs of real people you are related to. Some are more than a hundred years old.
Things they actually did
Only 2,124 people in the whole world are called Lerena.
That is fewer than the number of children in some schools. If you meet another Lerena anywhere on Earth, there is a very good chance you are related to them.
He had three names, and everyone used a different one.
His Argentine passport says Pablo Armando Lerena. His South African papers say Robert Paul. And at the stables, everybody just called him Bob.
He trained racehorses.
Bob was born in Rosario, Argentina, on 22 February 1882, and ended up with his own stables in Cape Town. His passport has one word for his job: Trainer. When he died, the certificate said Race Horse Owner.
He taught boys to be jockeys.
Young riders came to learn from him. One of them, Alan Higgins, went on to build a whole training centre of his own — and still told people, sixty years later, that he had been “apprenticed to Bob Lerena.”
She was the seventh daughter, and her name says so.
Bob married Mary Septima Taylor. Septima is Latin for “the seventh” — because she was her parents’ seventh daughter. By sixteen she was already teaching in a school.
The horses never stopped.
Bob’s son became a trainer too. His grandson Tex was a top jockey for twenty-two years. And Gavin Lerena is a champion jockey in South Africa right now — your dad’s cousin.
🔎 The bit we still can't solve
This is the shortest ladder of the five — and the biggest mystery. We know Bob was born in Rosario in 1882, but we do not yet know his mother’s or his father’s name. Somewhere in Argentina there is a book with the answer in it.