The atlas
Where this family actually was, plotted from latitude and longitude. A band of Karoo and north-eastern Cape districts, a jump of four hundred miles to the Rand — and, at the top left, a district that shares the surname and is not the family at all.
A plotted chart, not a drawn map. Positions are latitude and longitude on a plain graticule — no coastline is drawn, because this archive would be inventing its shape. The dashed line is the family's own route, not a road.
The Cape cluster
Everything before 1900 sits in a band about a hundred and eighty miles across — Graaff-Reinet and Cradock in the Karoo, then east to Colesberg, Burgersdorp, Lady Grey, Barkly East, Dordrecht and Indwe.
The whole of the Mountjoy line, the whole of the Barry line, the 1820 Settler's grave and every farm in the testimony fall inside it.
And then the Rand
After 1905 the family is at Johannesburg — roughly four hundred miles north of Indwe, in a place that did not exist as a settlement until 1886.
That jump is the testimony's train, and it is the same jump the surname statistics show: Booysen is a Cape name, Booyzen is a Gauteng one. The name →
The cluster this archive was too sure about
Marico, top left, was drawn here as a warning. Seven Booyzen claims for compensation as burghers were filed from that district in 1903–04, and the Booyzen children who died in the Johannesburg and Vereeniging camps came from farms there. It is a substantial Booyzen family who fought, were burnt out and were compensated — everything the testimony describes.
This page used to say, flatly, "They are not this family. This one was in the Cape until about 1907, and reached the Transvaal by railway rather than by commando." The second sentence is now known to be false, and the first was resting on it.
Rustenburg is not Marico, and nothing yet connects this family to a single one of those seven compensation claims. But the reason for keeping the two clusters apart was that this family had no business being in the western Transvaal in the nineteenth century, and it did.
The test, run
With three neighbouring districts in a row, the obvious thing is to put the Marico claimants against the names this archive now has. The seven compensation claims are indexed by initials: JPJ (1903) · PJ (1903) · GL (1904) · JPJ (1904) · L (1904) · JC (1904) · HE (1904). The eight children on the 1876 Sterfkennis are David Schalk, Magdalena Johanna, Petrus Jacobus, Anna Eliezabet, Jan Gerthardus Lodewikus, Eliezabet Cornelia, Hendrik Stefanus and Anna Maria.
Three of the seven sets of initials fit — PJ, GL, L — and three do not. That is about what chance would give you with a family this repetitive about names, and by 1903 the 1876 children were dead or in their eighties, so any real claimant would be a grandson and the initials would have to be matched a generation further on than this archive can see.
And one fact points the other way. The Marico patriarch in the index — Jacobus Petrus Johannes Booyzen, the JPJ of two of those claims — is entered as born at Pietermaritzburg, Natal, in 1841, and dead at Rhenosterfontein in the district of Marico in November 1900. This family is Graaff-Reinet. A Natal birth is not where a son of Brakfontein comes from.
So the test was run and it does not settle it. It is recorded because a question that has been asked and not answered is worth more on a page than a question nobody has touched, and because the next person should not have to run it again. What was searched →
So the map now carries three districts and one honest answer: unresolved. The Marico family may be cousins and may be strangers, and this archive has no document either way. What it will not do again is convert the absence of a link into the presence of a boundary. The testimony → What was withdrawn →
Off this map
Five places in the archive are nowhere near southern Africa.
Soho, London · LondonShoreditch · LondonConduit Street · LondonGerman Savoy Church · LondonBrisbane · Brisbane
Four of them are within two miles of each other in London — a Soho font, a Shoreditch wedding, a Mayfair deathbed and a Strand burial, all belonging to the Kolbes. The fifth is where the line reads this.