The Barrys

It lands exactly on the Booyzen name-change testimony. His daughter Kathleen Barry married Willem Hermanus Booyzen — the man recorded as changing Booysen to Booyzen so as not to be taken for a British-siding joiner. An anti-English Irish grandfather at Barkly East, whose children married almost entirely into Cape Dutch families, is precisely the household in which rebel sympathies would be unremarkable.

Inferred This is the most testable inference in the archive, and it is still an inference. Nobody has yet found a Barry or a Booysen on a rebel roll. The rebels →

Born at Barkly East, christened at Dordrecht in September 1859. Her occupation is recorded — rarely, and valuably — as "Needle Woman". She married Willem Hermanus Booyzen on 22 December 1879 and bore thirteen children, of whom nine are dated.

She outlived her husband by thirty-five years and died on 5 September 1940 at No. 1, Fifteenth Avenue, Mayfair, Johannesburg, of carcinoma of the uterus after thirteen months' illness. She was buried at Brixton Cemetery. She made the journey the testimony describes, and lived four decades on the Rand at the end of it.

Her death certificate records her occupation as Home Duties — and, on the line below, "Military Pensioner." Her husband had been dead thirty-five years and died of an ulcer, so the pension is not his.

Searched The archive guessed a son killed in the First World War. The war-dead registers say otherwise: no Booyzen among the 1914–18 dead, no Booysen matching a son's forename, and all her identifiable sons survived — dying in 1932, 1952, 1956, 1966 and 1980. The pension belongs to a man who served and came home. Where it goes next →

Nine years after her death, her granddaughter and namesake Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen married at St Joseph's Catholic Church, Mayfair. Johannesburg →

Kathleen Barry married a Booyzen in the 1880s, so the surname stops with her. Her daughter married a Daschner, so it is two surnames gone in two generations. Then look at what those eleven grandchildren are called:

• Catherine Mary Sophia Daschner — Kathleen's own name, third generation running
• Margaret Wilhelmina Elizabeth Jeanette Daschner — the Barry name that also runs down the Pretorius side of this family and reaches Maggie Booyzen in 1926
• Richard Peter Daschner — for Kathleen's brother Richard Peter Barry of Manorowen
• Henry James Daschner — for her brother Henry James Booyzen
• William Herman Daschner — for her father Willem Hermanus

Five of eleven. The Barrys stop being a surname in this archive in 1859 and go on being a set of first names for another eighty years.

And a sixth, off the 1942 list The Johannesburg cemetery index carries a George Downing Daschner, buried at Brixton on 20 June 1925, the year he was born. He is not on his father's death notice because he was dead seventeen years before it was written — a twelfth child. George Downing is the name of Kathleen Barry's own grandson, born in 1901, and here it is on an infant in another family in the same decade. A second of the name died in 1998.

This comes from an index and not from an image, and the page says so. But it moves the reading: six names, not five, and a pattern that cannot comfortably be called coincidence. The namesakes →

This matters to the rebel question in a small, real way. When the Cape Rebel roll produces a Fred J. Barry of Ivanhoe and a Richard Peter Barry of Jerpoint, the second name is not a coincidence to be waved at — it is a name this family demonstrably used and kept using. It still does not prove the man on the roll is Kathleen's brother, and this archive still marks that unproven. But it does mean the name is evidence of a family, not of an individual. The 1942 notice →

The archive went to this index for one thing: to settle whether the Cape Rebel Richard Peter Barry of Jerpoint is Kathleen's brother, by finding his estate. He is not there. Neither is Frederick Fortunatus, nor Dorothea Regina, nor Hendrik Nicholaas, nor Catherine Maria Sophia, nor Kathleen Mary.

And neither, more startlingly, is John Augustus Barry, who died in August 1903 in the middle of the index's range, or his widow Margaretha Kolbe, who died in 1912, the year it closes.

Then the reason arrives, and it is not an absence at all. This archive has already read their death notices. Both are dated 29 March 1915, sworn by their sons. The index stops in 1912. They filed in 1915.

And there is a second reason, found the same afternoon. The FamilySearch index of Cape probate enters John Barry's estate not at Cape Town but at GRAHAMSTOWN — the Master's office of the Eastern Districts. So this volume would not have held him even if he had died in 1911. Two independent reasons for one absence, and the archive had neither of them an hour ago.

John Augustus Barry died in August 1903 and nobody reported his estate for twelve years. That is not carelessness with a form. It is the third instance of the same thing in this archive:

Three families, three decades, one habit. Twice a husband's estate and a wife's were filed on the same day, years after the fact, by a son. The Master's office was something this family went to when it had to, not when somebody died — and any search that assumes an estate was reported in the year of the death will miss them all. Two of this archive's own corrections are exactly that mistake →