What changed
This archive is rewritten most days, and a reader who saw it last week has no way of knowing what moved. This page is that record — every finding and every withdrawal, by the day it happened, built from the same data the rest of the site is built from. Nothing here is written by hand.
Last worked
13 Sep 2026
37 findings · 15 withdrawals
Standing
212 people
80 events on the timeline
13 Sep 2026
Taken back — 15 published claims withdrawn on this day.
| What this archive said | What replaced it | Cause |
|---|---|---|
| One did. This archive searched the War Losses Compensation Commission, found nothing, and published the zero while noting it was weak because the Commission's records are catalogued by sub-commissioner and not by claimant. David Schalk Booijzen's answer to question ten of his wife's 1900 death notice is “none. Compensation claim filed.” The claim exists; it was the finding aid that could not reach it. → | population | |
| One woman, two records: a stub written from the 1908 death notice — “His first wife, named as pre-deceased” — and a full record written from her own 1891 Sterfkennis hours later. The shared-name page gathered them as though they were two people. Merged. The build now warns on every shared name so a human checks each one reads as two lives and not one. → | process | |
| She died on 6 February 1902, at Driefontein in Groot Marico, and her own Death Notice 844 says so. It also gives her father as Jacob Dormehl, her mother as unknown, her age as 60 years 4 months, her estate as one wagon and her furniture, and THREE husbands where this archive had one — Jacob van Staden, Matthys Roos, then Booysen. → | scope | |
| Every clause of that was wrong. She is Anna Catharina Johanna OLIVIER, she died at BRAKFONTEIN — the family's own farm, where the archive's oldest document was written — and she is the first wife of Hendrik Stefanus Booijsen. The maiden name reads Oliefier and contains no b, r, t or s; her son gives OLIVIER on the 1908 notice. Two misreadings on one page kept a documented wife, seven children and a whole Olivier line off this site for a week. → | reading | |
| He had at least seven. His first wife's 1891 Sterfkennis lists them all, of age: Petrus Jacobus, Ocken Johannes, Anna Johanna Maria, Elesabettha Maria Cornelya, Alettha Catrina Johanna, Magdalena Johanna and Hendrick Stefanus Nicolaas. The 1908 notice names four because by 1908 only four were left. → | scope | |
| They were his first wife's. The Zeerust marriage register, entry 13, dates the second marriage to 14 April 1892 and gives the bride's age as fifty-one and her condition as widow. By 1908 all four children were adults, two of them married women. The archive put them under the marriage it could name rather than the marriage that could have produced them. → | reading | |
| She was his granddaughter. The 1915 death notice names eight children and she is not among them; her father is Hendrik Nicholaas Barry, whose other children were baptised at Dordrecht and Slang River between 1888 and 1900. Moved down a generation — which is where the cousin marriage of 1924 needs her to be, and the archive had her in the wrong place while asserting it. → | reading | |
| Two men on that list — John Augustus Barry II and George Augustus Barry — had no page at all, while a ninth name stood in their place. All three fixed together; the build now refuses to publish a household naming somebody who does not exist. → | process | |
| The chart put each man's wife in his mother's box. Kathleen Barry stood as Willem Hermanus Booyzen's mother when she was his wife; Johanna Catharina Mountjoy stood as Petrus Jacobus Booysen's mother when she was his; and the woman at the root had no mother drawn at all. Four slots, all shifted by one. Rebuilt, and the genuinely empty slot — the mother of the 1812 man — is now a wall. → | process | |
| Estate O/2899 belongs to his uncle, born 1818. The death date had no source but the file number: the archive read a year off a reference, wrote it in as a fact, and cited the fact back. → | circular | |
| 31 March 1930. 1943 is the year her husband finally filed — thirteen years late. The same mistake as O/2899, made in the same way, and found the same afternoon by opening the document instead of trusting the reference. → | circular | |
| Born in IRELAND. The 1903 registration of his death, made by the son who was present, enters him as “Irishman born in Ireland”. The 1915 notice this archive had been using was sworn by another son twelve years later and says “at sea, exact whereabouts unknown”. The archive had the weaker document and had not looked for a better one. → | scope | |
| 25 August 1903, as the family tree said all along. The 1915 notice gives the 3rd; the statutory registration, signed by a son present at the death, gives the 25th. For once the tree was right and the document this archive preferred was wrong. → | scope | |
| She is not on the 1915 death notice. This archive said she was “named on” it, having quoted four lines from the top of the page without reading the children's list at the bottom. The only Dorothea Regina in the registers is a granddaughter, baptised at Slang River in 1892. → | scope | |
| Also not on the notice. A Ruben Jacobus Hosea was baptised at Dordrecht in 1888 — a grandson. The Schoeman name Ruben does come into this family, one generation later than this archive said. → | scope |
Withdrawn — “he died in the Transvaal at about thirty” · Taken back
This archive gave estate TAB MHG O/2899 to Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus Booysen, born 4 December 1855, the seventh child on the 1863 death notice, and wrote a death date of 1885 into his life on that basis. The date had no source except the file number. The Transvaal probate index names the estate's deceased in full: Jan Gerardus Lodewicus Booijzen, aged 67, born district Graaff-Reinet, died 25 May 1885 at Vaalbank, district Lichtenburg — born about 1818, which is his UNCLE, fifth on the 1876 Sterfkennis. The nephew's death date is withdrawn and nothing is known about what became of him. The particular error is worth naming: the archive read a year off a reference number, wrote it in as a fact, and then cited the fact back.
Lichtenburg joins the line · Found
The same correction does the opposite favour. Vaalbank, in the district of Lichtenburg, is where the 1876 man's son died in 1885 — and this archive had already read a 1920 Sterfkennis from that farm for Magdalena Susanna Maria van den Berg, born Booyzen about 1860, father entered as Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus Booyzen, filed under “NOT PROVED”. She is his daughter. Two deaths on one farm thirty-five years apart, which is settlement rather than passage. Read west along the atlas: Rustenburg 1876, Lichtenburg 1885 and 1920, Marico 1903. Three neighbouring districts, and this archive spent months insisting the third of them was somebody else's family.
The last six Transvaal estates are blocked, not missing · Method
Six estates have sat on the Sources page as “Located” for weeks, on the assumption that they were simply not name-indexed and would yield to film browsing. They will not. The collection runs on 762 films; every film up to 007830062 serves its images and every film from 007830063 onward returns 403 — twenty-eight tested, twenty-eight refused — and those are precisely the films carrying 1946 and later. Five of the six are behind that line. The sixth, 52653 of 1923, is in the open half but is not name-indexed, and the films are not ordered by estate number: image 100 of three films in the same numeric neighbourhood gave a 1920 Sterfkennis, a 1938 death notice, and a Chinese clan genealogy. There is nothing to interpolate along. The queue moves off the screen and onto a letter to Pretoria. One trap recorded on the way: q.filmNumber works as a search term alone and is silently ignored the moment a surname is added, returning a whole-collection result that looks like a film result.
A third letter, to Pretoria · Method
Sent to enquiries2@dsac.gov.za, the research address on the National Archives Repository's own contact page, copied to the Head of Client Services. Six estate files — MHG 1095/48, 3734/46, 769/52, 5155/51, 10/57 and 52653 — with the death notice asked for ahead of the will and the account in each, because six death notices are worth more to this archive than one complete file. Their own page states that records older than twenty years carry a public right of access free of charge. Whether it was DELIVERED is a separate question from whether it was sent, and this archive will not use the second word until it has checked for the first.
A dead child's name, given again — watched happening · Found
Worked out of the register rather than off a new document. Hercules Johannes Mountjoy and Maria Sophia van Niekerk baptised a daughter at Dordrecht on 6 September 1896 and called her CAROLINA ISABELLA MARGARETHA ALETTA, her grandmother's four names entire. She died at Wodehouse on 25 October 1897, aged fourteen months. On 8 November 1901 they had another daughter and gave her the whole name again; she married Hendrik Stefanus Palm, and a granddaughter born in 1920 carries it still. Replacement naming is well attested in these congregations and is exactly how a records-matcher invents one person out of two. The dates here make it unmistakable, and this archive keeps the two apart. Five of the eight children of that marriage are named for a parent or a grandparent — the same habit as the Barry names crossing into the Daschners, seen from the other direction and in another family.
Johanna Catharina Booysen gets her dates · Found
Second on the 1863 death notice and until now nothing but a position in a list. The Dutch Reformed index gives her born 15 May 1844 and baptised at BRAK RIVIER on 4 August 1844 — the farm her father was still on nineteen years later when her mother died there. A small thing, and the kind the register was built to hand over.
Withdrawn — Isabella Frederika Coetsee died in 1943 · Taken back
She died on 31 MARCH 1930, at Church Street, Middelburg. 1943 is when her husband finally filed. This archive had taken the year off the estate reference and written it in as a death date — the same error it corrected on O/2899 three days ago, sitting undetected in the next record along. Two instances in one week of one habit: trusting a file number to tell you when somebody died. The notice also names her parents, three children, and a son this archive had been carrying as living who was already dead.
The oldest Booyzen death notice in the Cape — and why it is dangerous · Found
Death notice 6167, filed Cape Town 21 June 1843, under Section 9 of Ordinance 104 — a generation older in form than anything else here. JOHANNA BOOYZEN, born in the Colony about 20 March 1754, died 16 June 1843 at 28 Roze Street, widow of Charles du Plessis, one daughter married to Benjamin Solomon, and “no property whatever except a Bond amounting per balance to £15”. Line 3 reads “both dead” — the seventh failure of that question in this archive and the earliest. She is NOT this family. She is recorded because the only two dates this archive holds for Magdelena Elisabeth de Beer are born 1754 and died 1843, both off the family tree with no source, and here is a Booyzen woman who matches both to the year and is demonstrably somebody else. That is exactly the material a bad merge is made of, and it is better to have met it deliberately than to meet it by accident.
The post, checked · Method
Three enquiries out, none answered. Western Cape Archives (sent 9 Sep, four days): silence. SANDF Documentation Centre (9 Sep): one of the two addresses bounced within seconds — 550 5.7.1, relay access denied — and the other has said nothing in four days. National Archives, Pretoria (12 Sep): no bounce, too early for anything else. Recorded with the date because silence and inaction are indistinguishable on a page that does not say which it is, and this archive has already had to correct itself once for calling a half-delivered letter sent.
The Cape compensation series, named — and then shown to be unsearchable by name · Method
Open question 11 has asked for “Cape Colony compensation claims” for weeks without knowing what they were called. They are the WAR LOSSES COMPENSATION COMMISSION, 1902 — KAB, source NA, volume 564, reference A1068. The Cape depot holds 454 documents mentioning compensation and war, and 679 mentioning losses. BOOYZEN appears in none of them. That would ordinarily be worth something, and here it is worth very little: SMIT, SCHOEMAN and BARRY also return nothing, and the two BOTHA hits are a 1935 locust and arsenical-poisoning stock claim from a magistrate's series. The Commission is catalogued by sub-commissioner and volume, not by claimant. A name search cannot reach these files, so a name search failing to reach them proves nothing. The question stays open and the way in is the Reading Room. Two working notes recorded with it: the NAAIRS asterisk wildcard returns ZERO rather than expanding — BOOY* gives 0 in a depot where BOOYZEN gives 39 — and the bare hostname national.archsrch.gov.za no longer resolves at all, though www.national.archsrch.gov.za does.
Not one Barry of this family is in the Master's index — and the reason is a habit · Found
Film 007844477 is the Cape Master's own INDEX OF ESTATES 1834–1912: every estate reported in the Colony for seventy-eight years, alphabetically, with the death-notice number beside each name. Barry runs across pages 232 to 234 and this family is on none of them. No Richard Peter — which was the point of going, since a Richard Peter Barry of Jerpoint is on the Cape Rebel roll and the estate would have identified him. No Frederick Fortunatus, no Dorothea Regina, no Hendrik Nicholaas, no Kathleen Mary. AND NO JOHN AUGUSTUS, who died in August 1903 in the middle of the index's range, and no Margaretha, who died in 1912 as it closed. Then the reason arrives and it is not an absence: this archive has read both their death notices and both are dated 29 MARCH 1915, sworn by their sons. The index stops in 1912. John Augustus Barry died and nobody reported his estate for TWELVE YEARS. It is the third instance of the same habit here — Isabella Coetzee died in 1930 and was reported in 1943, Maria Kumm died in 1934 and was reported in 1938 with “death not reported” typed on the form. Three families, three decades, and twice a husband's and a wife's estate filed on the same day by a son. Any search that assumes an estate was reported in the year of the death will miss all of them, and two of this archive's own corrections are exactly that mistake.
A Mountjoy at Indwe, and a Barry who carries two families in one name · Found
Items 5, 10 and 11 of the standing list. The Indwe lidmaten register, page 336: JOHANNA CATHARINA MOUNTJOY joined the congregation on 23 JULY 1907, arriving FROM BARKLY OOST — six weeks after Willem Hermanus Booijzen was confirmed in the same church — and the last column records her dead at Indwe in June 1911. A Mountjoy and a Booyzen in one small colliery congregation, twenty-two years after the two families stood at the same font at Barkly Oost. Ranking a whole-surname search by place then produced the Barkly East Barrys: James Henry, who swore his father's 1915 notice, dated at last (c.1847 – 23 June 1939); Harriet Louisa of MANOROWEN, dead at eighteen in 1912; Cornelia Herculena Petronella of CHERRYVILLE, a third named Barry farm after Manorowen and Jerpoint; and RICHARD PIETER KOLBE BARRY, born 1899, who carries the forename of the man on the Cape Rebel roll and the surname of the 1820 Settler family in one name. It does not prove the identification. It does show that whoever named that child was standing inside the family this archive is describing. And a second reason why no Barry is in the Cape Master's index: John Barry's 1915 estate was administered at GRAHAMSTOWN, not Cape Town.
Willem Hermanus Booyzen of Indwe stops in 1910 · Method
Item 5 was to read the Indwe registers forward from 1910 for the miner. The Dutch Reformed index holds nothing further: no third baptism, no marriage after 1908, no death. He is confirmed at 21 in 1907, married at 22 in 1908, has two children by two Roodt women in 1908 and 1909, and after his daughter's baptism on 22 September 1910 he is twenty-four years old and gone from the record this archive can reach. Recorded as a scoped negative rather than left as an open thread: the index has been asked and has nothing.
“Irishman born in Ireland” — open question 5, answered · Found
Entry 74, district Barkly East, 28 October 1903: the statutory registration of John Barry's death, made by his son RICHARD BARRY, “son present at death”, of Manor Owen. Question 5, Race: “IRISHMAN BORN IN IRELAND”. Also: aged eighty-four years two months, so born about June 1819; a CARPENTER, which is the first trade this archive has for him; resident and dead at MANOR OWEN Ward IV, which turns out to have been his own house and not merely his son's; dead on 25 AUGUST 1903; and the footnote that asks for the number of his children answers ELEVEN, where this archive has named nine. The 1915 death notice this archive had been arguing from — “at sea, exact whereabouts unknown, British” — was sworn by a different son twelve years after the fact. Where the two disagree the archive now follows 1903, and that includes the date of death, where the family tree turns out to have been right and the document the archive preferred wrong.
Irishman, then Dutch, on the same form nine years apart · Found
Harriet Louisa Barry died of typhoid at Cherryville on 7 September 1912, aged eighteen years five months and three days, and was buried at Manorowen. Her father Hendrik Nicholaas Barry signed the registration — “Father present when died” — and question 5 enters her as “DUTCH, BORN IN THE DISTRICT OF BARKLY EAST”. Nine years earlier the same printed question, at the same farm, called her grandfather an Irishman born in Ireland. The family testimony says exactly this in its least-examined line — “as his son and grandson were married to Dutch girls their activity during the Boer War would be interesting” — and here it is on a government form, taking two generations and nine years.
A mother nobody had, and a marriage at Zeerust · Found
Transvaal estate 14380. HENDRIK STEPHANUS BOOYSEN, who signed his father's Sterfkennis at Brakfontein in September 1876, died on 11 May 1908 at Koedoesfontein in the district of Rustenburg, in the house of his son-in-law, aged seventy-nine years eleven months. His own notice names his mother: ELIZABETHA BOOYSEN, BORN VAN DER MERWE. That resolves the oldest “Serious” contradiction on the disputed page — Anna Maria van der Merwe died before March 1825 and this son was born about June 1828 — and it was never a contradiction, only a missing row: two van der Merwe wives, one after the other. It also repairs the warning printed on the 1876 household, which had to draw eight children under one marriage because no other was recorded. AND THE PLACE OF HIS LAST MARRIAGE IS ZEERUST — the principal town of the district of MARICO. This archive spent weeks saying of the Marico Booyzens that they are not this family, and has spent three days walking it back through Rustenburg and Lichtenburg. Here is a son of the 1876 man married in the third district. It still links nobody to the seven compensation claims, and the atlas still says unresolved. The withdrawn sentence was wronger than it knew.
The marriages, the errands, and a register that refused eight surnames · Method
The last three items of the standing list. THE MARRIAGES: eighteen, in order, with the place in the column that matters — three at Graaff-Reinet and Cradock before 1850, fifty years in the north-eastern Cape, then Vereeniging and Johannesburg once and finally. Two are hinges: Cradock 1838 joins Booysen to Mountjoy, Mayfair 1949 is where this archive stops. ERRANDS: four doors, twenty things that could be settled behind them, every reference written out — Pretoria for six blocked estates, Roeland Street for two Mountjoy wills and the War Losses Commission registers that no name search can reach, Grahamstown for a depot discovered today and never searched, and Barkly East for four farms and three churches that exist here only as film. THE REGISTER: refreshed, and it grew by the reconstructed people rather than by harvest. Eight in-law surnames were pulled and all eight rejected — Keys 1,199, Grobelaar 726, Dormehl 1,841, Palm 3,818, Siebert 3,613, Buitendag 7,686, Roodt 12,916 and OLIVIER 81,327. Four hundred of eighty-one thousand chosen by a search engine's idea of relevance is not a sample of anything, and the page says so beside the counts.
The 1915 notice, read past the fourth line · Taken back
This archive has shown the top of John Barry's 1915 death notice for weeks and quoted four lines from it — the birthplace, the mother's maiden name, the signature. The children's list is further down the page and had never been read. It names EIGHT: John Augustus, James Henry, GEORGE AUGUSTUS (new), Henry Nicholas, Frederick Fortunatus, Richard Peter, Margaret Mary Bedford and KATHLEEN MARY BOYSON, born Barry, married in community of property to William Boyson — the only Booyzen marriage on the list, spelled Boyson by an English clerk. DOROTHEA REGINA AND RUBEN JACOBUS JOSUAH ARE NOT ON IT, and this archive had both as children “named on the 1915 death notice”. They are grandchildren: a Dorothea Regina baptised at Slang River in 1892 and a Ruben Jacobus Hosea at Dordrecht in 1888, both to Henry Nicholas Barry and Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman. The page also gives Margaretha Kolbe's death as 2 AUGUST 1912, where this archive had only the year. And it says the marriage took place at “Burghersdorp (probably)” — a son of the house, writing in English with a solicitor's help, who did not know where his parents married and put it in brackets.
Eight is not eleven · Found
The 1903 registration answers the printed question “the total number of children deceased has had” with ELEVEN. The 1915 death notice names EIGHT. Three children of John Barry and Margaretha Kolbe died before 1915 and this archive cannot name one of them. It is the first hard count of that generation it has ever had, and it is three short.
The ancestor chart had every wife one generation too high · Taken back
The tree page has been drawing each man's WIFE in his MOTHER's box since it was built — four slots, all shifted by one, and the woman at the root of the whole chart had no mother drawn at all. Rebuilt. The slot that is genuinely empty, the mother of the 1812 man, is now a fifth wall marked Disputed: a family tree supplies Anna Maria van der Merwe and no document does.
A drift checker, and the three things it found in its first run · Method
tools/drift.py now runs in build.sh beside tools/links.py and fails the build when a narrative page contradicts the data. Its first real run found the pedigree missing two documented wives, the direct line showing one wife where kin.js has two, and two men named in a household who had no page at all. A family history that only shows its conclusions is asking to be believed on trust; a build that will not publish a contradiction is cheaper than another month of reading by eye.
1892 — the Zeerust marriage, and four children move mother · Found
The 1908 death notice said the last marriage was at Zeerust and nothing more. The register gives entry 13 on 14 April 1892: Hendrik Stefanus Booijzen, 63, weduwnaar of Brakfontein in Rustenburg, and Charlotta Elizabeth Roos born Dormehl, 51, weduwe of Driefontein in Marico, BOTH BORN AT GRAAFF-REINET. Three things follow. His birthplace is now a town and not a colony, and it is the same town as three other men of this line. He was still at Brakfontein sixteen years after he signed his father's Sterfkennis there. And his four children cannot be hers: she was fifty-one at the wedding and they were adults by 1908, so they belong to the first wife, Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier. The clerk writes him Booijzen; he signs himself Booysen.
Brakfontein, 1891 — a wife, a son, and two of this archive's own misreadings · Found
A week ago this site found a woman it called ANNA JOHANNA BOOIJZEN, BORN ALBERTS, who died in 1891 at BOEKFONTEIN in the district of Rustenburg, and filed her under NOT PROVED TO BE KIN. Read at full resolution the farm is BRAKFONTEIN — the farm where the oldest document on this site was written in 1876 and where Hendrik Stefanus still lived in 1892 — and the maiden name is OLIEFIER, which has no b, no r, no t and no s in it. Her son gives OLIVIER on the 1908 notice. She is Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier, the first wife, and her death notice lists SEVEN children where the 1908 notice named four. Two of them were new. So was her son Hendrick Stefanus Nicolaas, twenty-nine, unmarried, dead on the same farm five days after her. So were her parents, Ocken Johannes Oliefier and Anna Johanna Botha — which is at last where OCKERT JOHANNES came into this family. Every one of those facts was on a page this archive had already found.
The Rustenburg register confirms Olivier from a third direction · Found
An hour after reading OLIEFIER off a death notice and arguing it was Olivier, the Netherdutch Reformed Church register of Rustenburg said so outright. A baptism of 25 December 1862 gives a boy born 31 JANUARY 1862 to Hendrik Stephanus Booijsen and ANNA JOHANNA OLIVIER — and 31 January 1862 is a date this archive did not have but had CALCULATED, from 29 jaar 3 maanden en 14 dagen on a torn 1891 notice. They agree to the day. The same register admits two brothers to membership on one Sunday in April 1869, Petrus Jacobus born 20 April 1851 and Ockert Johannes Stephanus born 15 September 1852, and baptises a nephew in 1882 named for the uncle who would die at Brakfontein. Ockert himself died at Klerksdorp on 16 January 1921, aged sixty-nine. Every one of these entries is INDEX ONLY — FamilySearch has no image for any of them — and they are published on their own page for that reason.
The second Willem Hermanus, followed to the end · Found
He was a name with a beginning and no end: a lidmaat at Indwe in 1907, a MIJNWERKER on two baptisms, a marriage known only from an index, and nothing after 1910. The Indwe register page has now been read — entry 13, 21 September 1908, he twenty-two and a mijnwerker, she SIXTEEN and marrying with her parents' consent, both of Dugmore Mijn, and their son already four months old and not baptised until December. And the end of him: a WILLIAM HERMAN BOOYZEN, 47, born Cape Province, married, EX MINER UNDERGROUND, of 62 Langford Street in BOOYSENS, dead at Johannesburg Hospital on 29 July 1932 of a perforated duodenal ulcer after about one day, buried at BRIXTON on the 31st. His father died of a stomach ulcer at Indwe in 1905. FamilySearch indexes the age as 44; the form says 47 and the burial register agrees with the form. Read the image, not the index — the third time today.
Grave 9760 · Found
A direct-line ancestor has had two bare years on this site since it was built: Catherine Maria Sophia “Kathleen” Barry, 1859–1940. The City of Johannesburg burial register gives the rest — buried 6 SEPTEMBER 1940 at the New Cemetery (Brixton), aged 82, section D.R., GRAVE 9760. It is the first grave number this archive has for anybody, and it is one a family could walk to.
Charlotta's own notice, and the same answer from the other side · Found
This morning the 1892 Zeerust register made it impossible for Hendrik Stefanus Booysen's four children to be his second wife's: she was FIFTY-ONE at the wedding. Her own death notice now says it outright. DEATH NOTICE 844, filed September 1902: Charlotta Elizabetta Booysen, born Dormehl, dead at Driefontein in Groot Marico on 6 February 1902, aged 60 years 4 months — THREE husbands, Jacob van Staden then Matthys Roos then Booysen, and SIX children, two van Stadens and four Rooses, and NOT ONE BOOYSEN. Her father was Jacob Dormehl; her mother is entered UNKNOWN, by a husband of ten years, which makes seven death notices in this archive that fail to name a parent. She had one wagon and her furniture, worth £51 8s 0d, and she left a will.
Looking for Ockert's estate and finding his son's · Found
Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen died at Klerksdorp on 16 January 1921 and HAS NO ESTATE FILE OF HIS OWN in the indexed Transvaal probate records. Searched under Ockert, Okkert, Ocker and Ocken against Booysen, Booyzen and Booijsen: six hits, every one of them him as somebody else's relative — four duplicate copies of a 1935 Sterfkennis where he is the father, and two of his own father's 1908 notice where he is entered Child. But the 1935 one is worth the search. STERFKENNIS 87882, the first Afrikaans document in this archive: DIEDERIK ARNOLDUS BOOYSEN, KARWEIER of Zwartruggens, dead at Voorbedacht No. 401 in the district of Rustenburg on 1 March 1935 — and line 3 names both parents, OCKERT JOHANNES STEPHANUS BOOYSEN and ELIZABETH JOHANNA SOPHIA gebore MYBURGH. That couple came into this archive this morning off a Rustenburg baptism index with NO IMAGE, published with a warning saying so. Here they are on a page that can be read. And their grandson, born 23 October 1927, is the fourth generation to carry a name that came in from the district of Cradock with one marriage.
Grave 6889 closes the second Willem Hermanus · Found
The 1932 identification was built on circumstance — ex miner underground, born Cape Province, married, forty-seven, Brixton. The Johannesburg grave register settles it. GRAVE 6889 holds “Boysen, William”, folio 49, and beneath him SUSANNA ADRIANA BOOYZEN, buried 29 AUGUST 1968. Susanna Adriana Roodt is the sixteen-year-old he married at Indwe on 21 September 1908. Husband and wife in one grave, thirty-six years apart. And the clerk spells him BOYSEN — the same spelling an English clerk used for a different man of this family on John Barry's 1915 death notice.
The Olivier line, and a marriage that moves the whole family twenty-six years · Found
Yesterday Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier did not exist on this site. This morning she was recovered from a death notice the archive had misread twice. This afternoon there are two more documents. HER BAPTISM: Cradock, 4 October 1824, born 10 September, father OCKERT JOHANNES STEPHANUS OLIVIER — all three names, exactly what her son was called — and mother ANNA CATHARINA BOTHA; with a sister Aletta Catharina baptised in the same church eleven months before, which is where her own daughter's name comes from. AND HER MARRIAGE: Potchefstroom, 3 July 1850, entry 206, Hendrik Stephanus Booijzen 23 and Anna Johanna Olivier 25 — her maiden name written plainly by a clerk who could write, forty-one years before the scrawl this archive read as Alberts. The marriage is the thing. This site began by saying the family went north by railway in the twentieth century; the 1876 Sterfkennis moved that to Rustenburg in 1876; this moves it to POTCHEFSTROOM IN 1850, two years before the Sand River Convention. A Booijzen was standing in a Transvaal church before there was a Transvaal.
Ten index entries, one death notice, and the direct line's own brother · Found
A run of ten entries under BOOIJZEN in the Transvaal probate index carried no dates, no places and nothing to identify them. They are all one document: DEATH NOTICE 4795, for ELIZABETHA MARGARETHA BOOIJZEN BORN MARAIS, who died on 1 JUNE 1900 in a zinc building in MARKET STREET, PRETORIA — four days before Lord Roberts entered the town — and whose husband did not file it until March 1904. Her husband is DAVID SCHALK BOOIJZEN, born 9 June 1848: fourth on the 1863 death notice of Johanna Catharina Mountjoy, where Willem Hermanus of the direct line is sixth. HIS BROTHER. They married at LADY GREY near Aliwal North, the same small Cape church where Willem Hermanus married Kathleen Barry in 1879. Eight children, one squeezed in between the lines with DIED MINOR against her. Nothing movable, and a COMPENSATION CLAIM FILED — which takes back a negative this archive published about the War Losses Compensation Commission. And it unsettles an inference: the notice names a STEPHANUS FRANCOIS BOOIJZEN as their son, and this site has a Stephanus Francois Booyzen of 1874 placed under a different father on his birth date alone.
The burial registers, swept — and Black October · Found
Grave 9760 took twenty minutes, so the whole Johannesburg cemetery collection was read: 298 entries under six surnames. Ten are this family, and each turns a year the archive was carrying into a day. HENRY JAMES BOOYZEN had been a name on estate MHG 10/57 with no birth and no death; he died 8 December 1956 aged 69. Joseph Heinrich Daschner was buried at West Park on 21 April 1942. Hendrik Stephanus Nicolaas Booyen, found this morning as a Rustenburg baptism and a Kempton Park death, was buried at Johannesburg on 12 October 1959. And two infants at Brixton the archive did not have at all. THEN OCTOBER 1918. RICHARD PETER BOOYZEN, twenty-four, buried at Brixton on the 27th — the centre of Black October. This archive has no Richard Peter Booyzen and it should: Richard Peter Barry is Kathleen's own brother, and a boy born about 1894 falls exactly in the gap between her daughter of 1891 and her son of 1901. Added as a ninth child, marked INFERRED, because a burial register names no parents. Two more Booysens went into the same ground within eight weeks and neither can be shown to be kin.
Estate 1291, and a ninth Barry child · Found
This archive looked for Margaretha Kolbe's estate on the films either side of 925, her husband's, and did not find it. It is 1291, and it is indexed under CAPE, KIMBERLEY, PROBATE RECORDS OF THE SUPREME COURT while the probate itself was granted at GRAHAMSTOWN. A collection label and a place that disagree is exactly how a record hides. DEATH NOTICE 1291: Margaret Louisa Elizabeth Barry born Kolbe, 84, AFRIKANDER OF EUROPEAN EXTRACTION, dead on 2 August 1912 in the house of her son R. P. Barry at Manorowen, leaving no movable property, no immovable property, estate Nil and no will. And question ten names NINE CHILDREN where her husband's notice names eight. The ninth is WILLIAM, who is on nothing else in this archive. “Eight is not eleven” becomes “nine is not eleven”. Two other things: her son puts his father's death in AUGUST 1904 when the registration says 25 August 1903, and where his parents were married he writes UNKNOWN — three months before writing “Burghersdorp (probably)” on his father's. Two documents by one man in one year, and he cannot place his own parents' wedding on either.
Eight Mountjoy children, the Keys question closed, and four honest noes · Found
George Mountjoy and Maria Sophia Botha married at Cradock in 1848 and had THIRTEEN children; this archive could name ONE. The baptism registers name eight, and the places track the family across the border — Graaff-Reinet 1858, Burgersdorp 1860, Smithfield in the Orange Free State 1862 and 1864. One of the eight answers an open question: JOHANNA CATHARINA MOUNTJOY, baptised at Burgersdorp on 29 FEBRUARY 1860, a leap day, is the woman who married William Henry Keys and put Mountjoy forenames into a third surname. A Petronella Christina Aletta baptised at Swellendam in 1871 carries both parents' names and is NOT adopted: Swellendam is six hundred miles west of anywhere else this family stood. And four questions answered NO: Elizabetha van der Merwe's marriage is not in any index, so the eight children of 1876 stay under their warning; the five remaining 1876 children have no document of their own; Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen has no estate file; and the three untraced daughters of 1891 stay untraced — this archive will NOT decide that the Anna Catharina Grobelaar of 1908 is the Anna Johanna Maria of 1891, because the forenames do not agree and guessing that they do is the exact mistake it spent today undoing.
Marico: the initials still fail, and the reason for dismissing them is gone · Taken back
In September this archive set aside seven TAB CJC compensation claims from MARICO with the sentence “that is NOT this family, who were Cape”, and could not test the initials because it could not name a single grandson. It can name them now, and the test STILL FAILS — of JPJ, PJ, GL, JPJ, L, JC and HE only PJ fits, and Petrus Jacobus is the commonest name this family has. But the sentence is false twice over. HENDRIK STEFANUS BOOIJZEN MARRIED AT ZEERUST, the principal town of Marico, on 14 April 1892; and his wife died at DRIEFONTEIN, GROOT MARICO on 6 February 1902, during the war, in the district the claims come from. The claims are still not tied to a named man. What has gone is the excuse for not looking.
A page that says what moved · Method
This archive is rewritten most days and a reader who saw it last week had no way of knowing what changed. /changed/ is that record: every finding and every withdrawal, grouped by the day it happened, newest first. It is BUILT FROM log.json AND corrections.json at build time and contains no hand-written text, so it cannot go stale the way a “latest news” box always does. If a finding is not on it, it is not in the log.
The post, chased — and the SANDF address is not the problem · Method
Three letters out, no replies and no new bounces. PRETORIA (sent today, six Transvaal estate files): delivered, no bounce, too early for anything else. WESTERN CAPE ARCHIVES (two letters, 9 September — the Mountjoy wills and the Lerena death notice): delivered, four days, silent. SANDF (9 September): the mweb address bounced with “Relay access denied” and archive@dod.mil.za delivered. RE-CHECKED TODAY: the Stellenbosch library guide, updated 1 SEPTEMBER 2026, no longer lists the mweb address at all — it gives archive@dod.mil.za and nothing else. So there is no better address to switch to; the one that bounced is a dead address that third-party sites keep republishing. The same guide shows the Centre HAS MOVED, from the Schweikert Building at 20 Visagie Street to 42 SATURNUS ROAD, IRENE — the National Archives directory still has the old one. And it names two officers for PAIA requests, which carries a statutory duty to answer. If archive@dod.mil.za is still silent on 7 October, that is the next step, and not another general enquiry.
10 Sep 2026
Taken back — 7 published claims withdrawn on this day.
| What this archive said | What replaced it | Cause |
|---|---|---|
| It was sent, and one of the two addresses bounced at the server. Sent and delivered are not the same word and this archive used the wrong one. → | process | |
| It proves nothing. Seven Attorney-General files spell one Middelburg constable both ways, twice inside 1905. Only the son's signature still carries weight. → | reading | |
| They hold 184. Every search in the project had been run against the Cape depot alone, one repository out of nine, for weeks. → | scope | |
| 14 October. Her father wrote it on her mother's death notice three months before he was widowed. → | tree | |
| The very next document opened named both parents too. The claim was a count of documents read, dressed as a count of documents that exist. → | population | |
| The direct ancestor died in district Rustenburg in 1876, twenty-five years before the war. The reason for holding the two clusters apart has gone; the atlas now says unresolved. → | population | |
| There is one. A son was a MIJNWERKER of Dugmore Mijn at Indwe in 1908. The negative was built out of six occupations the archive happened to have read, and it had not read his because it did not know the man existed. → | population |
CORRECTED — the SANDF request was only half delivered · Taken back
Reported here as sent. It was sent, and one of the two addresses bounced: sandfdoc@mweb.co.za refused it at the server, 550 relay access denied. That is the address published almost everywhere for the Documentation Centre. The enquiry did reach archive@dod.mil.za, which has not replied. “Sent” and “delivered” are not the same word and this archive used the wrong one.
Three documents identified that may break the oldest wall · Found
James Mountjoy's wills of 1818 and 1827, joint with Anna Catharina Slier, and an 1834 Colonial Office memorial from his widow. None digitised. A request went to the Western Cape Archives on 10 September 2026 — and unlike the last letter, delivery was checked.
NARROWED — the 1905 sheet proves less than this archive said · Taken back
Seven Attorney-General files about one police constable at Middelburg, 1904–07, spell him BOOYSEN four times and BOOYZEN three — twice both ways inside 1905. So the clerk's Booysen on the 1905 death form is not an older spelling being displaced; it is what a Cape clerk might write on any day. What survives is the half that was always stronger: the son SIGNED, and chose the z.
CORRECTED — the whole project searched one province out of nine · Taken back
Every NAAIRS search in this archive was run against the Cape depot. This family left the Cape about 1907 and the entire last generation died in Johannesburg, so their estates are in the Transvaal — and NAAIRS offers an “All Archives Repositories” database on the same selection page I used every time. BOOYZEN returns 39 in the Cape and 184 across all repositories. One hundred and forty-five documents unseen, including the estate files of nearly everyone in the last three generations.
The Johannesburg generation's estates, found · Found
Anna Pretorius (1944), George Downing Mountjoy Booyzen (1947), John Barry Booyzen (1952), Henry James Booyzen (1956) — and Catharina Maria Sophia, the daughter baptised at Barkly Oost in 1891, who married a Daschner and died in 1946. Also two of the eight children on the 1863 death notice, and both sons of the second marriage.
The 1820 voyage confirmed — and a second lie found under it · Found
Every date the tree carried for the Nautilus is right. The settler roll adds an occupation nobody had — CHEMIST — and two ages: “KOLBE, George Augustus 20. w Margaret 19.” They were sixteen and sixteen. With the 1819 marriage allegation, where both swore twenty-one at sixteen and fifteen, that is two age overstatements in one year on two official documents.
Two claims answered by absence · Found
No estate file for Willem Hermanus Booyzen in any repository in South Africa — he died at Indwe in 1905 leaving nothing to administer, as his father had in 1884. And nothing supports the mines: no Booyzen mining record anywhere in the index, and every occupation actually read for these men points elsewhere — mason, tree nurseryman, railway clerk.
A fourth death notice fails at the same line · Found
Stephanus Francois Booyzen's 1940 Sterfkennis was fetched for one reason — he was a son of the second marriage, so his mother should be on line 3. His widow wrote “oorlede” for both parents. Four death notices in this family now ask who the parents were, and four fail. He was a MESSELAAR, a mason, like his half-brother Willem Hermanus at Indwe.
The second wife, named — Johanna Margaritha Pretorius · Found
The oldest open question in the archive, answered by a christening rather than a death. Every attempt had gone at death notices, which either do not ask for a wife's name or got “oorlede” for an answer. A baptism names both parents: Gert Jacobus, born 19 January 1870 — the exact date on the 1884 death notice — baptised 19 June 1870, “Oud: Petrus Jacobus Booyzen en Johanna Margaritha Pretorius.” Read from the register image, not the index. And two children of the first marriage stood godparent to the first child of the second.
The one death notice where line 3 works · Found
TAB MHG 2945/44, read at full resolution off the film. Anna Johanna Maria Booyzen, born Pretorius, died Forest Hill 26 February 1944, aged 37. The parents line — blank or evasive on all four earlier notices in this archive — is filled in completely: Petrus Jacobus Pretorius and Margareth Wilhelmina Elizabeth Pretorius, both at 96 James Street, Germiston. The form did not change. The person filling it in did. Her husband signed it, and her parents were alive and reachable.
Withdrawn — Maggie born 1 October 1926 · Taken back
This archive carried Margaretha Wilhelmina Elizabeth “Maggie” Booyzen’s birth as 1 October 1926, taken from the family tree. Her mother’s 1944 death notice, written and signed by her father three months before he lost her, gives 14 October 1926. Every other child’s date on that list matches what the archive already held, which is what makes the one mismatch worth taking seriously. Corrected to 14 October.
A marriage place, and eleven cousins · Found
TAB MHG 1928/42 — Joseph Heinrich Daschner's death notice, opened only to put a document behind a marriage the family tree asserted. It gave the marriage (“CATHERINE MARY SOPHIA DASCHNER (born Booyzen)”), the place (“Indwe, Cape Colony” — the same village where her father died in 1905), his birthplace and parents, and eleven children by name. Five of the eleven carry Booyzen and Barry forenames: Catherine Mary Sophia, Margaret Wilhelmina Elizabeth, William Herman, Richard Peter, Henry James. The surname leaves in one generation; the names do not.
Withdrawn — “the one time the form worked” · Taken back
Published this morning, about the 1944 Sterfkennis: the one death notice in this archive whose question three names both parents. The very next document opened, the 1942 Daschner notice, names both parents too. The claim was a count, and the count was of documents read rather than documents that exist — the oldest mistake in this project. What replaced it is better: question three fails when the informant is remembering the nineteenth-century Cape interior, and works when a twentieth-century spouse is writing down in-laws they had actually met. 1840, 1884, 1915 and 1940 fail; 1942 and 1944 work.
The oldest document in this archive — and the two names above the line · Found
Sterfkennis No. 678, written at the farm Brakfontein, district Rustenburg, on 14 September 1876. Petrus Jacobus Booijsen, born Graaffreinet, aged 88, landbouwer, widower, died 1 September 1876. Line 3: “Gerthardus Lödewikus Booijsen — Magdalena de Beer.” Generation seven has stood at the head of the direct line since this archive began with the flattest entry on the site — no dates, no parents, no document. He has a document now. It does not name his own parents, so the oldest open question stays open; it moves him and his wife out of the family tree and into the record, and it retires a 1793 Cape will that had made the Booysen–de Beer pairing look unsafe. The notice also lists eight children, seven of them previously unknown here, and reports the whole estate as “Niets nagelaten. Niets bekend.”
Withdrawn — “they are not this family” · Taken back
The atlas said of the Marico Booyzens: “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 false and the first was resting on it. The direct ancestor died in district Rustenburg in 1876 — twenty-five years before the war, a generation before the railway. Rustenburg is not Marico and no document links this family to any of the seven compensation claims; but the reason for holding the two clusters apart has gone. The map now says unresolved. This is the fifteenth thing this archive has had to take back, and the pattern is consistent: every one of them was a confident negative built on an assumption nobody had tested.
A whole estate, from the death to the last shilling · Found
KAB MOOC 6/9/5047, estates 58379 and 58380 — on the Sources page as “Located, not yet read” for months. Read now, and not only the death notices: the liquidation account and the distribution account too, which is the first time this archive has seen a life in this family added up. James John Mountjoy, retired builder of Barkly East, died 22 December 1937 aged 83 years 6 months, leaving £664 11s 8d in the Post Office Savings Bank, a house on Lot 380 let at £2 10s a month, and £400 out on note at six per cent. Ten children and two grandchildren took £21. 4. 5. each. His wife’s death, three and a half years earlier, is recorded on his form in four words: “death not reported.” Her age gives the only birth date this archive has for her. And the file contradicts itself — his death notice answers question 14 “Joint Will with predeceased wife”, and the executors’ account four months later opens “The deceased died intestate.” Recorded, not resolved.
The false positive, opened · Found
Hercules Johannes Mountjoy has no estate file — a negative this archive has stated for months on the strength of a name search. Reading the entire indexed MOUNTJOY surname in the Cape probate collection at once, 61 personas, produced exactly one hit for him, and it is his mother-in-law’s 1902 death notice from Dordrecht: his name appears on it because he is written into her list of eleven children. The negative holds, and now it is understood rather than merely asserted. It also documents the van Niekerks: Maria Sophia van Niekerk’s parents, her ten siblings, and a mother born in the district of Cradock.
The register — 7,397 entries, and most of them are not this family · Method
Built to match the sibling archives, which have carried one for a while: every named individual this archive has found, one row for every source that names them. Fourteen spellings pulled whole out of FamilySearch's South African collections — BOOYZEN complete at 1,350, MOUNTJOY at 575, PIETERZEN at 236, DASCHNER at 46. Two were deliberately left alone: BOOYSEN returns 40,592 people in this country and BARRY 7,198, and a name that common fills a page without telling anyone anything. Three of the counts are findings in their own right. BOOYZEN 1,350 against BOOYSEN 40,592 is the scale behind everything this archive says about the name. And SCHLEHER — the family tree's spelling of Anna Catharina's surname — returns NOTHING AT ALL, against 851 for Slier and 7 for Sleer.
Every person page now draws its family, and says whose word it is on · Method
Brought into line with the sibling archives. 110 of the 119 person pages now open with a lineage chart — parents, the person and their spouses, the children of each marriage, and the siblings — and every box is colour-coded by how it is known: the direct line, a record this archive has read, an inference from a record, or the family tree unverified. Each chart ends with a count: “15 of the 18 relationships shown are written in a record this archive has read. 3 come from the family tree and are unverified.” The nine pages with no chart say so in words, because a witness at a font with no recorded kin is a statement about the sources rather than about the person. Twenty-eight households, sourced one at a time in site/src/data/kin.js. Drawn in plain boxes and rules, deliberately not in SVG — this archive once injected auto-links into an SVG tree and silently erased half the names in it.
MIJNWERKER — an eighth child, and the last line of the testimony · Found
Four documents from the Dutch Reformed congregation at Indwe, found by typing “Indwe” into the register that was built yesterday. A Willem Hermanus BOOIJZEN, aged 21, is confirmed there on 31 May 1907, in a class that also holds Catharina Maria Elizabeth Roodt, 17, and Susanna Adriana Roodt, 15. On 21 September 1908 he marries Susanna Adriana Roodt, sixteen, at Indwe — certificate 13, her parents consenting — and under Rang of Beroep the register writes MIJNWERKER, of DUGMORE MIJN. Two children are baptised at Indwe, both entered ONECHT: Willem Hermanus, born 31 May 1908 to Susanna Adriana, and Catharina Willemina Levina, born 8 February 1909 to Catharina Maria Elizabeth — eight months and eight days apart, so the second name cannot be a slip for the first. At the first font, the third godparent is CATHARINA MARIA SOPHIA BARRY. This archive holds one woman of that name: Kathleen, widowed at Indwe in 1905. So the miner is her son, and this archive had no idea he existed.
Withdrawn — “Not one miner among them” · Taken back
Open question 10 said the mines claim was unsupported and that the occupations pointed away from it: saddler, farmer, mason, tree nurseryman, railway clerk, mason. “Not one miner among them.” There is one, and the reason the archive missed him is worth stating plainly: the negative was built out of the occupations it happened to have read, and it had not read his because it did not know the man existed. A list of six is not a population. What replaces it is better than a simple yes — the boys did go onto the mines, and the first one this archive can name did it on CAPE COAL at Indwe in 1908, years before the family reached Johannesburg and while his widowed mother was still living in the same town. The testimony compressed a slow migration into one train.
9 Sep 2026
Taken back — 11 published claims withdrawn on this day.
| What this archive said | What replaced it | Cause |
|---|---|---|
| One did. The 1915 death notice lists the siblings and there is no second. → | tree | |
| No document anywhere names a family farm. The name came off the tree and had nothing behind it. → | tree | |
| Eighteen. Her father died in December 1947 and she was born in March 1929. → | reading | |
| 1906. A baptism register and her own death form agree against the tree, and the tree had mistranscribed one digit. → | tree | |
| The negative was VOID. The register searched turns out to be an Orange Free State land roll that does not cover the Cape at all. → | scope | |
| It does not. 1827 is when James Montjoy died and 1840 is when the notice was filed. The contradiction was the archive's. → | reading | |
| The 1851 Graaff-Reinet register writes a neighbouring family's name with a z in the same hand and ink. The z was Cape Dutch orthography before it was anybody's statement. → | reading | |
| It is a Pieterzen name. It came in through a step-relation with no blood tie to this family at all, and four generations have carried it. → | reading | |
| Five of the nine had been filled in by the archive itself. The source reports four. The chart now draws four, and a dash where nothing was reported. → | process | |
| It did not. Auto-linking injected HTML anchors into an SVG and silently erased half the names in it. It did not look broken; it looked plausible. → | process | |
| All twenty-two dated 1930 or later were read. The twenty before 1930 were not, and they held James Mountjoy's wills of 1818 and 1827 and an 1834 Colonial Office memorial. A filter applied for convenience was written up as the whole search. → | scope |
The tree, read · Method
A MyHeritage tree of 15,643 people, with the Booyzen line already seven generations deep and much of it citing Dutch Reformed registers and Cape probate. The job was never to find the family — it was to test what had been assembled, because a tree that good will be believed.
Thirty-five documents transcribed · Method
Civil registrations, church registers, wills, a marriage allegation, a burial register and a gravestone — most of them images that had hung on the family tree for years without anyone reading them.
The man was not shot by the British · Found
Willem Hermanus Booyzen died at Indwe on 13 September 1905 of an ulcer of the stomach, after fourteen months' illness, under a doctor's care. The testimony's central death is disproved for both candidates.
The name caught changing on one sheet · Found
On the same 1905 form the registering clerk writes Booysen and the dead man's son signs Booyzen, four lines apart.
WITHDRAWN — “two Barry sisters married Booysens” · Taken back
Asserted from a tree reading. John Barry's 1915 death notice lists only one, and the arithmetic closed exactly: eight surviving, two predeceased, one duplicate. Retracted on the page rather than quietly deleted.
WITHDRAWN — the farm called “Armadale” · Taken back
An 1901 register was read as Armadale and a small argument about Scottish farm names was built on it. At full magnification on the original the word is ambiguous. The argument survives on Caerlaverock and Manorowen, which are certain; Armadale is gone.
CORRECTED — “orphaned at seventeen” · Taken back
Written in four places, from a death date the archive had already corrected without propagating the change. Catherine was eighteen.
CORRECTED — Anna Pretorius born 1906, not 1905 · Taken back
Three documents beat the tree: the baptism register, her death form's age, and her marriage register's age with parental consent. A derived claim built on the wrong year was withdrawn with it.
The 1820 Settler his family forgot · Found
George Augustus Kolbe — the Nautilus, Owen's party, Algoa Bay 1820 — whose grandson wrote “Father: Kolbe, thinks James was christian name. Mother: Unknown” with the man's carved headstone standing forty miles away.
The Cape Rebel rolls searched, and the wrong surname noticed · Method
Twenty-six Booysens on the roll, every one Northern Cape. But the man in whose house the family married in July 1901 — D. W. Schoeman of Caerlaverock — was tried the month before. A note was written to search BARRY, and not acted on for some time.
The Farm List result is VOID · Taken back
A negative result was recorded against Caerlaverock and Manorowen before checking what the register was. It is an Orange Free State land roll and was never going to hold a Cape farm. A control search on “Dordrecht” — 670 rebels, 0 farms — caught it.
CORRECTED — my contradiction, not the tree's · Taken back
The archive flagged a conflict between the tree's 1827 death for James Montjoy and the 1840 date on his file. Both are right: he died in 1827 and the notice was filed thirteen years later. The error was mine.
“Names of the Parents of the Deceased. Not Known.” · Found
Found by interpolating reference numbers across 2,223 images of an unindexed film. The oldest document in the archive, and it answers the question it was fetched to answer by refusing it.
WITHDRAWN — the z as a family invention · Taken back
The archive had leaned on an 1879 signature. Then the 1851 register showed the clerk writing the godparents PIETERZEN in the same hand, and the Cape archives showed 39 documents under BOOYZEN with the earliest in 1779. The spelling was never invented. What survives is that this family switched between two spellings that both already existed.
CORRECTED — Willem Hermanus is not a Booyzen name · Taken back
The archive had called it “a Booysen name crossing into the Mountjoys”. It is neither: it enters through Anna Catharina Slier's FIRST marriage, to a Pieterzen, and four generations carried a step-relation's name.
The family is on the Cape Rebel roll — under Barry · Found
Acting at last on the note above. Fred J. Barry of Ivanhoe, Barkly East / Wodehouse, tried June 1901 — the same month as Schoeman; and Richard Peter Barry of Jerpoint, which is Kathleen Barry's brother's name. Identity unproven, district not.
CORRECTED — a chart with five invented rows · Taken back
The first province chart drew nine provinces. The source reports four; I had filled in the rest to make the picture look complete. It now draws four, and a province the source does not report is a gap with a dash rather than a zero bar.
A bug that removed exactly the names the archive knows best · Taken back
The ancestor chart rendered with names missing from half its boxes. The auto-linker was injecting HTML anchors into the SVG, where they do not render — so every person in the link index vanished from the chart while their dates stayed. It did not look broken; it looked plausible.
CORRECTED — a search I reported as complete was not · Taken back
The archive stated that MOUNTJOY returned 42 documents in the Cape archives and that all 22 dated 1930 or later had been read. Twenty documents before 1930 were never opened. They include JAMES MOUNTJOY'S OWN WILLS of 1818 and 1827, and an 1834 Colonial Office memorial from his widow. A filter applied for convenience was reported as if it were the whole search.
No death notice for Magdelena Elisabeth de Beer — twice over · Found
The Master's Office own index of death notices 1834–1912 was read on film at the “Beer, de” pages. She is not in it, which confirms the NAAIRS result from a second and older source.
Built from log.json and corrections.json at build time. If a finding is not here it is not in the log, and the build will say so before it says anything else — tools/drift.py fails the build when a narrative page and the data disagree. The research log → · What was taken back →