The Booyzen Archive
30 corrections, and why each happened

What was taken back

Every claim this archive has published and then withdrawn, in one place, with the cause named. Nothing here has been quietly edited away: each of these sentences was on the site, and some of them were on it for weeks.

Why this page exists

A family history that only shows its conclusions is asking to be believed on trust. This one has been wrong nineteen times, and the corrections are more useful than most of the findings, because they are the only part of the site that says anything about how the work goes wrong.

The right-hand column is the point. Sort by it and a pattern appears that no single correction would have shown.

8 times

A part searched, reported as the whole

A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

8 times

A document read past what it says

A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

5 times

The archive's own working

A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

4 times

The tree repeated before it was tested

A claim taken from the family tree and repeated before it was tested.

3 times

A list mistaken for a population

A negative built from a list mistaken for a population — the archive searched what it happened to have and reported the answer as though it had searched everything.

2 times

A fact cited back to itself

A fact derived from a reference, written into the record, and then cited back as evidence.

The list

Published What it said What replaced it Cause
13 Sep 2026 “Anna Johanna Booijzen, born Alberts, died at Boekfontein and is not this family” 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. → A document read past what it says
13 Sep 2026 “Hendrik Stefanus Booysen had four children” 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. → A part searched, reported as the whole
13 Sep 2026 “Hendrik Stefanus Booysen's four children were his second wife's” 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. → A document read past what it says
13 Sep 2026 “Margarietha Wilhelmina Elizabeth Barry was John Augustus Barry I’s daughter” 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. → A document read past what it says
13 Sep 2026 “The 1915 notice named eight children and the archive listed nine” 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. → The archive's own working
13 Sep 2026 “The ancestor chart, every wife one generation too high” 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. → The archive's own working
9 Sep 2026 “Two Barry sisters married Booysens” One did. The 1915 death notice lists the siblings and there is no second. → The tree repeated before it was tested
9 Sep 2026 “The farm was called Armadale” No document anywhere names a family farm. The name came off the tree and had nothing behind it. → The tree repeated before it was tested
9 Sep 2026 “Orphaned at seventeen” Eighteen. Her father died in December 1947 and she was born in March 1929. → A document read past what it says
9 Sep 2026 “Anna Pretorius born 1905” 1906. A baptism register and her own death form agree against the tree, and the tree had mistranscribed one digit. → The tree repeated before it was tested
9 Sep 2026 “The Farm List returns nothing, so the farm was not burned” 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. → A part searched, reported as the whole
9 Sep 2026 “The tree contradicts itself on 1827 and 1840” It does not. 1827 is when James Montjoy died and 1840 is when the notice was filed. The contradiction was the archive's. → A document read past what it says
9 Sep 2026 “The z was this family's invention” 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. → A document read past what it says
9 Sep 2026 “Willem Hermanus is a Booyzen name” 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. → A document read past what it says
9 Sep 2026 “A distribution chart with nine provinces” 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. → The archive's own working
9 Sep 2026 “The family tree renders correctly” 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. → The archive's own working
9 Sep 2026 “MOUNTJOY returned 42 documents, all read” 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. → A part searched, reported as the whole
10 Sep 2026 “The SANDF enquiry was sent” 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. → The archive's own working
10 Sep 2026 “The 1905 clerk's Booysen proves the family used an s” It proves nothing. Seven Attorney-General files spell one Middelburg constable both ways, twice inside 1905. Only the son's signature still carries weight. → A document read past what it says
10 Sep 2026 “The archives hold 39 Booyzen documents” They hold 184. Every search in the project had been run against the Cape depot alone, one repository out of nine, for weeks. → A part searched, reported as the whole
10 Sep 2026 “Maggie Booyzen was born 1 October 1926” 14 October. Her father wrote it on her mother's death notice three months before he was widowed. → The tree repeated before it was tested
10 Sep 2026 “1944 is the one time the form worked” 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. → A list mistaken for a population
10 Sep 2026 “The Marico Booyzens are not this family” 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. → A list mistaken for a population
10 Sep 2026 “Not one miner among them” 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. → A list mistaken for a population
13 Sep 2026 “He died in the Transvaal at about thirty” 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. → A fact cited back to itself
13 Sep 2026 “Isabella Frederika Coetsee died in 1943” 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. → A fact cited back to itself
13 Sep 2026 “John Augustus Barry was born at sea” 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. → A part searched, reported as the whole
13 Sep 2026 “He died on 3 August 1903” 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. → A part searched, reported as the whole
13 Sep 2026 “Dorothea Regina Barry was a daughter of John Barry” 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. → A part searched, reported as the whole
13 Sep 2026 “Ruben Jacobus Josuah Barry was a son of John Barry” 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. → A part searched, reported as the whole

What the pattern says

Three of the nineteen are the same mistake, and it is the one worth naming. The archive searched what it happened to have, found nothing, and reported the absence as a fact about the world. "Not one miner among them" came from six occupations. "The one time the form worked" came from five death notices. "They are not this family" came from a geography the archive had never actually tested.

A list is not a population. Every negative on this site now carries the scope it was run over, and where the scope is small the page says so. What was searched →

Three more were the reverse: a search run over part of the ground and written up as the whole. One province out of nine. Twenty-two documents out of forty-two. A register that turned out to cover a different colony entirely.

And one, the most recent, is the worst kind: a fact this archive manufactured from a reference number and then quoted back to itself. An estate file numbered O/2899 was dated 1885; the archive wrote 1885 into a man's life as a death date, and then cited the death date as though it were evidence for the attribution. How that unwound →

Every correction is also in the research log, in the order it happened, with what was being worked on at the time.