The cousin marriage
When George Booyzen married Anna Pretorius at Vereeniging in 1924, they were not strangers who happened to share a district. They were cousins — and their marriage folds the family tree back on itself.
The two descents
John Augustus Barry I (1819-1903) === Margaretha W. E. M. Kolbe (1826-1912)
| |
+-------------------+--------------+-------------------+
| |
Catherine Maria Sophia Hendrik Nicholaas Barry (1857-1931)
"Kathleen" Barry (1859-1940) === Anna Johanna Maria Schoemann (1859-1923)
=== Willem Hermanus Booyzen |
(1851-1905) |
| Margarietha W. E. Barry (1880-1961)
| === Petrus Jacobus Pretorius (1878-1941)
| |
GEORGE DOWNING MOUNTJOY ============== ANNA JOHANNA MARIA
BOOYZEN (1901-1947) PRETORIUS (1906-1944)
|
m. 30 December 1924
Vereeniging
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CATHERINE MARY SOPHIA BOOYZEN (1929-2013) Kathleen Barry and Hendrik Nicholaas Barry were brother and sister, two of the eleven children of John Augustus Barry I and Margaretha Kolbe.
George was Kathleen's son. Anna was Hendrik's granddaughter. They were first cousins once removed, and their common ancestors are John Augustus Barry I and Margaretha Wilhelmina Elizabeth Mary Kolbe.
What follows from it
Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen descends from John Augustus Barry I and Margaretha Kolbe twice — once through her father, once through her mother.
This is pedigree collapse: she has fewer distinct ancestors than the arithmetic of generations predicts. Where a person five generations back should have thirty-two separate ancestors, she has thirty — because one couple occupies two of the slots.
It also means the two most interesting descents in the archive each reach her twice: the 1820 Settler Kolbe line out of Württemberg and Soho, and the Irish Barry line, whatever it turns out to be. The Kolbes → The Barrys →
And it changes how DNA has to be read. Autosomal matches through this line will look closer than the paper relationship suggests, because shared segments arrive by two routes. Any cousin-match estimate that assumes a single path will overstate how recently two people connect. This matters directly: the tree is hosted on a 23andMe-linked MyHeritage site.
It was not an isolated match
Three Barry–Booyzen unions across three generations — a fourth, which this archive previously counted, turned out to be the same marriage entered twice. How that was settled →
| Barry | married | When | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Catherine Maria Sophia “Kathleen” Barry (1859–1940) | Willem Hermanus Booyzen (1851–1905) | 22 Dec 1879 | the direct line |
| — withdrawn — | — | — | the tree’s separate “Kathleen Mary Barry (Booysen)” is the same woman as row one; John Barry’s 1915 death notice lists only one Barry daughter married to a Boyson |
| Dorothea Regina Barry (1892–1956) | Henry James Booyzen (1887–1956) | 17 Jul 1912, Elliot | her father is Hendrik Nicholaas Barry; his mother is Kathleen Barry |
| Anna Johanna Maria Pretorius (1906–1944), via her Barry mother | George Downing Mountjoy Booyzen (1901–1947) | 30 Dec 1924, Vereeniging | the cousin marriage |
Look at row three closely. Hendrik Nicholaas Barry's daughter Dorothea married George Booyzen's brother Henry James — in 1912, twelve years before George married Hendrik's granddaughter. The two families were marrying each other in both directions at once.
In a district the size of Barkly East this is not scandalous, and it was not unusual. It is simply what a small settler population does. But it has to be stated plainly, because everything downstream — relationship estimates, DNA matches, and the apparent breadth of the family tree — depends on knowing that the tree is narrower than it looks.
The Schoemans sit alongside the Barrys in the same way. P. Schoeman witnessed the 1879 Booysen–Barry marriage; Anna Johanna Maria Schoemann married Hendrik Nicholaas Barry in 1877; and the 1901 Pretorius–Barry wedding was held at the home of D. Schoeman. Why that matters →
The names give it away
Anna's mother was christened Margarietha Wilhelmina Elizabeth Barry — the same four names, in the same order, as her own grandmother Margaretha Wilhelmina Elizabeth Mary Kolbe. And Anna herself was "named after Anna Johanna Maria Schoemann", her father's mother, a fact the tree records explicitly rather than leaving to be inferred.
Two Booyzen sisters in the next generation are Margaretha Wilhelmina Elizabeth "Maggie" (1926) and Catherine Mary Sophia (1929) — the Kolbe name and the Barry name, side by side, in Johannesburg, ninety years after Margaretha Kolbe was christened at Graaff-Reinet. The women →