The documents
The family tree carried these scans for years with nobody transcribing them. They are not snapshots — they are death registrations, a death notice and a marriage register. Reading them corrected three dates, killed one family legend, and caught the surname changing on a single sheet of paper.
1905 · The death registration that settles the biggest question
Cape Colony, Form of Information of a Death, Act No. 7 of 1894. Entry 299, sub-district Indwe, district Wodehouse. Registered 14 September 1905.
| Usual place of residence | Doorn Street, Indwe |
| Age | Fifty Five years |
| Occupation | Mason |
| Date of death | September Thirteenth 1905 |
| Intended place of burial | Public Cemetery, Indwe |
| Cause of death | Ulcer of Stomach |
| Duration of last illness | Fourteen months |
| Medical man | W. C. Macdonald, M.B. |
| Informant | J. B. Booyzen — qualification: Present at Death |
| Total children | Twelve |
What it proves
Documented The death date the tree flagged "To be confirmed, not sure" is correct. He died at Indwe on 13 September 1905.
Documented He was not shot by the British. He died of a stomach ulcer after fourteen months of illness, under a doctor's care, in his own house, three years after the war ended. What that does to the testimony →
A farmer who became a mason
At his marriage in 1879 his occupation is Boer — farmer. At his death in 1905 it is Mason.
A man who works land and then works stone has, in between, very often lost the land. The war sits in that interval. Inferred Suggestive, not probative — but it is exactly the trajectory the burned-farm testimony describes.
The name changing, on one sheet of paper
The registering clerk writes the deceased's surname. Four lines below, his son signs his own. They are not the same word.
The father is registered under the old spelling. The son signs the new one. Both are on the same page, in September 1905 — three years after the Anglo-Boer War ended.
The informant is John Barry Booyzen (b. 1884), the eldest son, then twenty-one, recorded as present at the death. This is as close to a photograph of the surname changing as the archive is ever likely to find. The name →
1879 · The marriage register — and one ambiguous letter
Duplicaat Origineel Register, in Dutch. Entry 15, 22 December 1879. Married in the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk at Barkly, after banns, by David Ross, consulent.
| Groom | Bride | |
|---|---|---|
| Name as entered | Willem Hermanus Booysen | Catharine Mary Barry |
| Age | 22 | 21 |
| Status | Jongman | Jongedochter |
| Rank or occupation | Boer (farmer) | — |
| Residence | Lady Grey | Barkly |
Witnesses: J. Sutherland and P. Schoeman. Set that beside Anna Johanna Maria Schoemann marrying Hendrik Nicholaas Barry in 1877, the 1901 Pretorius–Barry wedding held at the home of D. Schoeman, "Caerlaverock", Barkly East, and a Commandant D. Schoeman leading Cape Rebels at Labuschagne's Nek in 1900. The Schoemans are braided through this family across three generations. The rebels →
The most consequential letter in the archive
The clerk wrote Booysen. The groom signed what reads as "Booij_en" — using the older Dutch ij digraph, with a medial letter whose descending loop is more consistent with z than s.
If that reading is right, he was already signing with a z in 1879 — twenty years before the Anglo-Boer War — and the testimony's explanation of why the spelling changed is a later rationalisation of something that had already happened.
Not established The reading is not certain. Cursive Dutch s and z are genuinely confusable, and this is a photograph of a duplicate register, not the original. The archive states both readings and prefers neither.
This single letter is now the most consequential unresolved question here. It wants an eye trained on nineteenth-century Cape Dutch hands, and the original register at the Cape Archives. Open questions →
1915 · John Barry's death notice — typewritten, and therefore unarguable
Prepared by solicitors at Barkly East, stamped 18 April 1915, No. 925. Signed by James H. Barry, "Son (second)". This is the very document the family's earlier research note describes — it can now be quoted rather than paraphrased.
| Birthplace and nationality | "At sea (exact whereabouts unknown), British." |
| Father | John Barry (address unknown) |
| Mother | Barry, born Neagle (Christian names and address unknown) |
| Age | 83 years (about) |
| Occupation | Carpenter and builder |
| Residence | Manorowen, Barkly East District |
| Spouse | Margaret Wilhelmina Elizabeth Barry, born Kolbe (died 2 August 1912). In community. |
| Place of last marriage | "Burghersdorp (probably)" |
| Day of decease | 3rd August 1903 |
| Where died | on farm Manorowen, district Barkly East |
| Estate | movable Yes · immovable No · exceeds £300 Yes · will No |
"At sea" is official, not folklore
The Irish/High-Seas ambiguity is contemporaneous and legal, sworn by his own son. The mother's maiden name Neagle — almost certainly Nagle, of County Cork — is on a state document, not a family memory. The Barrys →
Manorowen is Welsh
The tree renders the farm "Manor Owen", which hides it. The notice types it as one word: Manorowen — a village in Pembrokeshire, Wales. He also owned no immovable property: he lived on Manorowen but did not own it. Both are new and entirely unexplored.
1. The death date is 3 August 1903, not the 25 August the tree carries — a 22-day discrepancy.
2. A duplicate person is resolved. The tree lists both Catherine Maria Sophia "Kathleen" Barry (1859–1940), married Booyzen and a separate sister Kathleen Mary Barry (Booysen) with no dates. This notice lists only one Barry daughter married to a Boyson. The arithmetic closes exactly: the tree's 11 children = the notice's 8 surviving + 2 who predeceased him + 1 duplicate. They are the same woman, and the archive's earlier claim of "two Barry sisters marrying Booysens" is withdrawn.
1947 · George's death notice corrects his own death date
Signed by G. Booyzen at Johannesburg on 21 February 1948 under the Administration of Estates Act 1913.
He died on 11 December 1947 — not 21 February 1947.
21 February is the date the notice was signed, and it was signed in 1948. A transcriber conflated the two and lost ten months.
This also dissolves an anomaly this archive had itself flagged: a burial at West Park recorded on 14 December 1947 looked like a ten-month delay. It was not. He died on the 11th and was buried on the 14th — three days later, exactly as one would expect.
The notice also records "no children of last marriage" — consistent with both infant Gertrude Elizabeths having died before him.
The photographs
Three uncaptioned photographs
Attached to George's profile with no caption, no date and no tagging. The identifications below are Inferred — reasoning is given so it can be overturned.
1819 · A sworn falsehood in Shoreditch
A marriage allegation of the London Diocese, 20 January 1819 — the sworn statement required before a marriage licence could be issued. Fee, 2/6.
"Appeared personally George Kolbe and made Oath, that he is of the Parish of Saint Leonard Shoreditch in the County of Middlesex, a Bachelor of the age of Twenty-one Years and upwards, and intendeth to marry with Margaret Downing of the same Parish, a Spinster of the age of Twenty-one Years and upwards…"
George Augustus Kolbe was born 7 December 1802. On 20 January 1819 he was sixteen years and six weeks old. Margaret Downing was born 23 February 1803; she was fifteen years and eleven months.
Under Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753 a minor under twenty-one could not marry by licence without a parent's consent. Swearing to be "of the age of twenty-one years and upwards" was the ordinary way round it — and it was perjury. The four weeks' residence in the parish was very often nominal too.
This archive's 1820 Settler married at sixteen, by lying under oath about his age, and sailed for Africa eleven months later. The Kolbes →
1844 · The estate the archive had a reference for but had never read
The Cape Archives reference KAB MOOC 6/9/35: 7698 (1845) was already noted here as "not yet ordered". It was in the family tree all along — the estate number 7698 is written at the head of the page.
| Birth-place | London |
| Names of the parents | left blank |
| Age | 42 years |
| Condition in life | Agriculturist |
| Day of the decease | 1 December 1844 |
| Where died | At Knapdaar, in the field cornetcy of Rhenosterberg, District of Colesberg |
| Property | "about £1000 Sterling" |
He died a farmer
The tree gives his occupations as Reverend Missionary of the London Missionary Society, Chemist and Tailor. The official record at the end of his life calls him simply an agriculturist, and he died on his own farm. Those are not contradictions — they are a life in sequence — but the archive should stop leading with "missionary".
Ten children, and one who is missing
The notice names ten. Keetor Peter Benjamin Kolbe, whom the tree gives a birth in 1840, is not among them — nor among the ten in his mother's 1867 notice. He died young, or he does not belong in this family. Julia Kolbe, whom MyHeritage flags as born two years after her father's death, is likewise absent, as she must be.
1867 · Margaret's death notice solves a problem this archive had raised
| Birthplace | London |
| Names of the parents | "Both dead" — no names given |
| Age | 64 years 9 months & 2 days |
| Day of the decease | 25 November 1867 |
| Where died | at her own residence in Burghersdorp |
| Property | a dwelling house in Burghersdorp and a farm in the division of Albert; household furniture, live stock, sheep and cattle |
"64 years 9 months & 2 days" on 25 November 1867 computes to a birth of 23 February 1803 — exactly what the tree says and exactly what the gravestone says. A three-way agreement, which in this archive is rare enough to be worth stating.
The notice lists, among Margaret Downing's children: "Mary Elizabeth (dead) who was married to George F. Enslin — left issue of 6 minor children." Resolved The Enslin marriage and its children are Mary Elizabeth's, not Margaretha's. The tree has attached one sister's family to the other. Disputed →
One thing it does not give: her parents, entered only as "Both dead". The tree's John Paul Downing and Mary P King are therefore not corroborated here.
The grave at Burgersdorp
SACRED / TO THE MEMORY OF / GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE, / BORN IN LONDON 7 DECEMBER 1802, / AND DIED AT HIS FARM WURTHEMBURG, / DIVISION OF ALBERT, 1 DECEMBER 1844. / ALSO HIS RELICT / MARGARET DOWNING, / BORN IN LONDON 23 FEBRUARY 1803, / AND DIED AT BURGHERSDORP / 25 NOVEMBER 1867.
The farm is spelled WURTHEMBURG in cut stone, with a th — closer to Württemberg than the tree's "Wurtemburg". And the stone says "HIS FARM": he owned it, which Margaret's 1867 notice confirms with "a farm in the division of Albert".
She is commemorated under her maiden name, as his relict — the old word for widow. She outlived him by twenty-three years and was buried in his grave, as the Dutch note on the MyHeritage record says: "Zijn vrouw is later bijgezet in het graf."
The 1845 notice says district of Colesberg; the stone says division of Albert. Both are right — Albert, with its seat at Burgersdorp, was carved out of the older district afterwards. The stone is the later text.
The portraits — and one that cannot be who it says
George Augustus Kolbe died in 1844. Margaret Downing died in 1867. Neither can appear in a photograph taken in the late 1870s. A pencilled inscription on the mount does not appear to read "Kolbe".
Hypothesis It is their son George Augustus Kolbe (b. 1836) — who would be about forty in 1876, matching the sitter — with his wife. The repeated forename is the obvious route by which a caption goes astray. Unproved.
1842 · The will of a Bond Street tailor
A Prerogative Court of Canterbury register copy, from the Public Record Office. Signed 25 May 1842; proved at London 23 February 1846.
He had a partner and a going concern
"…an agreement with my present partner Mr Richard Davies that the Executors … should permit the capital to be invested by me in our partnership business of Tailors at the time of my death to remain in such business…" — for a term of fourteen years after he died.
This is not a jobbing tailor. It is a firm with capital, a partner, and a fourteen-year plan.
His daughter was an executrix
He appointed Timothy Duke, Christian William Kent and Marian Kolbe — his own daughter — "Executors and Executrix". At probate she is sworn as "Marian Kolbe Spinster the daughter."
A woman administering a substantial estate in her own right in 1846 is worth pausing on.
George Augustus Kolbe died on 1 December 1844. His father died on 18 November 1845 — a year later. Under that clause, George's share passed to his own children — to Margaret Downing's family at Burgersdorp, and so to Margaretha Kolbe, who married John Augustus Barry.
Inferred There is, on paper, a line of money from a Bond Street tailor's estate to the Barkly East family. A later clause names "my said children or grandchildren" explicitly. Whether a shilling of it ever reached the Cape is unknown and untested — it would show in the PCC estate papers and in the Cape estate files. Open questions →
1845 · Two documents correct the tree twice over
| When died | Eighteenth of November 1845, at 34 Conduit Street |
| Age | 80 years |
| Rank or profession | Tailor |
| Cause of death | "Decay of Nature" (certified) — the Victorian phrase for old age |
| Informant | S. Leather, in attendance, 34 Conduit Street — an attendant, not family |
Correction 1 — he did not die in Lamb's Conduit Street
The tree records "34 Lamb's Conduit Street". Three independent documents say otherwise.
| Document | Address as given |
|---|---|
| Death certificate, 1845 | 34 Conduit Street, registered at May Fair |
| Burial register, 1845 | "Conduit Street, Regent Street" |
| His own will, 1842 | "of Conduit Street, Bond Street, in the County of Middlesex, Tailor" |
Conduit Street runs between Regent Street and New Bond Street, in Mayfair. Lamb's Conduit Street is in Bloomsbury, over a mile away and in the Holborn registration district — a death there could not have been registered at May Fair.
The consequence
The photograph in the tree captioned "34 Lamb's Conduit Street" is a picture of the wrong building, in the wrong part of London. Someone went and photographed a real 34 — just not his.
He lived and died above his own shop, in Mayfair.
Correction 2 — he was not buried in Warwickshire
The tree records "St John the Baptist, Leamington, Warwickshire."
The correction makes the family more coherent, not less. They are German Lutherans of the Savoy from first to last. The officiant, Revd Dr Steinkopff, is Karl Friedrich Adolf Steinkopf (1773–1859), minister of the German Savoy Church and a founder of the British and Foreign Bible Society. The Kolbes →
The neighbouring entries in the register are almost all German — Wüst, Nitsch, Wuleko, Stürcke, Kollmann, Schnitzlein, Grubusch, Wettig. A German congregation in London, burying its own.
1901 · A wedding in a rebel's house, under martial law
The archive knew from a note in the tree that this marriage was held "at the home of D Schoeman". The original register gives the man a signature.
| Groom | Bride | |
|---|---|---|
| Age | 22 | 21 |
| Occupation | Veeboer — stock farmer | — |
| Residence | “Arundale” (reading uncertain), Barkly Oost | Caerlaverock, Barkly Oost |
"Getrouwd in woonhuis D. Schoeman te Caerlaverock voormeld, na huwelijksgeboden, door mij: J. G. van der Walt, Pred. Geref. Kerk."
Hypothesis That is now a specific, searchable identity to set against the rebel commandant lists — not the bare initial the archive had before. It is still not proof. The rebels →
Married in a house, not a church
In the middle of the war, in a private dwelling. And in the Gereformeerde Kerk — the "Dopper" church — not the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk in which Willem Hermanus Booysen had married in 1879. A different, more conservative denomination.
And two more British farm names
He was of a farm whose name reads as “Arundale” — the word is genuinely ambiguous at full magnification — and she of Caerlaverock. Set beside John Barry's Manorowen, the farms of this district carry Scottish and Welsh place-names — Dumfriesshire, Scotland, Pembrokeshire.
Inferred These are British settlers' farms, and the families on them were siding with the republics. That complicates the picture in a way worth keeping.
c. 1909 · Anna Pretorius, aged about four
Left: a boy of about seven in a pleated tunic and wide collar — Dirk Jacobus
Pretorius (b. 8 June 1902).
Centre: Petrus Jacobus Pretorius (1878–1941), the stock farmer.
Right: Margarietha Wilhelmina Elizabeth Barry (1880–1961), in a high-necked blouse
with her hair dressed in a pompadour.
Front: a small girl of about four — Anna Johanna Maria Pretorius (b. 3 Oct 1905).
Inferred The hairstyle and blouse date the picture to about 1908–1912; the children's ages narrow it to roughly 1909.
This is David Defranceski's great-grandmother as a small child — the woman who would die at thirty-eight of an ectopic pregnancy at Forest Hill, leaving Catherine orphaned at eighteen. It appears to be the only photograph of her parents together, eight years after they married in D. W. Schoeman's house.
1940 · Kathleen Barry's death certificate, and one unexpected word
| Name | Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen — "(Born Barry.)" |
| Age · birthplace · condition | 82 · Cape Province · Widow |
| Occupation | Home Duties |
| Pensioner | MILITARY PENSIONER |
| Place of death | No. 1, Fifteenth Avenue, Mayfair, Johannesburg |
| Intended place of burial | Brixton Cemetery, Johannesburg |
| Causes of death | Carcinoma of the Uterus; Senility — one year one month |
| Informant | M. v. Rensburg, "Causing Burial", of 20 Commercial Road, Fordsburg |
Untested The likeliest route is a son's First World War service — several of her sons were of age — with a dependant's pension attaching to her. It is a hard, searchable fact and an entirely new thread in this archive.
It also carries an irony worth leaving in rather than smoothing away: a family that remembers fighting the British ends with its matriarch on a military pension in a British dominion.
Two smaller gains. The archive had only "Mayfair" for her death; it now has No. 1, Fifteenth Avenue. And the tree records no burial place for her at all — she is at Brixton Cemetery. Johannesburg →
1912–1915 · "Father: Kolbe, thinks James was christian name"
Of everything read in these four days, this is the line that most justifies the archive existing.
She died on 2 August 1912; her son completed the notice on 13 May 1915, nearly three years later. That gap matters — and it is the same gap as the 1840 Montjoy notice, written thirteen years after that death, which answers the same question with "Not Known." In both cases the delay is part of the reason the answer is empty.
Her son, filling in his own mother's death notice, did not know his grandfather's name. He guessed James. Of his grandmother he knew nothing at all.
His grandfather was George Augustus Kolbe — who married at sixteen on a sworn lie in Shoreditch, sailed on the Nautilus in 1819, preached across the Orange River, named a Karoo farm after his father's Württemberg, and lies under a cut-stone monument at Burgersdorp with his name, his London birth and his farm carved into it. His grandmother was Margaret Downing of London, buried in the same grave.
The family forgot them inside seventy years, while the headstone stood forty miles up the road.
Two generations after the Nautilus, the notice describes her as "Afrikander of European extraction" and guesses her birthplace: "Believe Colesberg District." The Kolbes →
Set that beside her mother Margaret Downing, who in 1867 left a house in Burgersdorp and a farm in the division of Albert; beside her grandfather Johan Gottlieb Kolbe, whose 1842 will disposed of a partnership in a Bond Street tailoring firm; and beside her husband John Barry, whose estate in 1903 exceeded £300. The Kolbe money did not last three generations.
This notice also supplies a third date for John Barry's death — "August 1904" — against the 3 August 1903 of his own 1915 death notice and the 25 August 1903 in the tree. Both notices were made in 1915, by two different sons, and they contradict each other. Disputed →
1923 · The Schoemans get a name
The archive has been chasing a "D. Schoeman" of Caerlaverock since the beginning. This document does not name him — but it plants his family.
| Geboorteplaats | Queenstown, Cape Province |
| Vader | Ruben Schoeman, Barkly Oost, K. Prov. |
| Moeder | Magdalena Johanna Botha, Barkly Oost, K. Prov. |
| Echtgenoot | Hendrik Nicolaas Barry, in community of property |
| Plaats van laatste huwelik | Barkly Oost |
| Signed | D. Booyzen, "dochter van overledene", present at the death |
Ruben Schoeman of Barkly Oost
Anna Johanna Maria Schoemann — who married Hendrik Nicholaas Barry in 1877, and whose grandchild Anna married George Booyzen in 1924 — was the daughter of Ruben Schoeman and Magdalena Johanna Botha, both of Barkly Oost.
The naming confirms it: her fourth son is Ruben Jacobus Josuah Barry, after his maternal grandfather.
Inferred This does not identify D. W. Schoeman of Caerlaverock — but it places a named Schoeman family in exactly the right district and generation to hold him. The rebels →
And a Booyzen signs it
The informant is "D. Booyzen" — Dorothea Regina Barry, who married Henry James Booyzen at Elliot in 1912. She signs as a Booyzen, daughter of the deceased, present at the death.
A third document, independent of the other two, confirming the third Barry–Booyzen marriage. The cousin marriage →
1803 · The London end of the line, closed
A baptism register index from St Anne's, Soho — birth date at the left, day of baptism at the right. A note on the same page records that the register holds "410 Baptisms for the Year 1802."
Born 7 December 1802. Baptised 2 February 1803. Son of John Gottlob and Mary.
An English parish register and a Karoo gravestone, written ninety years and six thousand miles apart, give the same birth date to the day: 7 December 1802.
Documented And the parentage is no longer taken on the tree's word. The link from George Augustus Kolbe, the 1820 Settler, to John Gottlob Kolbe, tailor of Conduit Street, and Mary Larman is on the parish register. The London end of this line is closed.
Four independent documents, and not one of them says "Johan Gottlieb." That is the German original the family tree leads with. "John Gottlob" is the name he actually used, and was buried under, in England — and this archive now follows the documents. The Kolbes →
1906 · A one-digit slip, caught by two documents
A Gereformeerde Kerk baptism register. Entry 29, under Gedoopt 11 Nov. 1906:
The tree gives her birth as 3 October 1905 and her christening as 11 November 1906 — a thirteen-month gap. The register shows the two are five weeks apart, both in 1906. It is the same register the christening date came from; the birth year was mistranscribed by one digit.
And her own death form settles it independently: "Age — 37 years" at 26 February 1944. A birth in October 1905 would make her 38.
Documented Anna Johanna Maria Pretorius was born 3 October 1906. A contemporary baptism register and a death registration agree, against the tree.
| Age | 37 years |
| Place of death | 85, Rheeders Street, Forrest Hill, Johannesburg |
| Intended place of burial | West Park Cemetery — the same ground as her husband; the tree gives only "Johannesburg" |
| Causes of death | "Haemorrhage due to Ruptured Tubal Pregnancy (extra-uterine). Not 1st child." |
| Informant | "Causing Burial", of 9–11 Jack Street, Germiston |
1961 · Margarietha Barry, and a pension that is only ordinary
| Age and date of birth | 81 years, 16.3.1880 — confirming the tree exactly |
| Place of birth | Barclay East, Cape Province |
| Died | First April 1961, General Hospital, Germiston |
| Causes of death | Uraemia — Hypertensive Congestive Cardiac Failure |
| Residence | 5 Plaza Court, Rietfontein Road, Primrose, Germiston |
| Burial | Primrose Cemetery |
| Allowance | Old Age |
| Identity number | "Unobtainable" |
One small human detail. The informant here, P. Gouws of 9 Jack Street, Germiston, gives the same address as the informant on Anna's 1944 form seventeen years earlier. Almost certainly an undertaker's premises rather than a relative — a reminder that "informant" on these forms often means the funeral director, not family.
Two corrections to this archive's own work
Both were found by reading the last four documents. Both were mine, not the tree's.
The farm was not "Armadale"
This archive read the groom's 1901 residence as Armadale and built a small argument on it — that the Barkly East farms carried Scottish names. At full magnification on the original register the word is genuinely ambiguous: it reads as "Arundale", possibly Armsdale or Ormsdale.
"Armadale" was an over-reading and is withdrawn. The wider point survives on the two names that are certain — Caerlaverock (Dumfriesshire) and Manorowen (Pembrokeshire) — but the archive should not have leant on a word it could not read.
Catherine was orphaned at eighteen
This archive said in four places that Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen was "seventeen years old and had no parents." That was calculated from the wrong death date for her father — the tree's 21 February 1947, which this archive itself later corrected to 11 December 1947 without carrying the correction through to her age.
Born 25 March 1929, she was eighteen when her father died, and fourteen when her mother did. Corrected throughout.
1851 · The baptism that settles an age, and names a godfather
The age question is settled
Documented Born 4 May 1851, from a contemporary register, matching the tree exactly.
So of the three figures the archive had, the marriage register is the outlier: it gives his age as 22 in December 1879, when he was 28. His 1905 death registration says 55, which is right within a year. The 1879 entry is wrong by six years.
And he was named for his godfather
The witnesses are Willem Hermanus Pieterzen, Maria Catharina Magdalena Potgieter and Xaverius Hermanus Pieterzen. (The archive scan corrects this archive's earlier reading of the surname as Pietersen — see below; the first given name, earlier read as Iwerus, is still not certain.)
Johanna Catharina Mountjoy's half-brothers were Pieterzens — the sons of Anna Catharina Sleer by her first marriage. The archive had them only as names in a list. Here one of them is standing at the font, and the child takes his name. The women →
The register's place column reads achter Sneeuwberg — the family was farming behind the Sneeuberg, not living in Cradock town.
Resolved — by a better scan, and not in the direction expected
This section previously read the father's surname here as "Booij_en", with the same ambiguous medial letter as the 1879 signature, and concluded: "I cannot separate them from an image… The change is real. Its date is not established, and no scan will establish it."
That was read from a photograph of the register on the family tree. The archive has since read the Cape Town Archives scan of the register itself, at nine times magnification. It is not ambiguous at all:
The letter is a z. And it is a z for the Pieterzens too — a family with no name-change story attached to it. In Dutch orthography -zen is simply how the patronymic ending is written, and this clerk wrote it that way for everyone.
The scan settled the letter. Settling the letter is what took the argument away.
What this costs. The z cannot have been invented by anyone in this family — it was ordinary Cape-Dutch spelling, sitting in the registers in 1851. The 1879 signature question is not merely unsettled but largely emptied: a z-shaped letter in a Dutch hand is not evidence of intent.
What survives, unchanged. The 1905 death registration, which turns on two spellings of one man's name on one sheet — clerk Booysen, son Booyzen — and not on the shape of any single letter. The tree's recorded "Former name: Booysen". And the distribution data: 646 against 53,764, Gauteng against the Cape, gathered a century later by people who had never heard of this family.
The change is real. The spelling it changed to was not new. The name →
1946 and 1947 · The two Gertrudes — a contradiction resolved
This archive flagged as Serious: two daughters recorded born on 11 May a year apart, both named Gertrude Elizabeth. Either two children given the same name and the same birthday — or one record duplicated a year out.
Both certificates exist, and they are irreconcilably different documents.
| Gertrude Elizabeth Booyzen | Gertrude Booyzen | |
|---|---|---|
| Date of death | 15 May 1946 | 11 May 1947 |
| Age | 4 days | 6 hours |
| Place of death | Queen Victoria Hospital | Turf Club Nursing Home |
| Cause | Prematurity ± 30 weeks | Atelectasis; prematurity 7½ months |
| Doctor | Dr Dennis W. P. Lavery | J. S. Porter |
| Burial | West Park Cemetery | Primrose Cemetery, Germiston |
Two hospitals. Two cemeteries. Two doctors. Two registration entries a year apart. Four days, and six hours. There were two children. Resolved
And the coincidence the archive doubted is real. Both were born on 11 May, exactly a year apart, and both were badly premature — the first at about thirty weeks, the second at seven and a half months. The first lived four days. The second lived six hours. They are not buried together.
February 1944 — Anna dies at 85 Rheeder Street, aged 37. · May 1946 — Gertrude Elizabeth, four days old. · May 1947 — Gertrude, six hours old. · December 1947 — George, aged 46.
Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen was eighteen. Two years later she married at St Joseph's, Mayfair. Johannesburg →
Three smaller corrections. The first Gertrude did not die at 85 Rheeden Street — the certificate gives Queen Victoria Hospital and names the street only as the mother's residence. The second child is registered simply "Gertrude", not Gertrude Elizabeth. And the street appears as Rheeder, Rheeders and Rheeden across three documents.
1819 · The marriage entry — and a bride who could not sign her name
The allegation was sworn that morning. This is the register entry itself, St Leonard's Shoreditch, No. 858.
He signed George Kolbe — after striking through a first attempt. She did not sign.
Margaret Downing † her mark.
She could not write her own name. She was fifteen.
And in 1867 she died at Burgersdorp owning a dwelling house and a farm in the division of Albert, having buried her husband at forty-one and raised ten children across a mission circuit from Uitenhage to Bethulie. It is the steepest arc in this archive, and it starts with a cross in a Shoreditch register.
The blank that proves the lie
The line reading "with Consent of ————" is left empty. Under Hardwicke's Act a minor marrying by licence needed a named consenting parent. The blank is the visible consequence of the oath they had sworn that morning: that both were "of the age of Twenty-one Years and upwards." He was sixteen; she was fifteen.
And a witness called "John Paul"
The witnesses are John Paul and Mary Downing. The tree records the groom's father, Johan Gottlieb Kolbe, as also known as "John Paul" Kolbe.
Inferred If that is him, the father witnessed the marriage — which makes this something more complicated than an elopement: a parent standing by while his sixteen-year-old son swore he was of age. Unproved; "John Paul" could be an unrelated man.
The portrait is a painting — as it had to be
This archive had cautioned that any likeness of a man who died in 1844 — when photography was five years old and almost unknown in the Cape interior — would have to be a painted portrait, not a photograph from life.
Resolved It is. A young man with reddish-brown curling hair, clean-shaven, in a high white stock and a tan coat with wide lapels — dress of the 1820s and 30s, which fits a man born in 1802.
A third file in the same set is a left-facing profile so heavily processed — posterised, speckled, colour-fringed — that it is either a separate image or a modern "restoration" that has invented a great deal. Not relied on here for likeness.
1924 · A tree nurseryman marries at Vereeniging
| Husband | Wife | |
|---|---|---|
| Age | 24 | 18 |
| Occupation | Boomkweker — tree nurseryman | Geen |
| Residence | Evaton | Evaton |
| Consent | Eigen — his own | Ouders — her parents' |
A third document for 1906
She is 18 at 30 December 1924 — which requires a birth in late 1906, not 1905. And her consent is recorded as "Ouders", her parents' — required because she was a minor.
With the baptism register and the death form, three independent documents now give 1906. The tree is wrong three times over.
Boomkweker
Not a miner, and not yet a railwayman. In 1924 George grew trees. A wholly new occupation for him — and by 1947 he was a clerk on the South African Railways.
Both were living at Evaton — where Anna's grandmother Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman had died the year before. The whole connection had moved north together.
1947 · The death registration, and a garbled memory vindicated
| Occupation | Clerk, South African Railways, Johannesburg |
| Date of death | Eleventh December 1947 |
| Place | 85 Rheeders Street, Forest Hill · buried West Park |
| Causes | Coronary Thrombosis; Chronic Myocarditis |
| Duration | 2 days / 11 months |
And the tree's strangest note turns out to be substantially right. It carried "Cause: HEART ATTACK 1946", which read like nonsense against a February 1947 death. The registration gives chronic myocarditis of eleven months' duration ending in a coronary thrombosis of two days. A year-long heart illness, ending in a heart attack. A garbled memory, but a true one.
1889 · Two grandparents at a font, and a name on the facing page
The godparents are the child's own maternal grandparents — John Augustus Barry I, the Irishman born at sea, and Margaretha Kolbe, the 1820 Settler's daughter, standing together at a font in Barkly East in September 1889.
Her surname is written "Kolby" — a phonetic variant, twenty-six years before her own son would tell a magistrate he thought his grandfather's name was James. The Kolbes →
And on the facing page, entirely by accident
Hercules Johannes, Jakobus Jonathan and Maria Sophia Mountjoy are a named, searchable cluster in the right district, twenty-six years after her death — and they turned up on the page opposite a Booyzen baptism, found by accident. Open questions →
1863 · The death notice that adds a generation
Found by searching a spelling nobody had tried: Montjoy.
The National Archives index had been searched for MOUNTJOY — forty-two documents, none of them the one wanted. Searched for MONTJOY it returns four, and two of them are the junction between the two families:
| File | Reference | Year |
|---|---|---|
| MONTJOY, JAMES. DEATH NOTICE. | KAB MOOC 6/9/21, 4393 | 1840 |
| MONTJOY, JOHANNA CATHARINA. WIFE OF PETRUS JACOBUS BOOYSEN. WILL. | KAB MOOC 7/1/268, 87 | 1845 |
| BOOYSEN, JOHANNA CATHARINA. (NEE MONTJOY). DEATH NOTICE. | KAB MOOC 6/9/104, 499 | 1863 |
| MONTJOY, JOHANNA CATHARINA. LIQUIDATION AND DISTRIBUTION ACCOUNT. | KAB MOOC 13/1/221, 6 | 1866 |
The form, as completed
| 1. Name of the Deceased | Johanna Catharina Montjoy |
| 2. Birth-place | Graaff Reinet |
| 3. Names of the Parents | James Montjoy and Anna Catharina Sleer |
| 4. Age | 44 years & 19 days |
| 5. Condition in life | farmer's wife |
| 6. Married or unmarried | Married to Petrus Jacobus Booysen |
| 7. Day of decease | 19th May 1863 |
| 8. At what House | Zevenfontein, Brak River |
| 10. Property | Moveable property |
An age given to the day
The form asks for years. The informant wrote "44 years & 19 days". Counted back from 19 May 1863, that puts her birth at 30 April 1819, at Graaff-Reinet.
The tree had "1819". The document has the date, and the informant knew it without being asked.
The surname, settled by convergence
The hand is genuinely ambiguous between Sleer and Steer, and this archive has over-read a single word before.
It is settled from outside: the family tree carries Schleher, FamilySearch's index carries Slier. Three renderings from three independent sources, all with an l and none with a t. The letter is an uncrossed l.
Eight children, and one of them is the direct line
Jacobus Nicholas · Johanna Catharina · Petrus Jacobus · David Schalk · Willem Hermanus · Magdalena Johanna · Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus · Jacoba Catharina.
The fifth child is the man the 1905 death registration is about. Willem Hermanus Booyzen, baptised at Achter Sneeuwberg on 31 October 1851, twelve years old and a minor when his mother died. His parentage — Petrus Jacobus Booyzen and Johanna Catharina Montjoy — is now carried by two original registers that agree, and the Mountjoy descent enters this family through his mother.
Seven of the eight are matched to baptisms in the Graaff-Reinet registers. An eighth child, Anna Catharina, baptised 21 September 1842, is not on the list — she died before her mother, and the notice is silent about her, as these forms are.
The signature
Not established The surname ends in an angular letter with a descender — the form is more consistent with z than s, and the clerk who filled in the body of the form wrote Booysen at line 6. But the archive has just finished demonstrating, on the 1851 register above, that this letterform proves nothing on its own. It is recorded here and claimed for nothing.
Still to be read: MOOC 6/9/21, reference 4393 — the 1840 death notice of James Montjoy himself. It would name his parents, and with them the point at which the name entered the Cape. It is not name-indexed; the probate collection's 846 films are catalogued by film number alone, so reaching it means finding the film that covers the 1840 volume. Open questions →
1840 · The oldest document in this archive — and it answers by refusing
KAB MOOC 6/9/21, reference 4393. Named on the previous page as the most valuable unread document here. It has now been read.
How it was found. It is not name-indexed, and the probate collection's 846 films are catalogued by film number alone. The route was arithmetic: find any indexed 1840 death in the collection, take its film — 007844936, "Cape Province. Probate Records 1840–1843", 2,223 images — and read the reference numbers pencilled in the top corner of a handful of pages. They ascend by roughly one per image. Image 700 is reference 4726; image 330 is 4386. Interpolating and then narrowing put reference 4393 at image 338. It was there.
The form, as completed
| 1. Name of the Deceased | James Montjoy |
| 2. Birth-place | Europe |
| 3. Names of the Parents | Not Known |
| 4. Age | About 45 years |
| 5. Condition in life | Saddler |
| 6. Married or unmarried | Married to Catharina Sl[i/e]er, widow of William Pietersen |
| 7. Day of decease | September 1827 |
| 8. At what House | In the village of Cradock |
| 9. Children | James, George, Johanna, Jacoba — all minors |
| 10. Property | A house and erf at Cradock, of the value of £90 |
| Signed | Colesberg, 25 June 1840, by a Montjoy |
Line 3
This archive went looking for this document because it was supposed to give the generation above — the point at which the Mountjoy name entered the Cape. Instead it says, in a firm hand, that in 1840 the family did not know who James Montjoy's parents were.
And they had every chance to find out. He died in September 1827. The notice was completed thirteen years later by a relative who knew his trade, his property, the value of his house, the village he died in and the name of his wife's first husband — and could not name his mother or his father.
The wall at the top of this line is not a gap in the archive. It is a gap in the family, and it was already there in 1840.
It is the same sentence the archive found on the 1915 death notice at Barkly East, where a grandson wrote "Father: Kolbe, thinks James was christian name. Mother: Unknown" with the man's carved headstone standing forty miles away. Two families, two centuries, the same box on the same printed form, the same answer. Why this archive exists →
"Birth-place: Europe." Not a country. The most that was remembered of where he came from was that it was not here.
A trade, passed down
Documented James Montjoy was a saddler at Cradock. His son George Mountjoy — four years old when his father died — is recorded at his own 1848 marriage as a saddle maker, in the same town.
The archive had George's trade already and treated it as the first recorded for a Mountjoy. It was the second. The boy learned his dead father's trade.
The Pietersen marriage, confirmed
Documented "Married to Catharina Sl[i/e]er, widow of William Pietersen." The archive had inferred, from a godparent at an 1851 font, that Johanna Catharina's half-brothers were Pieterzens by her mother's first marriage.
Here is the first marriage, named, in a document eleven years older than the baptism. The inference was right. The women →
Four children, and a date this archive had flagged as a contradiction
The archive had raised this as an open contradiction: our tree has Johanna Catharina's father dying in 1827, but the archival file is dated 1840. Resolved Both are right. He died in September 1827; the notice was filed thirteen years afterwards, and the file carries the filing year. The tree was correct and the contradiction was mine.
The four children fix the family at September 1827 exactly. Johanna Catharina was eight — her own 1863 death notice puts her birth at 30 April 1819. Jacoba was seven, George four, James one. And Thomas Jacobus, born 1818, is not on the list — which independently supports the correction that he died in 1827 rather than in infancy in 1818.
A correction the tree needs Our tree records James Mountjoy as born and died in 1826. He is listed here alive, as a minor, at his father's death in September 1827. The infant-death date is wrong.
Where the line now ends, and why it is a real end. James Montjoy, a saddler born in "Europe" about 1782, who owned a house and erf at Cradock worth £90 and died there in September 1827 leaving four children under nine. Above him: nothing, and nothing recoverable from this family — because the people who buried him could not name his parents thirteen years later. Anything further will have to come from outside the Cape: English, Irish or Continental records for a saddler named Montjoy born around 1782 who reached the Cape before 1818. Open questions →
1884 · A farmer who died owning his clothes — and a third "not known"
The tree had carried this image for years under its own citation. Nobody had opened it.
The form, as completed
| 1. Name | Petrus Jacobus Booysen, Senior |
| 2. Birth-place | Graaff Reinet District |
| 3. Parents | Petrus Jacobus Booÿsen — mother's name, not known |
| 4. Age | 72 years |
| 5. Condition in life | Farmer |
| 6. Married or unmarried | Married |
| 7. Day of decease | 30 March 1884 |
| 8. At what house | Zevenfontein, District Middelburg |
| 9. Children | Gerrit Jacobus Booÿsen, geboren 19 Januarij 1870 |
| 10. Property | Moveables only, such as wearing apparel &c |
Age 72 in 1884 puts his birth at about 1812, which matches the register exactly. Zevenfontein is the farm where his first wife had died twenty-one years before.
It happens a third time
This archive has now read three death notices that ask for the parents of the deceased. All three fail, and they fail in the same direction:
| Written | For | Line 3 says |
|---|---|---|
| 1840 | James Montjoy (d. 1827) | "Not Known." — both parents |
| 1884 | Petrus Jacobus Booysen (d. 1884) | Father named. "Mother's name, not known." |
| 1915 | Margaret Elizabeth Barry née Kolbe (d. 1912) | "Father: Kolbe, thinks James was christian name. Mother: Unknown." |
Three families, three generations, one printed box — and it is the mother who goes first. In 1884 the father's full name is written out and the mother has no name at all. In 1915 the father survives as a surname and a guess at a christian name; the mother is Unknown. Only in 1840, the oldest of the three, are both gone together.
His mother was Anna Maria van der Merwe. She had died before March 1825, when her son was twelve. By the time he died at seventy-two, nobody in the house could name her. The women →
The second wife, confirmed but still not named
Documented He is recorded as Married at his death in 1884 — twenty-one years after Johanna Catharina died. That settles the open question: there was a second wife. And the single child entered here, Gerrit Jacobus, born 19 January 1870, is new to this archive and can only be hers.
With Izak (1864) and Stephanus Francois (1875), that is now three children born to this man after 1863 — the ones the tree had wrongly attached to his first wife. Still open The form never asks her name, and so it does not give it. The marriage itself, at Cradock or Middelburg between 1863 and 1870, is the document that would. Open questions →
"Moveables only"
He is entered on line 5 as a farmer. On line 10 he leaves no fixed property at all — his clothes and whatever else would fit in a wagon. He was living at Zevenfontein; he did not own it.
Set that beside the oldest document here. James Montjoy, a saddler, died in 1827 owning a house and erf at Cradock worth £90. Fifty-seven years later his son-in-law's household has movables and wearing apparel.
The family was already landless in 1884 — fifteen years before the war.
Inferred, and it cuts both ways This does not dispose of the burned-farm claim: Willem Hermanus is entered as a boer, farmer, of Lady Grey at his marriage in 1879 — five years after his father's estate showed nothing. A son can farm land his father never owned, by lease, by marriage or by his wife's people. But it does mean the family's landlessness cannot simply be dated to the war, and any account that starts with a prosperous farm being burned has to explain 1884 first. The testimony →
1817 · The marriage register — where the blank actually begins
Two index entries existed for this marriage and neither carried an image. A third indexing, under the spelling Montyoy, did.
What it does not say, and that is the point
This archive went to this register expecting an origin. Cape marriage entries of this date routinely record where a party came from, and this very page does it repeatedly — three couples in the right-hand column are entered "beide van Uitenhage".
Against James Montjoy's name there is a long ruled dash and nothing else.
He arrived in the record already without a past.
So the silence is not a failure of the 1840 death notice, written thirteen years after his death. It was there at his wedding, twenty-three years earlier, while he was standing in the room.
Her surname, a sixth time
The register reads Slier. The tally across independent sources is now:
| 1817 | marriage register | Slier |
| 1863 | daughter's death notice | Sleer |
| — | FamilySearch index | Slier |
| — | family tree | Schleher |
| — | indexer, entry 1 | Sher |
| — | indexer, entry 2 | Hier |
The contemporary register agrees with the index against the tree: Slier.
And now a seventh test FamilySearch's whole South African corpus has been counted for each spelling. SLIER returns 851 people. SLEER returns 7. SCHLEHER returns nothing at all — not one record in the country.
That is not proof of what her name was. It is proof that the tree's spelling is the one form of it that no South African record uses, which is exactly what you would expect of a form arrived at by a modern hand. The register →
And a name in this family turns out not to be a family name
Three documents name Anna Catharina's first husband, and they look like three different men:
- 1817, the marriage register, contemporary — Harmanus Pieterze[n]
- 1840, the death notice, written by a relative — William Pietersen
- 1851, the baptism, the godfather who is his son — Willem Hermanus Pieterzen
The third contains both of the first two. Inferred, and firmly The man was Willem Hermanus Pieterzen: the 1817 clerk wrote the second given name, the 1840 informant the first, and his son carried the whole of it to the font in 1851.
Which means the name Willem Hermanus did not come down the Booyzen line at all.
It enters through Anna Catharina Slier's first marriage — a Pieterzen household with no blood relation to the Booyzens whatever. Her son by that marriage stood godfather at the Booyzen font in 1851, and the child was given his name.
That child is Willem Hermanus Booyzen, who farmed at Lady Grey, laid stone at Indwe, died of an ulcer of the stomach in September 1905, and whose son signed the death form Booyzen under a clerk's Booysen. His grandson was Willem Hermanus "Willy" Booyzen, born 1925 in Johannesburg. Four generations carried a step-relation's name, and the archive can now say exactly where it came from. The women →
1891 · The same font, two years on — and the name that runs three generations
One of the last unread images on the tree, and it turns out to be the same register as the 1889 page, at pages 262–263.
The entry
| Kind | Catharina Maria Sophia |
| Geboren | 22 April 1891 |
| Gedoopt | 24 Mei 1891, Barkly Oost |
| Ouders | Willem Hermanus Booysen Catharina Maria Sophia Barry |
| Getuigen | Philippus Rudolph Olivier · Elizabeth Susanna Germishuizen · Gert Francois Botha · Catharina Anna Susanna Botha |
The father is entered Booysen, with an s — as he is on every register entry the archive has read for him.
A daughter named for her mother
The child takes her mother's name entire: Catharina Maria Sophia. And it goes on:
| 1859 | Catherine Maria Sophia "Kathleen" Barry — the mother |
| 1891 | Catharina Maria Sophia Booysen — this entry |
| 1929 | Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen — the granddaughter, and the starting point of this archive |
Three women, seventy years, one name — and the spelling of the surname shifts underneath it while the given names hold. The women →
New to this archive Catharina Maria Sophia Booysen, born 22 April 1891, is a daughter of Willem Hermanus and Kathleen that the archive did not have. She was fourteen when her father died at Indwe in 1905.
1940 · A fourth time the form asks for the parents, and a fourth time it fails
Found only after this archive noticed it had spent its whole life searching one province out of nine. TAB MHG 2428/40
The form, as completed
| 1. Naam | Stephanus Francois Booyzen |
| 2. Geboorteplek | Kaap Provinsie — nasionaliteit Afrikaner |
| 3. Ouers | Vader: oorlede. Moeder: oorlede. |
| 4. Ouderdom | 65 jaar 7 maande — so born about October 1874 |
| 5. Beroep | Messelaar — mason |
| 6. Woonplek | East Lynne, Pk. Silverton, dist. Pretoria |
| 7. Getroud | Beatrix Magdalena Catharina, geb. Boshoff, in gemeenskap; last married at Mosselbaai, K.P. |
| 8. Sterfdag | 14 Mei 1940 |
| 10. Kinders | eleven, the youngest born 18 August 1930 |
| 11–14 | moveable and immovable property; estate over £300; a will |
Line 3
The form asks for the names and addresses of the parents. His widow answered, for both, "deceased".
This archive went to this document for one reason: Stephanus Francois was a son of the second marriage, and a death notice names its subject's parents, so his mother should have been on this line. She is the woman the archive has proved to exist and cannot name. She is not on it.
Four death notices in this family now ask who the parents were. Four fail.
| Written | For | Line 3 says |
|---|---|---|
| 1840 | James Montjoy | "Not Known." |
| 1884 | Petrus Jacobus Booysen | Father in full. "Mother's name, not known." |
| 1915 | Margaret Elizabeth Barry née Kolbe | "Father: Kolbe, thinks James was christian name. Mother: Unknown." |
| 1940 | Stephanus Francois Booyzen | "Vader: oorlede. Moeder: oorlede." |
The 1940 answer is different in kind from the other three, and worse. The earlier informants at least said they did not know. His widow answered a question about identity with a question about mortality — and nobody at the Master's office sent it back.
And a second mason
Messelaar is a mason. His half-brother Willem Hermanus Booyzen is entered as a mason on his own death registration at Indwe in 1905.
Two brothers, both in stone. The testimony ends with the boys going onto the mines. Of the occupations this archive has now actually read for the men of this family — saddler, farmer, mason, tree nurseryman, railway clerk, mason — not one is a miner. They went into trades, and two of them into the same one. What was searched →
He also left immovable property and a will, and an estate over £300 — which is more than his father managed in 1884, and more than his half-brother, who left no estate at all.
1870 · The second wife, named at last
The oldest open question in this archive, and it was answered by a christening rather than a death.
What had been established. Petrus Jacobus Booysen's first wife died in 1863. His own 1884 death notice enters him as married twenty-one years later and names one child — Gerrit Jacobus, born 19 January 1870 — who can only be a second wife's. Three children in all were born after 1863 and the tree had wrongly attached them to a woman already dead. But no document would give her name. Not his death notice, which does not ask. Not her son Stephanus Francois's, read this morning, where the widow wrote only "oorlede".
The mistake was looking at deaths. A baptism names both parents, and the child whose birth date the 1884 notice gives to the day was baptised 19 June 1870.
The entry
| Kind | Gert Jacobus |
| Geboren | 19 January 1870 — the exact date on the 1884 death notice |
| Gedoopt | 19 June 1870, Cape Colony |
| Ouders | Petrus Jacobus Booyzen Johanna Margaritha Pretorius |
| Getuigen | Petrus Jacobus Booijzen jr · Magdalena Johanna Francina Booijzen · Andries Gottlieb Pretorius |
Look at who stood at the font
Petrus Jacobus Booijzen junior, born 10 September 1839. Magdalena Johanna Francina Booijzen, born 16 July 1853.
Both are on the 1863 death notice — the third and sixth of Johanna Catharina Mountjoy's eight children.
Two children of the first marriage stood godparent to the first child of the second.
Whatever the household was after 1863, it was not divided. The third witness, Andries Gottlieb Pretorius, is presumably the bride's people.
Open question 7, answered Johanna Margaritha Pretorius is the second wife of Petrus Jacobus Booysen, mother of Gert Jacobus (1870), and — with the tree's other misattributions now corrected — of Izak (1864) and Stephanus Francois (1874), the mason who died at Pretoria in 1940.
One thing not to jump at Pretorius is also the surname of Anna Johanna Maria Pretorius, who married George Downing Mountjoy Booyzen in 1924 — and this archive has already shown that marriage to be between cousins, through her Barry mother. A second Pretorius connection fifty-four years earlier is not evidence of anything: Pretorius is among the commonest surnames in the Cape. It is noted here so that nobody later mistakes a coincidence for a link. The cousin marriage →
Read from the register image, not the index — this archive has been caught once already trusting a volunteer transcription, on the Pieterzen witnesses of 1851. The father is written Booyzen and the two witnesses Booijzen, in the same hand, in 1870.
1944 · The parents line, filled in
Anna Pretorius's Sterfkennis. TAB MHG 2945/44 — the second of the nine Transvaal estates, and the first in this archive where question three gets a real answer.
The form, as completed
| 1. Naam | Anna Johanna Maria Booyzen (geb. Pretorius) |
| 2. Geboorteplek | Barkly Oos, Kaap Provinsie |
| 3. Ouers | Vader: Petrus Jacobus Pretorius — 96 James Street, Germiston Moeder: Margareth Wilhelmina Elizabeth Pretorius — 96 James Street, Germiston |
| 4. Ouderdom | 37 |
| 6. Woonplek | Rheeder Straat 85, Forest Hill, J'hburg |
| 8. Sterfdag | 26 Februarie 1944 |
| 10. Kinders | six, alle minderjarig |
Line 3, filled in
This archive has now read five death notices that ask who the parents were. Four failed: "Not Known" in 1840, "mother's name, not known" in 1884, "Mother: Unknown" in 1915, "oorlede" in 1940.
This one is filled in completely — both names, and the street number they were living at.
The difference is not the form. It is the same printed question. The difference is who was holding the pen and what they knew. Her husband filled this in, and her parents were alive at 96 James Street, Germiston — her mother Margaretha Wilhelmina Elizabeth Barry, who outlived her by seventeen years. The cousin marriage →
Set beside the 1940 sheet, where a widow could not name her own husband's parents, it is a reminder that these blanks are not archival accidents. They record what a particular person, on a particular afternoon, actually knew about their own family.
This section first said "the one time the form worked." The next document opened after it — the 1942 Daschner notice, below — names both parents too. So the line is not unique; it is the earlier of two, and the pattern is a different one. The log →
Two documents were filed for this one death, and they are not the same document. The civil registration — entry 2045, Johannesburg, read further up this page — gives the cause of death, the cemetery and the age, but it never asks who her parents were. The Master's Sterfkennis does, because the Master needs to know who might inherit. The archive that seems less clinical is the one that carries the genealogy.
Six children, all minors
| Child | Born, per this document | Age in Feb 1944 |
|---|---|---|
| Willem Hermanus | 15 Oct 1925 | 18 |
| Margrett Wilhelmina Elizabeth | 14 Oct 1926 | 17 |
| Catherine Mary Sophia | 25 Mar 1929 | 14 |
| Anna Johanna Maria | 12 Oct 1930 | 13 |
| Georgina Jeanette | 22 Sep 1932 | 11 |
| Petrus Jacobus | 10 Jan 1934 | 10 |
A correction This archive has carried Maggie's birthday as 1 October 1926. Her mother's death notice, written by her father, gives 14 October. The document wins.
Every other date matches what the archive already held. And the bracket at the foot of the list — "Alle Minderjarig" — is the whole of it: six children under nineteen, the youngest ten, and three years and ten months later their father would be dead too. The line →
1942 · A daughter married at Indwe, and eleven cousins
Joseph Heinrich Daschner's death notice. TAB MHG 1928/42 — opened to check a marriage, and it returned a branch.
The form, as completed
| 1. Deceased | Joseph Heinrich Daschner |
| 2. Birthplace | Stutterheim, Cape Province · South African |
| 3. Parents | Joseph Daschner, deceased Sophia Daschner (Stoter), deceased |
| 4. Age | 58 years 5 months — born about November 1883 |
| 5. Occupation | Pensioner (Electrician) |
| 6. Residence | 132 Sheffield Street, Kenilworth, Johannesburg |
| 7a. Spouse | Catherine Mary Sophia Daschner (born Booyzen) — married in community of property |
| 7b. Earlier wife | "Not previously married." |
| 7c. Married at | Indwe, Cape Colony |
| 8. Died | 19 April 1942 |
| 11–14 | Movables yes · immovables yes · over £300 yes · a will yes |
Signed C. M. S. Daschner, "Surviving Spouse — Saw body after death."
Two words that close a marriage
This archive already held the marriage, from the family tree: Catharina Maria Sophia Booysen, baptised at Barkly Oost on 24 May 1891, married Joseph Heinrich Daschner. What it did not have was a document. Here are two lines of one, and they do more than confirm a husband's name.
They married at Indwe. Indwe is where her father, Willem Hermanus Booyzen, died in September 1905, when she was fourteen. It is a colliery village in the north-eastern Cape that appears in this archive for exactly one reason — a death form. Now it appears for a wedding as well.
And note the spelling. The clerk who filled in her father's 1905 death form wrote Booysen, with an s, and this archive has spent some care on how little that proves. Thirty-seven years later, a Johannesburg typist taking dictation from his daughter typed Booyzen, with a z. The name →
Eleven children
| Child | Status, 1942 | Born |
|---|---|---|
| Catherine Mary Sophia Daschner | Major | — |
| Joseph Charles Daschner | Major | — |
| Margaret Wilhelmina Elizabeth Jeanette van Jaarsveld, born Daschner | Major | — |
| William Herman Daschner | Major | — |
| Martha Magdeline van Deventer, born Daschner | Major | — |
| John Frederick Daschner | Major | — |
| Richard Peter Daschner | Minor | 8 May 1922 |
| Albert Alfred Daschner | Minor | 3 Mar 1927 |
| Edith Dorothy Daschner | Minor | 20 Jan 1930 |
| Henry James Daschner | Minor | 25 Feb 1932 |
| Yvonne Muriel Daschner | Minor | 15 Jul 1935 |
Read the bolded names again. Catherine Mary Sophia is her own name, and her mother's before her — Kathleen Barry, born 1859. Margaret Wilhelmina Elizabeth is the Barry name that runs down the other side of this family too. William Herman is Willem Hermanus, her father. Richard Peter is her uncle, Richard Peter Barry. Henry James is her brother.
Five of eleven Daschner children carry Booyzen and Barry names. The surname leaves the family in one generation. The names do not.
This is the same evidence the archive uses on the name and in the cousin marriage: in this family, forenames are inherited property, and they travel through daughters as reliably as surnames travel through sons. It is why Willem Hermanus — a name that entered by step-relation, with no blood tie at all — is still being given to children a century and a half later.
A small correction to the index, not to this archive FamilySearch's volunteer index gives Richard Peter Daschner's birth as 1923. The document reads 1922, and reads it clearly at full resolution. The table above follows the document.
And what question three actually depends on
Both parents dead, and both parents named. Put that beside the 1940 sheet two years earlier, where a widow answered the same printed question with the single word "oorlede" and nothing else, and the pattern in this archive stops being about the form at all.
Question three fails when the informant is remembering the nineteenth-century Cape interior. It works when the informant married into the family in the twentieth century and the names were still in the house. 1840, 1884, 1915 and 1940 fail. 1942 and 1944 work. All six are the same question.
It also matters which way the marriage ran. In 1940 a Boshoff widow was asked for her Booyzen husband's parents and could not do it. In 1942 and 1944 the informant was the spouse of the deceased, writing down their own in-laws — people they had met, at addresses they could quote. The method →
1876 · The oldest man in this archive, and the two names above him
Sterfkennis No. 678, written at the farm Brakfontein on 14 September 1876 under the Transvaal Republic's Wet op de Weeskamer. It is the document this archive has been looking for since the first page was written.
The form, as completed
| 1. Naam | Petrus Jacobus Booijsen |
| 2. Geboorteplaats | Graaffreinet |
| 3. Ouders | Gerthardus Lödewikus Booijsen Magdalena de Beer |
| 4. Ouderdom | 88 jaar |
| 5. Beroep | Landbouwer |
| 6. Staat | Gehuwd — weduwenaar |
| 7. Overleden | 1 September 1876 |
| 8. Waar | Destrikt Rustenburg |
| 9. Testament | Neen |
| 10. Goederen | Niets nagelaten |
| 11. Boven £25 | Niets bekend |
| 12. Kinderen | eight, all mondig |
The top of the line, in someone's handwriting
Generation seven of this family has stood at the head of the direct line since this archive began with the flattest entry on the site: no birth date, no death date, no father, no mother. He was there because the family tree said so, and for no other reason. Everything below him had documents. He had a name.
He now has a document too. Not his own — his son's. In September 1876, at a farm in the Transvaal, somebody was asked who the dead man's parents were and wrote down Gerthardus Lödewikus Booijsen and Magdalena de Beer.
It does not date him, and it does not name his parents, so the oldest open question on this site stays open. What it does is move the two of them out of the tree and into the record, and that matters more than it sounds, because this archive had already found a reason to distrust the pairing. Searching the Cape depot for Magdalena de Beer's estate turned up KAB NCD 2/1: 49, a notarial will of 1793 for "Jan Booysen, married to the late Magdalena de Beer" — a different husband, and a wife fifty years too early. It was recorded as a warning that Booysen–de Beer was not a unique pairing.
It still is not. But the pairing in this line is no longer an assertion, and the 1793 will can now be set aside for good rather than merely resisted.
Eight children, and three names that come back
| Child, as written | What this archive already knew |
|---|---|
| David Schalk Booijsen | — |
| Magdalena Johanna Booijsen | — |
| Petrus Jacobus Booijsen | generation five, b. 10 May 1812, the farmer at Zevenfontein who signed the 1863 death notice |
| Anna Eliezabet Booijsen | — |
| Jan Gerthardus Lodewikus Booijsen | — |
| Eliezabet Cornelia Booijsen | — |
| Hendrik Stefanus Booijsen | signed this notice |
| Anna Maria Booijsen | — |
Seven of these eight were unknown to this archive an hour ago. And three of the names — David Schalk, Magdalena Johanna, Jan Gerthardus Lodewikus — are the same names that appear on the 1863 death notice as children of Petrus Jacobus the younger, born 1848, 1853 and 1855.
They are uncles and aunts and their namesake nephews and nieces, one generation apart, and nothing but a birth year tells them apart. This archive has now met that trap four times. It is why the people index says out loud when two people share a page.
"Niets nagelaten"
Eighty-eight years old, a lifetime of farming, and the estate is nothing. No will, no movables, no land, nothing known to be worth twenty-five pounds.
Eight years later his son's notice would read "moveables only, such as wearing apparel". Sixty-eight years after that, his great-great-grandson would be buried from a rented house in Forest Hill. Three death notices across four generations, and not one of them has anything to leave. The line →
Since then the second of those two has been settled. The farm is Brakfontein, not Boekfontein, and the maiden name is Oliefier, not Alberts. She is Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier, the first wife of Hendrik Stefanus Booijsen, and she died on the family's own farm. How that was read →
1937–38 · A whole estate, from the death to the last shilling
Estates 58379 and 58380, KAB MOOC 6/9/5047 — on this archive's Sources page as "Located, not yet read" for months. Read now, and not just the death notices: the liquidation account and the distribution account too. It is the only complete estate in this archive, and the only place where a life in this family is added up.
The two notices, written the same afternoon
Both were dated at Barkly East on 19 February 1938, in the same typewriter, and both were signed G. Mountjoy — son, present at place of death. She had been dead for three years and seven months.
Four words, typed on his form about her. Her death was never reported to the Master, and it was only when her husband died that anyone filed for either of them. The estates were then handled as one, because they had married in community of property and left "a joint Will".
This archive already predicted the file number. The Sources page has said for months that "his wife's is the very next file, 58380", reasoning from the sequence. It was right — and the reason it was right turns out to be that both were opened on the same day by the same son, not that she died anywhere near him in time.
Documented Her age of 73 years 9 months at 3 July 1934 puts her birth at about October 1860. This archive had no birth date for her at all.
And question three, twice more
Asked for the names and addresses of the parents of a man born in the Cape in 1854, his son typed the fact that they were dead and stopped. Her form says the same. That is a fifth and a sixth failure of the line this archive keeps returning to, and it fits the pattern exactly: the deceased were born in the nineteenth-century Cape, and the informant was a generation removed. Where it works →
The account
What he had
| Cash in the house | £6. 4. 2. |
| Post Office Savings Bank, joint with his late wife | £664. 11. 8. |
| Promissory note, E. W. Diesel, at 6% | £400 |
| Rent, Lot No. 380, to W. Bendeman | £2. 10. 0. a month |
Brought into this account as £300. 3. 1. capital and £13. 10. 6. income — the savings-bank deposit belonged half to his wife's estate.
The debts are a street directory of Barkly East in 1938: Die A.V.B.O.B. Bpk. — the Afrikaans burial society — twelve pounds ten; Dr A. R. A. Wilhelm, eight pounds fifteen; Premier Butchery and Star Butchery; Buys & Sons and Buys Bros.; C. F. Hardie; Edelstein Bros. & Co.; S. Seligmann & Co., Ltd.; Mukheibir Bros.; and Greyvenstein & Spence, thirty pounds, the largest single creditor.
A doctor, a burial society, two butchers, and traders whose names are Afrikaans, Jewish and Lebanese. It is a village, itemised.
"The deceased died intestate"
Note the contradiction, because this archive is not going to resolve it. Question 14 of the death notice, in the son's own typing, answers "Joint Will with predeceased wife." Four months later the executors' account opens with "The deceased died intestate." One estate file says both. Whatever happened between February and July 1938 — a will rejected, a will that dealt only with her half, a will that could not be found — the file as read does not say, and neither will this page.
What it does say is who got what.
| Heir | Relation | Share |
|---|---|---|
| George Mountjoy | major son — who signed both notices | £21. 4. 4. |
| Maria Sophia Diesel, born Mountjoy | daughter, m. i.c.p. Marthinus Frederick Diesel | £21. 4. 5. |
| Annie Louisa Nepgen, born Mountjoy | daughter, m. i.c.p. Arnoldus Fredeman Nepgen | £21. 4. 5. |
| Ellen Sophia Schmidt, born Mountjoy | daughter, m. o.c.p. John William Schmidt | £21. 4. 5. |
| Charles Mountjoy | major son | £21. 4. 4. |
| James John Mountjoy | major son — the second of the name | £21. 4. 5. |
| Emma Jane Mountjoy | major daughter, spinster | £21. 4. 5. |
| Mathilda Elizabeth Shooter, born Mountjoy | daughter, m. o.c.p. Douglas Gilmore Shooter | £21. 4. 5. |
| Lena Millie Frachet, born Mountjoy | daughter, m. o.c.p. Eric Bernard Frachet | £21. 4. 5. |
| Gwendoline Diesel | granddaughter, major — half of a tenth | £10. 12. 2. |
| Aubrey Diesel | grandson, minor — half of a tenth | £10. 12. 2. |
The two Diesel grandchildren take their dead mother's tenth between them: Louisa Elizabeth Diesel, born Mountjoy, who had married Evelyn Wilfred Diesel and died on 11 June 1923. She is on her mother's notice and not on her father's, because his was typed first and ran out of page.
These two families are joined by the marriage of 1838 and by the font at Barkly Oost in 1889, and they are three days' ride apart. One of them was accumulating and one of them was not. The line →
1902 · A wrong name in the index, and a right family behind it
Searching the Cape probate index for Hercules Johannes Mountjoy returns exactly one hit. It is not his.
Why it comes up
Because his name is written on it. Fifth in her list of eleven children:
"5. Maria Sophia van Niekerk, getrouwd met Hercules Johannes Mountjoy."
The FamilySearch index keys every name on the page, so a search hit is not a statement about whose document it is. Hercules Johannes still has no estate file, and this archive's finding on that stands. What has changed is that the one false positive has been opened and turns out to be his mother-in-law.
So the van Niekerks are now documented. Maria Sophia van Niekerk, who married Hercules Johannes Mountjoy at Dordrecht on 8 October 1888, was a daughter of Jan Dirk Abram Frans van Niekerk and Carolina Deybella Margrietta Alletta Botha, who was herself born in the district of Cradock and whose parents were Philip Rudolph Botha and a mother of the same long name.
Her ten brothers and sisters were Carolina Deybella Margrietta Alletta, Cornelius, Maria Francina Cecilia (widow of Gert Olivier), Jan Dirk Abram Frans, Hercules Johannes, Christiaan Jacobus, Cornelia Elizabeth Gertruida (married James Ross), Benjamin Jacobus, Pieter Jacobus and Philip Rudolph.
She had a brother called Hercules Johannes, and she married a man called Hercules Johannes. This archive notes that and does nothing with it. It is the kind of coincidence that invites a story, and there is no document behind any story it invites.
The notice is signed by her widower, J. D. A. F. van Niekerk, and it is one more piece of evidence that Dordrecht is where this side of the family married. Dordrecht →
1907–1910 · An eighth child, and the word MIJNWERKER
Four documents from the Dutch Reformed congregation at Indwe, found the day the register was built by typing Indwe into it. Between them they add a son this archive did not have, and they answer the last line of the family testimony — not in the way it was told, and not in the way this archive said it could not be answered.
First, the confirmation class of 1907
Five names off one page
| 8 | Booijzen, Willem Hermanus | 21 |
| 25 | Roodt, Catharina Maria Elizabeth | 17 |
| 26 | Roodt, Susanna Adriana | 15 |
| 27 | Roodt, Maria Catha Cornelia | 16 |
| 28 | Roodt, James Johannes | 17 |
| 29 | Roodt, Cornelis de Klerk | 21 |
Everyone who matters to the next three years is on this one page, on one afternoon, in one room.
Twenty-one in May 1907 means born about 1886. This archive's list of the children of Willem Hermanus Booyzen and Kathleen Barry ran John Barry (c. 1884), then Johanna Catharina (1889). There was a gap and nobody had noticed it.
Then a marriage, and one word in it
21 September 1908
| Groom | William Hermanus Booyzen, 22, jonkman |
| Bride | Susanna Adriana Roodt, 16, jongedochter |
| Beroep | MIJNWERKER |
| Woonplaats | Dugmore Mijn — both of them |
| Toestemming | Ouders — she was sixteen, so her parents had to consent |
| Married by | J. J. Krige, predikant der Ned. Geref. Kerk |
A Booyzen, on a mine, in a document.
The last line of the family testimony reads: "after the war our great great grandmother put herself and her kids on a train to Johannesburg where the boys initially all got jobs on the mines to make ends meet." This archive tested it, found six occupations across five generations — saddler, farmer, mason, tree nurseryman, railway clerk, mason — and wrote, on the open questions page: "Not one miner among them."
There is one. He is twenty-two, he lives at the mine, and the register writes his trade in the column that asks for it. The testimony →
And his mother was standing at the font
Entry 15
| Kind | Willem Hermanus Booyzen |
| Geboren | 31 May 1908 |
| Gedoopt | 6 December 1908 |
| Ouders | Willem Hermanus Booyzen Susanna Adriana Roodt |
| Getuigen | Cornelis Philippus Roodt Catharina Wilhelmina Levina Buitendag Catharina Maria Sophia Barry |
| Aanmerkingen | onecht |
The archive holds exactly one Catharina Maria Sophia Barry: Kathleen, born 1859, married to Willem Hermanus Booyzen in 1879, widowed at Indwe in September 1905. Dutch Reformed registers enter women under their maiden names, and there she is, in December 1908, standing godmother.
Inferred The miner is her son. No document says so in words. What the documents say is that a Willem Hermanus Booyzen born about 1886 was living at Indwe, and that Kathleen Barry stood at his child's font. This archive is satisfied and says which of those two things is the evidence.
The remark column is the harder reading. Onecht — born out of wedlock. The child was born on 31 May 1908; the parents married on 21 September 1908; the baptism was on 6 December. The register records the child's status at birth and does not revise it.
It also fixes where the family was. Kathleen Barry was still at Indwe in December 1908, three years and three months after her husband died there. Whatever else the train to Johannesburg was, it was not immediate.
And then a second child, by a second Roodt
Entry 12
| Kind | Catharina Willemina Levina Booyzen |
| Geboren | 8 February 1909 |
| Gedoopt | 22 September 1910 |
| Vader | Willem Hermanus Booyzen |
| Moeder | Catharina Maria Elizabeth Roodt |
| Getuigen | Cornelis Philippus Roodt Catharina Willemina Levina Buitendag |
| Aanmerkingen | onecht · gratis |
A different woman. Both were confirmed in the same class on 31 May 1907 — Catharina Maria Elizabeth at seventeen, number 25 on the page, and Susanna Adriana at fifteen, number 26. The two children were born eight months and eight days apart, which settles the question of whether the second name is a clerk's slip for the first: it cannot be.
| Date | What the register says |
|---|---|
| 31 May 1907 | Willem Hermanus Booijzen, 21, confirmed at Indwe alongside Catharina Maria Elizabeth Roodt, 17, and Susanna Adriana Roodt, 15 |
| 31 May 1908 | Willem Hermanus born to Susanna Adriana Roodt |
| 21 Sep 1908 | he marries Susanna Adriana Roodt, 16, at Indwe — both of Dugmore Mijn, her parents consenting |
| 6 Dec 1908 | the boy baptised, entered onecht; his grandmother Kathleen Barry stands godmother |
| 8 Feb 1909 | Catharina Willemina Levina born to Catharina Maria Elizabeth Roodt — four and a half months after the wedding |
| 22 Sep 1910 | she is baptised, entered onecht, gratis |
This archive sets that down because the register does, and stops there. The two Roodt women are not further identified here and the relation between them is not stated anywhere read so far. The daughter is named for her godmother, Catharina Willemina Levina Buitendag, who stood at both fonts.
1885 · The estate this archive gave to the wrong man
No image, no transcription, no new document read. Just an index line, set against two that have been read — and a correction that moves a whole branch of this family onto the map.
Since the Transvaal references were first pulled out of NAAIRS, this archive has carried a row saying TAB MHG O/2899 — Jan Gerhardus Lodewikus Booyzen — 1885, and attached it to the seventh child on the 1863 death notice: Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus Booysen, born 4 December 1855. His entry on the people index read "he died in the Transvaal at about thirty."
He did not. That sentence had no source except the estate reference itself. The archive read the year off the file number, wrote it into his life as a death date, and then quoted the death date back as if it were evidence.
FamilySearch's index of the same Transvaal probate series gives the estate's deceased in full:
What the index says
| Name | Jan Gerardus Lodewicus Booijzen |
| Relationship | Deceased |
| Age | 67 |
| Birthplace | Distrik Graaf Reinet — birth year about 1818 |
| Died | 25 May 1885 |
| Death place | Vaalbank, distrik Lichtenburg |
ark 1:1:QPTJ-R6KB and 1:1:Q2DG-52P9, two index passes over the same estate.
A man born in 1818 is not a man born in 1855. And the archive already holds a Jan Gerthardus Lodewikus Booijsen born in the right decade in the right place: he is fifth on the 1876 Sterfkennis of Petrus Jacobus Booysen of Brakfontein, born Graaff-Reinet about 1788. The 1876 notice →
So the estate is the uncle's, not the nephew's, and two things follow.
First, a date comes off a man
Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus Booysen, born 4 December 1855, no longer dies in 1885. This archive does not know what became of him, and now says so. He was seven when his mother died and twenty-nine when his father's estate was wound up, and after that there is nothing.
One more name back in the queue at open questions.
Second, a farm joins the line
The uncle died at Vaalbank, district Lichtenburg. This archive has already read a Sterfkennis from that farm: Magdalena Susanna Maria van den Berg, born Booyzen, died there on 1 May 1920, aged 59 years 9 months, father entered as Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus Booyzen.
She was recorded here as a lead that was "NOT PROVED". She is his daughter, born about 1860, on a farm where her father had died thirty-five years before.
What this section is not. The estate file itself has not been read. FamilySearch offers no image for it — the record page says "Check Image Availability" where the others say "View original document" — so what is above rests on an index entry, checked against two documents that have been read. The file is at the Transvaal Archives in Pretoria and this archive has not seen it. Sources →
1930, filed 1943 · A death notice thirteen years late
Death notice 84992, Cape Town. This archive went looking for it because the Master's own index files it under BOOYZEN, with a z. It found that, and a correction of exactly the kind it had just finished making about somebody else.
The form, as completed
| 1. Name | Isabella Fredrika Booyzen (born Coetzee) |
| 2. Birthplace | Middelburg · European |
| 3. Parents | Pieter Coetzee, deceased Isabella Fredrika Coetzee, deceased |
| 4. Age | 55 years 11 months — born about May 1874 |
| 7a. Husband | Gert Jacobus Booyzen, in community of property |
| 7c. Married at | Middelburg, Cape |
| 8. Died | 31 March 1930 |
| 9. Where | Church Street, Middelburg |
| 10. Children | Isabella Fredrika du Plessis · Pieter Jacobus Booyzen (deceased) · Gerhardus Jacobus Booyzen — all majors |
A correction This archive had her dying in 1943. She died on 31 March 1930. 1943 is when her husband finally filed.
The wrong date came from the same place as the last one: the year in the estate reference, read as though it were the year of the death. Three days ago the archive took a death date off a man on exactly that ground. It had made the same mistake here and had not noticed. What was taken back →
Thirteen years is a long gap, and the form does not explain it. What it does show is that Gert Jacobus Booyzen was alive on 1 April 1943, signing as survivor, eight years before his own estate was opened in the Transvaal.
And their son Pieter Jacobus — the boy baptised with a z at Middelburg on 12 February 1905, whom this archive has been carrying as a living name — is entered here as deceased. The Cape civil index gives a Petrus Jacobus Booyzen dying at Middelburg on 7 June 1937, aged about thirty-two.
And the spelling. Every occurrence on this form is BOOYZEN — in the Master's file number, in her name, in her husband's, in her sons', and in the signature. A Cape official document of 1943, thirty-eight years after the Indwe clerk wrote Booysen on her father-in-law's death form. The name →
1843 · The oldest Booyzen death notice in the Cape — and a warning
Death notice 6167, filed at Cape Town on 21 June 1843. It is not this family. It is put here because of what it nearly is.
The form
| 1. Name | Johanna Booyzen |
| 2. Birth-place | This Colony |
| 3. Parents | "both dead" |
| 4. Age | 89 years, 2 months & 26 days — born about 20 March 1754 |
| 6. Condition | Widow of Charles du Plessis, Dls son |
| 7. Died | 16 June 1843 |
| 8. Where | No. 28 Roze Street, Cape Town |
| 9. Children | Johanna Petronella du Plessis, married to Benjamin Solomon |
| 10. Property | "no property whatever except a Bond amounting per balance to £15" |
Question three has now failed seven times in this archive, and this is the earliest and the bluntest. Asked for the names of the parents, the informant wrote down whether they were alive. Where it works →
Here is a woman named Booyzen, born about March 1754, who died in 1843, whose estate sits in the Cape Master's papers — and whose name is not Magdelena, not Elisabeth, and not de Beer. She was the widow of a du Plessis and she died in a rented house in Cape Town.
This archive does not say they are the same person. It says the opposite. But a birth year and a death year matching to the year, on the only two facts the tree offers, is exactly the material a records-matcher builds a wrong person out of — and it is worth knowing that such a record exists before somebody finds it and decides it is her. Open question zero →
One thing she does show, and it is not nothing. Booyzen was a Cape surname before this family's paper trail starts. She was born in the Colony in 1754, which is a year earlier than anything else in this archive, and she died owning fifteen pounds of somebody else's debt.
1903 · "Irishman born in Ireland"
Entry 74, district Barkly East. The registration of John Barry's death, made by the son who was standing there — and it settles a question this archive has carried since its first week.
The form, as completed
| 1. Name | John Barry |
| 3. Residence | Manor Owen, Ward IV, Barkly East |
| 4. Age | eighty four years two months — born about June 1819 |
| 5. Race | "Irishman born in Ireland" |
| 7. Occupation | Carpenter |
| 8. Died | 25th August 1903 |
| 11. Causes | Inflammation and Old Age, one month seven days |
| 12. Doctor | Dr Helm |
| 13–15. Informant | Richard Barry — "Son present at death", of Manor Owen |
| Footnote (b) | "eleven" children |
Open question 5, answered He was born in Ireland. Not at sea, not in Sunderland, not in an unknown place. His son wrote it down eight weeks after burying him, on a form that carries the penalties for perjury at the top of the page.
This archive has run that question three ways for weeks. The family tree guessed Sunderland, Durham with a question mark. His own 1915 death notice — sworn by a different son, twelve years after the fact — types "At sea, exact whereabouts unknown. British." And a research note on the same tree called him "an Irishman … reputed to be anti English."
The 1903 form beats the 1915 notice on every count that matters. It is twelve years closer to the man; it was made by a son who was in the room; and it is a statutory registration rather than an estate paper. Where the two disagree, this archive now follows 1903. Open questions →
Which also settles the date. The tree says 25 August 1903; the 1915 notice says the 3rd. The registration says 25th August, and the man who signed it was present. Disputed →
And Manorowen was his own house. This archive knew the farm only from 1915, when Margaretha Kolbe died there and Richard Peter Barry signed as "son in whose house deceased died". The 1903 form puts John Barry himself there, living and dying at Manor Owen, Ward IV, with Richard resident at the same address.
Eleven children. The footnote asks for the total and the answer is eleven. This archive has named nine. The Barrys →
1912 · "Dutch, born in the District of Barkly East"
Nine years later, the same farm, the same registrar's form — and a grandchild of the Irishman is entered under a different nation.
The form
| 1. Name | Harriet Louisa Barry |
| 3. Residence | Manor Owen, Barkly East District |
| 4. Age | 18 years 5 months and 3 days |
| 5. Race | "Dutch, born in the District of Barkly East" |
| 7. Occupation | Farm domestic work |
| 8. Died | 7 September 1912 |
| 9. Where | Cherry Ville, Barkly East District |
| 10. Burial | Manor Owen |
| 11. Cause | Fever (Typhoid), thirty days |
| 13–15. Informant | H. N. Barry — "Father present when died", of Manorowen |
She is Hendrik Nicholaas Barry's daughter — he signs as father, present when she died — and her mother is Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman. Her baptism is on record at Barkly West in October 1894.
Two generations, two nations, one registrar's form. In 1903 the grandfather is an Irishman born in Ireland. In 1912 the granddaughter, dead of typhoid at eighteen on the same farm, is Dutch.
That is what the family's own testimony says happened, in the one line of it nobody has questioned: "as his son and grandson were married to Dutch girls their activity during the Boer War would be interesting." Here it is on a government form, and it took nine years. The testimony →
She also fixes a farm. She lived at Manorowen, died at Cherryville and was buried at Manorowen — so both are Barry places, and Cherryville is the third named Barry farm in this archive after Manorowen and Jerpoint. The atlas →
1908 · The son who signed the 1876 notice, found — and a mother nobody had
Estate 14380, Transvaal. Hendrik Stephanus Booysen put his name to his father's Sterfkennis at Brakfontein in September 1876. Thirty-two years later his own was filed, and it resolves a contradiction this archive has carried as Serious since the first week.
The form, as completed
| Name | Hendrik Stephanus Booysen |
| Birthplace | Cape Colony · nationality Dutch |
| Father | Petrus Jacobus Booysen |
| Mother | Elizabetha Booysen, born van der Merwe |
| Age | 79 years 11 months — born about June 1828 |
| Condition | Farmer · widower |
| Wives | 1. Anna Catharina Johanna, born Olivier 2. Charlotta Elizabetha, born Dormehl |
| Married at | ZEERUST, TRANSVAAL |
| Died | 11 May 1908, at the house of Willem Grobelaar, Koedoesfontein, district Rustenburg |
| Children | Petrus Jacobus (deceased) · Ockert Johannes Stephanus · Anna Catharina Grobelaar · Aletta Catharina Johanna Venter |
A mother this archive did not have
This archive's disputed page has carried a contradiction marked Serious since the beginning:
"Anna Maria van der Merwe (1785–1825) dies before 8 March 1825 — but Hendrik Stefanus is recorded born 23 August 1829. The same pattern one generation earlier: an unrecorded second marriage."
The second marriage is no longer unrecorded. The mother is Elizabetha van der Merwe, and the son's own age on the form — seventy-nine years eleven months at 11 May 1908 — puts his birth at about June 1828, three years after the first wife died. Two van der Merwe wives, one after the other. The contradiction was never a contradiction; it was a missing row.
And it repairs something this page has been apologising for. The 1876 Sterfkennis lists eight children and names no mother for any of them, so this archive drew them all under Anna Maria van der Merwe with a warning printed beside them. At least one of the eight is Elizabetha's. The households →
And then the place of the marriage
Zeerust is 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 been walking that back for three days — Rustenburg in 1876, Lichtenburg in 1885 and 1920, and Marico left standing as the one district still held at arm's length.
Here is a son of the 1876 man marrying at Zeerust. It is still not a link to any of the seven compensation claims, and the atlas still says unresolved. But the last district in the row has now had a documented Booysen marriage in it, and the sentence this archive withdrew was wronger than it knew. The atlas → · What was taken back →
He died in his son-in-law's house at Koedoesfontein, a farmer with no movables, some land, and mutual wills with both of his dead wives. His son Ockert Johannes Stephanus signed for him, as he had signed for his own father thirty-two years before.
1892 · The marriage the 1908 notice named, found — and it takes four children off one mother
Entry 13 of the Duplicaat Origineel Register, Huwelijks-Bevestiging te Zeerust, Distrikt Marico, 14 April 1892. The 1908 death notice said only Zeerust, Transvaal. Here is the register page, and it answers three questions the notice left open and contradicts one thing this archive published about it.
| Column | Hendrik Stefanus Booijzen | Charlotta Elizabeth Roos |
|---|---|---|
| Ouderdom | 63 — born about 1829 | 51 — born about 1841 |
| Waar geboren | Graaff-Reinet, K.K. | Graaff-Reinet, K.K. |
| Conditie | Weduwnaar | Weduwe |
| Huwelijksvoorwaarden | zonder | zonder |
| Woonplaats | Brakfontein, Rustenburg | Driefontein, Marico |
| Consent | eigen | eigen |
Graaff-Reinet, in his own marriage
The 1908 notice gave his birthplace as Cape Colony and nothing finer. This gives the town. It is the fourth man of this family documented as born at Graaff-Reinet — Petrus Jacobus baptised there in 1788, Petrus Jacobus born there in 1812, Jan Gerardus Lodewicus born there in 1818, and now Hendrik Stefanus about 1829. The atlas →
Brakfontein, sixteen years on
In September 1876 he signed his father's Sterfkennis at Brakfontein in the district of Rustenburg. In April 1892 he gives his home as Brakfontein, Rustenburg. He did not leave. The family that this archive spent weeks placing in the north-eastern Cape had a branch sitting on one farm in the Transvaal for at least sixteen years. The 1876 notice →
She was a widow, and her name is not what we published
This archive has called her Charlotta Elizabetha Dormehl. The register writes Charlotta Elizabeth Roos, geboren Dormehl, condition weduwe, and she signs C. E. Roos geb. Dormehl. Dormehl was her maiden name and Roos was her first husband's. She came to this marriage from Driefontein in Marico with a married name of her own.
And he signs with an s
The clerk writes him into the register as Booijzen. Two inches below, in the box headed Dit Huwelijk is voltrokken tusschen ons, he signs his own name H. S. Booysen. The z and the s are not two families and they are not even two clerks. On this page they are one man and the official writing him down. The name →
The 1908 death notice names four children — Petrus Jacobus (deceased), Ockert Johannes Stephanus, Anna Catharina Grobelaar and Aletta Catharina Johanna Venter — and does not say which wife they belong to. This archive drew all four under the second wife, Charlotta, because she was the marriage it could name.
They cannot be hers. She married him on 14 April 1892 at the age of fifty-one, a widow. By 1908 two of the four are married women carrying their husbands' surnames, one is dead, and the fourth signs his father's death notice as an adult son. Every one of them was born long before 1892. The four children belong to the first wife, Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier, and the household that has stood empty on this site since the 1908 notice was read is the one they go in. The households → · What was taken back →
What it does not give. The register has no column for parents. Neither party's father or mother is named, so this page cannot be used to test Hendrik Stefanus against the 1876 list a second time — the 1908 notice is still the only document that puts Elizabetha van der Merwe in this family. What 1892 adds is the town, the farm, the condition of both parties, and a date the archive did not have.
South Africa, Transvaal, Civil Marriages, 1870–1931 · FamilySearch 1:1:QPH1-9CX8, film 007747932 image 01608, read 13 September 2026.
1891 · Two deaths at Brakfontein in five days, and a woman this archive had thrown away
This site has carried a woman called Anna Johanna Booijzen, born Alberts for a week, under the heading NOT PROVED TO BE KIN, on a farm this site called Boekfontein. Read at full resolution, her death notice says neither of those things. She is the first wife of Hendrik Stefanus Booijsen, she died on Brakfontein — the family farm — and the surname the archive read as Alberts has no b, no r, no t and no s in it.
The form, as completed
| 1. Naam | Anna Johanna Booijzen, gebooren Oliefier |
| 2. Geboorteplaats | District Cradock, Cap Kolonie |
| 3. Ouders | Ocken Johannes Oliefier en Anna Johanna Botha |
| 4. Ouderdom | 67 jaar 8 maanden en 1 dag — born about 8 September 1823 |
| 5. Beroep | Landbouwster |
| 6. Staat | gehuwd — not a widow. Her husband outlived her. |
| 7. Overleden | 9 Mei 1891 |
| 8. Waar | op de plaas BRAKFONTIJN, district Rustenburg |
| 9. Testament | Ja, bekend |
| 10–11. Boedel | roerend en onroerend, boven £25 |
| 12. Kinderen | Allen mondig — seven, all of age |
First, the farm
Brakfontein is not a strange farm. It is the farm. Sterfkennis No. 678 for Petrus Jacobus Booijsen, the oldest document on this site, was written at Brakfontein on 14 September 1876 and signed there by his son Hendrik Stefanus. Sixteen years after that, the Zeerust register gives Hendrik Stefanus's home as Brakfontein, Rustenburg. A woman dying on that farm in 1891 was never a stranger. One letter — a k read for an r — kept her off this family for a week.
Then the name
The letters are o · l · i · e · f · i · e · r. There is no b, no r-t-s, and no second syllable that could carry -berts. Oliefier is how a man who writes Booijzen, Stefanes and Brakfontijn spells OLIVIER.
And the archive does not have to guess, because her own son wrote her name down again. Seventeen years later, filling in his father's death notice, Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen gave the first wife as "Anna Catharina Johanna Booysen, born Olivier". The 1908 notice →
Three documents, three spellings of one woman: Anna Johanna on her own notice, Anna Catrena on her son's, Anna Catharina Johanna on her husband's. Put together, she is Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier, and every one of them agrees on the surname.
Seven children, all of age
| As written, 1891 | What became of them |
|---|---|
| Petrus Jacobus Booijsen | On the 1908 notice, and already dead by then. |
| Ocken Johannes | Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen, who signed his father's death notice in 1908 — and who is named for his mother's father. |
| Anna Johanna Maria | Not yet traced. |
| Elesabettha Maria Cornelya | Not yet traced. |
| Alettha Catrina Johanna | Aletta Catharina Johanna Venter on the 1908 notice, married in community of property to Stephanus Andries Venter. |
| Magdalena Johanna | Not yet traced. The name comes down from Magdalena Elisabeth de Beer. |
| Hendrick Stefanus Nicolaas | Dead five days after his mother, on the same farm. His notice is below. |
And five days later, her son
The form, as completed
| 1. Naam | Hendrick Stefanes Booijsen |
| 2. Geboorteplaats | a farm in district Rustenburg |
| 3. Ouders | Hendrick Stefanus Booijsen en Anna Catrena, gebooren Oliefier |
| 4. Ouderdom | 29 jaar 3 maanden en 14 dagen — born about 31 January 1862 |
| 5. Beroep | Landbouwer |
| 6. Staat | ongehuwd |
| 7. Overleden | 14 Mei 1891 |
| 8. Waar | op de plaas BRAKFONTIJN, district Rustenburg |
| 9. Testament | Niet bekend |
| 10–11. Boedel | alleen roerende, niet boven £25 |
A twenty-nine-year-old farmer, unmarried, with nothing but movables worth under twenty-five pounds, dead on his father's farm five days after his mother. The archive cannot say what killed either of them and the notices do not ask. What it can say is that Brakfontein lost two people in one week in May 1891, and that the man left standing was a widower of sixty-two with six grown children — who married again, at Zeerust, eleven months later.
This is what the archive gets back. A wife with a name, her parents, her birth district and her seven children; a son nobody knew existed; a farm confirmed as the family's own; and the origin of a forename that had no business being there. All of it came out of a page this site had already found, already filed, and read wrongly twice.
South Africa, Transvaal, Probate Records from the Master of the Supreme Court, 1869–1961 · Sterfkennis 6332 (FamilySearch 1:1:QPTM-SCPJ, film 007897335 image 00647) and Sterfkennis 6361 (FamilySearch 1:1:QPRB-R43G, same film image 00675). Read 13 September 2026.
1862–1894 · The Rustenburg register, where an index has to stand in for the page
Five entries from the Netherdutch Reformed Church registers of Rustenburg, held at the Pretoria archive. Not one of them has an image — FamilySearch says Image Unavailable against every one, so what follows is a volunteer's transcription and nothing else. It is set out separately from the read documents for that reason. It also contains the single most useful line this archive found today.
| Date | Entry | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| 25 Dec 1862 rec. 1046, p. 185 | Baptism — Hendrik Nicolaas Stephanus Booijsen, born 31 Jan 1862 | Father Hendrik Stephanus Booijsen. Mother Anna Johanna Olivier. |
| 3 Apr 1869 p. 75 | Lidmaat — Petrus Jacobus Booÿsen | Born 20 April 1851. Admitted a member at Rustenburg, aged seventeen. |
| 3 Apr 1869 | Lidmaat — “Ceker” Johannes Stephanus Booÿsen | Born 15 September 1852. Admitted the same day as his brother. The forename is indexed Ceker and is Ockert. |
| 30 Jan 1882 rec. 6134, p. 469 | Baptism — Hendrik Stephanus Nicolaas Booyen, born 4 Jan 1882 | Father Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen, mother Elisabetta Johanna Sophia Myburgh. |
| 1889 & 4 Nov 1894 | Baptisms — Petrus Jacobus (b. 21 Jun 1889) and Ockert Johannes Stefanus (b. 16 May 1894) | Father Petrus Jacobus Booijsen, mother Anna Catharina Sofia Benadi. |
31 January 1862 is not a date this archive had. It is a date it calculated, an hour earlier, by subtracting 29 jaar 3 maanden en 14 dagen from 14 Mei 1891 on a torn death notice. The two agree to the day. And the register spells the mother's name in full, in a hand a volunteer could read, thirty years before the death notice this archive misread as Alberts. The 1891 notices →
Two brothers, one Sunday
On 3 April 1869 two sons of the house were admitted to membership at Rustenburg together: Petrus Jacobus, born 20 April 1851, and Ockert Johannes Stephanus, born 15 September 1852. They are the first and second names on their mother's 1891 list, seventeen and sixteen at the time, and they are the two who appear again on their father's 1908 notice — one of them dead by then, the other signing it.
Ockert died at Klerksdorp on 16 January 1921, aged sixty-nine. That is a civil registration and it names no parents, which is the whole difficulty with civil death records in this country and the reason this archive keeps going back to Sterfkennisse.
Where a name goes once it is in
Ocken Johannes Oliefier, of the district of Cradock, had a grandson called Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen — who had a nephew called Ockert Johannes Stefanus, baptised at Rustenburg in 1894. Three generations of a forename that came into this family with one marriage, and this archive could not account for any of them a day ago.
The other direction runs the same way. Hendrik Stephanus Nicolaas Booyen was born on 4 January 1882 and named for his uncle — who was twenty at the time and would be dead on his father's farm before the boy was ten. The nephew lived until 8 October 1959, at Kempton Park, and outlived the man he was named for by sixty-eight years. The namesakes →
South Africa, Netherdutch Reformed Church Registers (Pretoria Archive), 1838–1991 · FamilySearch 1:1:QPLV-KSW2, 1:1:4ZCG-XRZM, 1:1:4ZCG-XRN2, 1:1:Q57R-8CPN, 1:1:QPLK-N324, 1:1:CSNF-M5N2. Transvaal Civil Death 1869–1954 · 1:1:W9CB-BNMM. All read 13 September 2026. No image is available for any of the church entries.
1908 & 1932 · The second Willem Hermanus — married at sixteen and twenty-two, dead in Booysens
This archive has had Willem Hermanus Booyzen of Indwe as 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 then nothing at all after 1910. Two things are new here. The marriage register page itself has now been read, and it is worth reading. And the end of him has been found: he died in a Johannesburg hospital on 29 July 1932, an ex-miner, and was buried at Brixton two days later.
| Column | William Hermanus Booyzen | Susanna Adriana Roodt |
|---|---|---|
| Ouderdom | 22 | 16 |
| Staat | Jongman | Jongedochter |
| Rang of beroep | MIJNWERKER | — |
| Woonplaats | Dugmore Mijn | Dugmore Mijn |
| Geboden of licentie | na huwelijksgeboden | geboden |
| Toestemming | — | OUDERS — she was sixteen |
Married in the Ned. Geref. Kerk at Indwe. Signed W. H. Booyzen and S. A. Roodt, before D. N. Claase and C. J. Slabbert, and checked against the original register by J. J. Knight.
And twenty-four years later, Johannesburg
The form, as completed
| Name | WILLIAM HERMAN BOOYZEN |
| Age | 47 years — born about mid-1885 |
| Birthplace | Cape Province |
| Condition | Married |
| Occupation | EX MINER (told) UNDERGROUND |
| Died | 29 July 1932, Johannesburg Hospital |
| Residence | 62 Langford Street, BOOYSENS, Johannesburg |
| Cause | Perforated duodenal ulcer; general peritonitis; pulmonary tuberculosis |
| Last illness | about one day in hospital |
| Informant | an occupier of the Johannesburg Hospital. No relative signed. |
Why this is him
What agrees
Ex miner, underground. He was a mijnwerker at Dugmore Mijn in 1908 and the word
appears on no other Booyzen document this archive holds.
Born Cape Province. Indwe.
Married. Since 1908.
Forty-seven in July 1932 against twenty-two in September 1908 — which makes him
forty-six. One year.
Brixton Cemetery, 31 July 1932, where the burial register gives his birth as 1885
and where this family already buries its Johannesburg dead: Anna J. Mary Booyzen in 1914,
John Barry Booyzen in 1916, George Downing Daschner in 1925.
And “Sasanna Adriana Booyzen” was buried at Johannesburg in 1968 — his widow, under
his name, thirty-six years after him.
What does not
No parents are named, because a South African civil death registration does not ask for
them unless the deceased is under ten. That is the whole reason this archive keeps going back to
Sterfkennisse, and it is why this identification is marked
Inferred and not documented.
FamilySearch indexes his age as 44. The form says 47. Read the image, not the index
— a lesson this site learned twice today.
The occupation itself was “told” to the clerk, by a hospital official who wrote the word in
brackets. Nobody who knew him was in the room.
His father died of a stomach ulcer at Indwe in 1905, aged fifty-four. This man died of a perforated duodenal ulcer at Johannesburg in 1932, aged forty-seven. Twenty-seven years and eight hundred kilometres apart, and the same organ.
He left the coal at Indwe for the gold on the Rand, as the whole family did, and he was living at 62 Langford Street in Booysens — a Johannesburg suburb that has nothing to do with this family and is spelled like it. He was in hospital about a day. The man who reported his death was the hospital's own officer. The atlas → · Open questions →
South Africa, Civil Marriage Records, 1801–1974 · FamilySearch 1:1:6ZHR-PCSV, film 007729488 image 02719. South Africa, Transvaal, Civil Death, 1869–1954 · 1:1:736J-96W2, film 007731503 image 01056. Johannesburg Cemetery Records · 1:1:6N1B-JVP9 and 1:1:6J3R-2Q1R. Read 13 September 2026.
1915 · The death notice, read entire at last
Estate 925, Grahamstown, stamped 18 April 1915. This archive has shown the top of this page for weeks and quoted four lines from it. The children's list is further down, and it contradicts this site in two places.
The form, as completed
| 1. Name | John Barry |
| 2. Birthplace | At sea (exact whereabouts unknown), British |
| 3. Parents | John Barry (address unknown) Barry, born Neagle (Christian names and address unknown) |
| 4. Age | 83 (about) |
| 5. Occupation | Carpenter and builder |
| 6. Residence | Manorowen, Barkly East District |
| 7a. Wife | Margaret Wilhelmina Elizabeth Barry, born Kolbe — died 2nd August 1912, in community |
| 7c. Married at | Burghersdorp (probably) |
| 8. Died | 3rd August 1903, on farm Manorowen |
| 11–14 | movables yes · immovables no · over £300 yes · will no |
Eight children, where the registration said eleven
| As typed | What this archive has |
|---|---|
| John Augustus Barry | A son of the same name as his father's — and the reason this site has been calling the father "John Augustus Barry I". Both his own documents call him simply John Barry. |
| James Henry Barry | The second son. He signed this form, and died at Barkly East on 23 June 1939. |
| George Augustus Barry | New. |
| Henry Nicholas Barry | Hendrik Nicholaas — who married Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman and signed his own daughter's death registration in 1912. |
| Frederick Fortunatus Barry | Carries the Kolbe name. |
| Richard Peter Barry | Present at his father's death in 1903, and the name on the Cape Rebel roll. |
| Margaret Mary Bedford, born Barry, married to Tom Bedford | Margaretha Louisa Maria, m. Thomas Bedford 1875. |
| Kathleen Mary Boyson, born Barry, married in community of property to William Boyson | The only Booyzen marriage on the list, and it is spelled Boyson by an English clerk. |
Dorothea Regina Barry and Ruben Jacobus Josuah Barry are not on it. This archive has carried both as children of John Barry, "named on the 1915 death notice". They are not named on it. What the registers do hold is a Dorothea Regina baptised at Slang River in 1892 and a Ruben Jacobus Hosea baptised at Dordrecht in 1888 — both children of Henry Nicholas Barry and Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman, so grandchildren, not children. What was taken back →
And eight is not eleven. The 1903 registration, made by Richard Barry twelve years earlier, answers the printed question "the total number of children deceased has had" with eleven. This list has eight. Three children died between 1903 and 1915, or before, and this archive cannot yet name one of them. Open questions →
One more thing worth noticing. The form asks where the marriage took place and the answer is "Burghersdorp (probably)". A son of the house, writing twelve years after his father's death and three after his mother's, does not know where his parents were married and says so in brackets. It sits beside line 3, where he gives his grandmother's surname as Neagle and admits he has neither her Christian names nor an address.
This is the same failure this archive has been tracking since 1840, in a family that wrote in English and filed with a solicitor. Six death notices here fail to name a parent properly; two of them are John Barry's and his wife's.
What is still in there
This was one pass over two profiles. The tree holds far more.
| Profile | Photos | |
|---|---|---|
| George Augustus Kolbe (1802–1844) | 23 | plus 4 biographies — the 1820 Settler; by far the richest record in the ancestry |
| Johan Gottlieb Kolbe (1765–1845) | 10 | the Bond Street tailor |
| Anna Johanna Maria Pretorius (1906–1944) | 9 | |
| Margarietha Wilhelmina Elizabeth Barry (1880–1961) | 9 | |
| Catherine Maria Sophia "Kathleen" Barry (1859–1940) | 8 | |
| John Augustus Barry I (1819–1903) | 6 | plus 2 biographies |
| Margaretha Kolbe (1826–1912) | 6 | |
| Petrus Jacobus Booysen (1788–1876) | 4 | |
| Johanna Catharina Mountjoy (1819–1863) | 3 | |
| Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen (1929–2013) | 2 |
Five further images already downloaded from Willem Hermanus's and George's profiles are not yet read (the 1851 baptism has since been read, above, from the archive scan): the 1891 birth of Catherine Mary Sophia, a Johanna Catharina birth entry, the Anna–George marriage certificate, and two further pages of death information.