Method
Every claim here carries a label saying how well it is known. The labels are the point: an archive that presents testimony and documents in the same voice is not a history, it is a story with footnotes.
The five labels
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Documented | A named source with a reference, and where possible the scan. Most of this archive's documented claims trace to Dutch Reformed Church registers and to Cape and Transvaal probate records, cited by FamilySearch ark. |
| Inferred | A reasoned conclusion drawn from documented facts, with the reasoning written out so it can be overturned. The cousin marriage, the reading of the surname distribution, and the identification of the 1820 Settler are all inferences. |
| Family lore | Told, remembered, not corroborated. Kept because it is precious; labelled because pretending otherwise is how family myths become family history. |
| Superseded | Asserted in the family record, and now displaced by a document that says otherwise. |
| Disputed | Asserted somewhere in the record and contradicted somewhere else in it. Every one is listed. Disputed → |
The living are left out
Living people are omitted from this build entirely — not hidden, not gated, not present in the output.
Because this line reaches the present within three generations of Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen, that removes a large part of the story from public view. Cheryl Anne Lerena, David Defranceski's mother, appears only as a name and a birth year where the descent cannot be explained without her. Her siblings' living descendants do not appear at all.
A removal request is honoured within days, without argument and without requiring a reason.
Where this one starts
Unusually well. The Lerena archive began with almost nothing documented. This one begins with a MyHeritage tree of 15,643 people in which the Booyzen line is already carried back seven generations, and in which a large proportion of births, marriages and deaths already carry a FamilySearch citation to an original register.
That changes the job. The work here is not to find the family. It is to test what has been assembled — because a tree that good will be believed, and parts of it are wrong.
So this archive did three things the tree does not do:
- Listed every contradiction rather than choosing between them silently.
- Tested the family testimony against outside evidence — surname distribution, Cape Rebel district figures, the 1820 Settler record — instead of repeating it.
- Named what has not been searched, so the gaps are visible.
What "verified" on the tree does and does not mean
Many people in the source tree carry a tick and a star. Those are MyHeritage interface marks — confirmed Smart Matches and direct-ancestor flags. They are not source citations, and this archive does not treat them as evidence. A Smart Match means another user's tree agrees; it does not mean a register does.
Where this archive says Documented, there is a named record behind it, listed on Sources.
On quotation
The family's own testimony is quoted in full, because it is the family's and because paraphrasing it would smooth away exactly the details that make it testable. A long passage on Kitchener's clearance policy also sits in the source tree, copied there from a published history of the war; that passage is summarised and not reproduced, and its presence is reported as evidence of what the family believed rather than as evidence of what happened to them. The rebels →
Sibling archives
Same method, same author: The Defranceski (Istria), The Falco (Arienzo, Campania), The Lerena (Rosario, the Cape, Brisbane). The marriage of Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen to Nuno Fernando Lerena at Mayfair in 1949 is the hinge between this archive and the Lerena one.