The namesakes
In this family a forename is inherited property. It travels through daughters as reliably as a surname travels through sons, it survives a change of surname, and it goes on being given long after the person it came from is dead.
Why this is not decoration
In this family a forename is inherited property. It travels through daughters as reliably as a surname travels through sons, it survives a change of surname, and it survives the death of the person it came from. Three times it has also produced an error in this archive, because two people of one name in two generations look exactly alike in an index.
Read these lists and the family's own idea of itself is visible in a way no document states: who was worth remembering, whose side of the family was being honoured, and which relationships mattered enough to be carried for a century.
The first list is the strangest. The name this family has repeated for five generations belongs to a man with no blood relation to any of them.
Willem Hermanus
The name enters through a step-relation with no blood tie to any Booyzen, and is still being given to children a century and a half later.
| Who | When | What they are to the name |
|---|---|---|
| Willem Hermanus Pieterzen | d. bef. 1817 | Anna Catharina Slier's FIRST husband. Not a Booyzen, not a Mountjoy, and no blood relation to either. |
| Willem Hermanus Pieterzen | the son | His son by her, and godfather at the 1851 Graaff-Reinet font — half-brother to Johanna Catharina Mountjoy. |
| Willem Hermanus “William Henry” Booyzen | 1851–1905 | Named at that font for the godfather standing over it. Generation four of the direct line. |
| Willem Hermanus Booyzen of Indwe | c. 1886 | The miner. An eighth child this archive did not know it had until the register turned him up. |
| Willem Hermanus Booyzen of Dugmore | b. 31 May 1908 | Baptised at Indwe, entered “onecht”, his grandmother standing godmother. |
| Willem Hermanus “Willy” Booyzen | 1925–1996 | Eldest of the Johannesburg family. |
| William Herman Daschner | b. c. 1915 | And out through a daughter into a third surname. |
This archive published “Willem Hermanus is a Booyzen name” and withdrew it. Three documents name the first husband three ways — Harmanus Pieterze in 1817, William Pietersen in 1840, Willem Hermanus Pieterzen in 1851 — and the man they name married into the line and died before it started.
Catherine Maria Sophia
A Barry name that outlives the Barry surname by eighty years.
| Who | When | What they are to the name |
|---|---|---|
| Catherine Maria Sophia “Kathleen” Barry | 1859–1940 | The last Barry of the surname in this line. She married a Booyzen in 1879. |
| Catharina Maria Sophia Booysen | 1891–1946 | Baptised at Barkly Oost, “named for her mother entire”. She married a Daschner at Indwe. |
| Catherine Mary Sophia Daschner | a major by 1942 | Her eldest daughter — the third of the name, and the second surname it has crossed. |
| Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen | 1929–2013 | And back into the Booyzens, on the direct line, the hinge to the Lerena archive. |
A fifth carries it too: Catharina Mary Sophia Däschner, born at Indwe on 11 March 1909, baptised there that May.
Petrus Jacobus
1788, 1812, 1839, 1904, 1934. Two of them are on the direct line and three are not, and an index cannot tell them apart.
| Who | When | What they are to the name |
|---|---|---|
| Petrus Jacobus Booysen | 1788–1876 | Generation six. Died at Brakfontein, district Rustenburg, with nothing to leave. |
| Petrus Jacobus Booysen | 1812–1884 | Generation five. The farmer at Zevenfontein who signed his wife's death notice. |
| Petrus Jacobus Booysen | b. 10 Sep 1839 | Third child on the 1863 death notice. |
| Petrus Jacobus Booyzen | b. 29 Dec 1904 | Baptised with a Z at Middelburg, a year before the Indwe sheet spelled it with an S. |
| Petrus Jacobus “Piet” Booyzen | 1934–2003 | Youngest of the Johannesburg family. |
Three of these share one page on this site, because merging them silently would be worse than saying so.
Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus
An uncle and a nephew, both of this name, both connected to an estate filed in 1885.
| Who | When | What they are to the name |
|---|---|---|
| Gerthardus Lodewikus Booysen | no dates | Generation seven — the top of the male line, and the source of the name. |
| Jan Gerthardus Lodewikus Booijsen | 1818–1885 | His grandson. Fifth on the 1876 Sterfkennis; died at Vaalbank, district Lichtenburg. THE ESTATE IS HIS. |
| Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus Booysen | b. 4 Dec 1855 | His great-grandson, seventh on the 1863 death notice. This archive gave him the uncle's estate and a death date to match. Both are withdrawn. |
| Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus Booyzen | aged 2 | And a third, who died in a concentration camp — of the western Transvaal family this archive spent months insisting was somebody else's. |
The error is on the corrections page. A year was read off a file number, written into a man's life as a death date, and then cited back as though it were evidence.
The Barry names, after the Barrys
The surname stops in 1859. The names do not stop at all.
| Who | When | What they are to the name |
|---|---|---|
| Catherine Mary Sophia Daschner | eldest daughter | Kathleen Barry's own name, third generation running. |
| Margaret Wilhelmina Elizabeth Jeanette van Jaarsveld | born Daschner | The Barry name that also runs down the Pretorius side and reaches Maggie Booyzen in 1926. |
| William Herman Daschner | b. c. 1915 | For his grandfather Willem Hermanus. |
| Richard Peter Daschner | b. 8 May 1922 | For his great-uncle Richard Peter Barry of Manorowen. |
| Henry James Daschner | b. 25 Feb 1932 | For his uncle Henry James Booyzen. |
| George Downing Daschner | born and buried 1925 | AND GEORGE DOWNING TOO — buried at Brixton, Johannesburg, the year he was born. A second of the name died in 1998. |
Six of eleven children. When the Cape Rebel roll produces a Richard Peter Barry of Jerpoint, the name is evidence of a family and not of an individual — and this archive still marks that identification unproven.
Carolina Isabella Margaretha Aletta
Fourteen months old when she died. Four years later her parents used the name again, and it is still running two generations on.
| Who | When | What they are to the name |
|---|---|---|
| Carolina Deybella Margrietta Alletta Botha | c. 1844 – 1902 | The grandmother. Born in the district of Cradock, died at her own house at Dordrecht. |
| Carolina Isabella Margaretha Aletta Mountjoy | 15 Aug 1896 – 25 Oct 1897 | Baptised at Dordrecht three weeks after she was born, named for her grandmother entire, and dead at fourteen months in Wodehouse. |
| Carolina Isabella Margaretha Aletta Mountjoy | b. 8 Nov 1901 | Baptised at Aberdeen, and given the whole name again. She married Hendrik Stefanus Palm. |
| Carolina Isabella Margaretha Aletta | b. 1920 | And a granddaughter, twenty-four years after the first of the name was buried. |
Replacement naming — a child who dies young and a later child given the same name — is well attested in these congregations and is exactly how a records-matcher invents one person out of two. Here the dates make it unmistakable: a death in October 1897 and a birth in November 1901. This archive keeps the two apart, and says which is which.
Fortunatus
It comes out of the London Kolbes and ends up on a Booÿsen born in the year the war began.
| Who | When | What they are to the name |
|---|---|---|
| Frederik Fortunatus Kolbe | of the London Kolbes | The source of the name. |
| Frederick Fortunatus Barry | — | Carried into the Barrys by the Kolbe marriage of 1850. |
| Frederik Fortsenatus Booÿsen | b. 1899 | And into the Booysens, spelled with a diaeresis, in 1899. |
Ruben, a Schoeman name, travels the same way into the Barrys — Ruben Jacobus Josuah Barry.
The two Gertrudes
Not a duplicated record. Two children, two death certificates, two cemeteries.
| Who | When | What they are to the name |
|---|---|---|
| Gertrude Elizabeth Booyzen | 11–15 May 1946 | Four days old. Queen Victoria Hospital. |
| Gertrude Booyzen | 11 May 1947 | Six hours old, entry 3920, Turf Club Nursing Home. A different hospital and a different cemetery. |
Born on the same date a year apart, and both named for the same person. This archive checked it precisely because it looked like an indexing error, and it is not one.
And it runs the other way too
The same habit, observed from a second direction and in a second family — which is what makes it a habit rather than a coincidence.
| Who | When | What they are to the name |
|---|---|---|
| Jan Dirk Abraham Francois Mountjoy | b. 3 Sep 1891 | For his mother's father, Jan Dirk Abram Frans van Niekerk of Dordrecht. |
| Carolina Isabella Margaretha Aletta Mountjoy | b. 15 Aug 1896 | For his mother's mother. |
| Maria Sophia Mountjoy | b. 23 Oct 1898 | For his mother. |
| Herklaus Johannes Mountjoy | b. 16 Feb 1904 | For his father. |
| Willem Hermanus Mountjoy | b. 10 Apr 1915 | And the Booyzen name, into the Mountjoys, twenty-six years after the two families stood at the same font at Barkly Oost. |
Five of the eight children of Hercules Johannes Mountjoy and Maria Sophia van Niekerk are named for a grandparent or a parent. These come from the Dutch Reformed INDEX and not from the register images, and the person pages say so.
And into a family called Keys
The habit again, in a family this archive did not know existed until this afternoon.
| Who | When | What they are to the name |
|---|---|---|
| William Henry Keys | b. 1854 | Married a Johanna Catharina Mountjoy. Their children were baptised at Dordrecht, Burgersdorp and Barkly East between 1878 and 1897. |
| James Jonathan Keys | b. 18 Nov 1883 | Baptised at Dordrecht — and named for James Jonathan Mountjoy, the retired builder of Barkly East. |
| Herklaas Edward Johannes Keys | b. 9 Feb 1897 | Named for Herklaas — Hercules Johannes Mountjoy. |
| Maria Annie Sophia Keys | b. 21 Nov 1889 | Maria Sophia, which is both a Mountjoy and a van Niekerk name. |
| Richard Pieter Kolbe Barry | b. 1899 | And on the other side of the family, a Barry carrying the rebel's forename and the Settler's surname in one. |
All from the index rather than from register images, and the person pages say so. Three surnames now carry these forenames out of the family that coined them: Daschner, Keys, and van Jaarsveld.
What it costs
The same habit that makes this family legible makes it dangerous to index. Three of this archive's corrections are name collisions, and one of them stood for weeks: an estate filed in 1885 was given to the wrong Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus, and a death date was invented to fit.
So this site does not merge people on a name. Where two people share one, they share a page and the page says so out loud; where a name is carried by more than one person, every chart and every register row keeps them apart. What was taken back → · Everyone → · The surname →