Open questions

Who were Gerthardus Lodewikus Booysen's parents?

STILL BLOCKING, and the named lead is now exhausted at the Cape depot. The queue pointed at the estate papers of his wife MAGDELENA ELISABETH DE BEER, d. 1843. The Cape Town Archives Repository has been searched under DE BEER + MAGDELENA, BEER + MAGDELENA + ELISABETH, BOOYSEN + MAGDELENA, BOOIJSEN + MAGDELENA, BOOYSEN + GERTHARDUS, BOOYSEN + GERHARDUS, BOOYZEN + GERHARDUS and BOOYSEN + LODEWIKUS/LODEWICUS. There is no estate file for her, and none for him. One near-miss worth recording and NOT adopting: KAB NCD 2/1: 49, a notarial will of 1793 for 'JAN BOOYSEN, MARRIED TO THE LATE MAGDALENA DE BEER' — wrong husband's name, and a wife already dead fifty years before ours. It shows Booysen–de Beer was not a unique pairing, which is a warning about the tree rather than a lead. WHAT HAS CHANGED, 10 September 2026: the 1876 Rustenburg Sterfkennis of his son now names BOTH of them in line 3 — "Gerthardus Lödewikus Booijsen" and "Magdalena de Beer". That does not answer this question, which is about HIS parents, and the entry stays blocking. But generation seven is no longer an assertion of the family tree, the 1793 Jan Booysen will can be set aside rather than merely resisted, and the search has a new country to run in: the Transvaal probate series, where this family turns out to have been living from at least the 1870s.

Where to look: CONFIRMED A SECOND TIME, from an older source. The Master of the Supreme Court's own index of death notices 1834–1912 has been read on film at the “Beer, de” pages: the Magdalena de Beers in it are Magda Catha du Plessis (1872), Magda de Beer (1865), Magda Vermeulen (1883), Magda Eliz Troskie (1863), Magda Jacomina Nel (1850) and Magda Greef (1839/40). No Magdelena Elisabeth, and nothing in 1843. So the absence is not an artefact of the modern NAAIRS index. What is left is the published Suid-Afrikaanse Geslagsregisters Booysen genealogy, and Dutch Reformed baptism registers for Graaff-Reinet and Paarl 1740–1790 read page by page rather than by index — his son was baptised at Graaff-Reinet in 1788. And now, newly available: the Transvaal Master’s series, where the same son died in 1876 — Weeskamer records, Rustenburg district registers, and the estates of the seven newly-named siblings.

Is there a Booysen on a Cape Rebel roll? — NO. But there is a BARRY, and the estate route to identifying him is now closed.

The Anglo-Boer War Museum's register of 12,792 Cape Rebels holds 26 Booysens, every one from the Northern Cape or Griqualand West. 'Booyzen' returns nothing in any of the fifteen registers. THE SURNAME BARRY HAS NOW BEEN SEARCHED, as this entry said it should be, and it returns four: BARRY, FRED J., plaasboer of IVANHOE, district BARKLEY-OOS/WODEHOUSE, TRIED JUNE 1901 — the same district and the same month as Daniel Willem Schoeman of Caerlaverock, in whose house the family married five weeks later; BARRY, RICHARD PETER, plaasboer of JERPOINT — and Richard Peter Barry is Kathleen Barry's brother, the R. P. Barry who signed his mother's 1915 death notice at Manorowen, Barkly East; plus Adolf Barry of Keimoes and Thomas Andrew Barry of Oudtshoorn, neither relevant. Identity is not proven — the register gives no birth dates or parents — but the claim that this family was rebel country now has two men of its own surname in its own district.

Where to look: Birth dates or parents for the two men, to close the identification: Cape Rebel trial files for Barkly East and Wodehouse, June 1901; and the published three-volume Rebel Record. Also JERPOINT — an Irish abbey name, joining Manorowen and Caerlaverock as farm names in this district, and the first Irish place name found near the Barrys.

Who was “D. W. Schoeman” of Caerlaverock?

ANSWERED IN PART. The Cape Rebel register holds DANIEL WILLEM SCHOEMAN, plaasboer, of CAERLAVEROCK, district Wodehouse–Barkly East, TRIED AS A CAPE REBEL IN JUNE 1901 — the month before the family married in his house. A second rebel, Christiaan F. Klopper, farmed the same place and was tried the same month. What remains open is whether he was also the COMMANDANT D. Schoeman of Labuschagne's Nek: the record's Commando field is blank, and there is a cluster of D. W. Schoemans in the same division (Wolwekloof, Waschbank, both tried 1 May 1901).

Where to look: The Boer Officers register (514 records; a surname search reports 2 Schoemans, but the filtered list would not display); the Barkly East treason files for a sentence; Cape deeds for Caerlaverock; and the family of Ruben Schoeman of Barkly Oost.

Were the women and children in a camp? — SEARCHED, AND NOT FOUND.

The Anglo-Boer War Museum's fifteen registers contain no camp list at all, so this entry named the wrong source. The right one is the University of Cape Town's British Concentration Camps of the South African War 1900-1902 database, and it has now been searched. BOOYZEN returns 5, and every one is Transvaal — Gert Jacobus, aged 2, died Johannesburg camp, farm Rietvallei, district Marico; Gertruida Magdalena, aged 19, died Vereeniging camp, farm Rietvlei, district Heidelberg; Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus, aged 2. None from the Cape. BARRY returns 0 in the entire database. Booysen with Catherine, Kathleen, John Barry, or Willem Hermanus all return 0, as does Booyzen with Catharina. So no member of this family has been found in a camp. IMPORTANT CAVEAT: that database is built largely from camp DEATH lists and surviving registers, so it records who died far better than who was interned and walked out. Absence here is much weaker evidence than presence would have been, and this claim is NOT disproved — only unsupported.

Where to look: Cape camp registers proper rather than death lists — Aliwal North is the camp nearest Barkly East. Also the Cape Colony refugee and 'undesirables' returns, which handled rebel families in the Cape districts and are not in the UCT database.

Is the letter in the 1879 signature a z or an s?

LARGELY EMPTIED, and by an answer rather than a failure. The archive scan of the 1851 Graaff-Reinet baptism register shows the father written unambiguously as BOOYZEN — and, three lines below in the same hand and ink, the godparents written twice as PIETERZEN. The Pietersens changed no name: -zen is simply how Dutch writes the patronymic ending, and this clerk wrote it that way for everyone. A z-shaped letter in a Cape Dutch hand is therefore not evidence of intent, and the 1879 signature can no longer carry the weight this archive put on it. What the question was really asking — when did the z start? — is not answerable from letterforms at all.

Where to look: Nothing further in the handwriting. The change itself now rests on the 1905 sheet (two spellings of one name on one page), the tree's recorded 'Former name: Booysen', and the distribution data.

Was John Augustus Barry Irish, English, or born at sea? — ANSWERED. IRELAND.

ANSWERED, 13 September 2026, by a document twelve years older than the one this archive had been arguing from. The 1903 REGISTRATION of his death — entry 74, district Barkly East, made by his son RICHARD BARRY, who was present when he died — enters question 5 as “IRISHMAN BORN IN IRELAND”. It also gives his age as eighty-four years two months, his trade as CARPENTER, his residence and place of death as MANOR OWEN Ward IV, his death as 25 AUGUST 1903, and the number of his children as ELEVEN. The 1915 death notice that typed “at sea, exact whereabouts unknown, British” was sworn by a different son twelve years after the fact. Where the two disagree this archive now follows 1903: it is closer to the man, its informant was in the room, and it is a statutory registration rather than an estate paper. THE OLD TEXT OF THIS ENTRY FOLLOWS. PARTLY ANSWERED. The 1915 death notice is now read: it types his birthplace as “At sea (exact whereabouts unknown), British” and his mother as “born Neagle”. What remains is the other two documents, and the question of who his parents actually were.

Where to look: The two 1903 death certificates named in the tree note; Cape Mounted Rifles records at Johnson’s Leap; Cork Nagle/Neagle baptisms around 1819; passenger lists 1819–1820. Also new: why a farm in Barkly East is called MANOROWEN, a village in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Break the John Barry (1796–1853) conflation.

One profile holds a Yorkshire farmer of Bilsdale and a man who died at de Bruins Poort in the Cape.

Where to look: The 1841 and 1851 England censuses for Holly Bower, Bilsdale; St Hilda's Bilsdale burial register; the Cape death record for de Bruins Poort. Separate them and see which, if either, is the father.

Who was Petrus Jacobus Booysen's second wife? — ANSWERED. JOHANNA MARGARITHA PRETORIUS.

ANSWERED, and by a christening rather than a death. The archive had spent this question on death notices: his own 1884 notice, which enters him as married twenty-one years after his first wife died but never asks her name; and his son Stephanus Francois's of 1940, where the widow wrote only 'oorlede' for both parents. The mistake was looking at deaths. A BAPTISM NAMES BOTH PARENTS — and the child whose birth date the 1884 notice gives to the day, GERT JACOBUS, BORN 19 JANUARY 1870, was baptised on 19 June 1870. The register reads: Oud: PETRUS JACOBUS BOOYZEN en JOHANNA MARGARITHA PRETORIUS. Read from the image, not the index. And the witnesses are worth as much as the answer: PETRUS JACOBUS BOOIJZEN JUNIOR, born 1839, and MAGDALENA JOHANNA FRANCINA BOOIJZEN, born 1853 — the third and sixth children on the 1863 death notice. Two children of the first marriage stood godparent to the first child of the second.

Where to look: Her own dates and parentage; the marriage itself, now bounded to 1863–January 1870; and whether Izak (1864) is hers too. Note and do not chase: Pretorius is also the surname of Anna Johanna Maria Pretorius, who married into this family in 1924 — but it is among the commonest surnames in the Cape and a coincidence is not a link.

Extract what is left of the photographs and biographies. — DONE.

COMPLETE, and this entry was carrying three stale claims of its own. It said George Kolbe's 1803 baptism was 'downloaded and unread' — it had in fact been read and published (born 7 Dec 1802, baptised 2 Feb 1803, son of John Gottlob and Mary, at St Anne's Soho). It listed a 'Johanna Catharina birth' as unread — that image is the 1889 Doop Register spread already transcribed, pages 212-213, with the Booyzen baptism on one page and the Mountjoy baptism on the other. It listed 'george death information' as unread — that is the 1947 death form already published. Of everything on the two profiles exactly one image was genuinely unread, and it has now been read: the 1891 baptism at Barkly Oost of CATHARINA MARIA SOPHIA BOOYSEN, born 22 April 1891, a daughter of Willem Hermanus and Kathleen new to this archive.

Where to look: Nothing on these profiles. The remaining unextracted profiles are the ones this entry already names and none is a document set: Anna Pretorius, Margarietha Barry and Kathleen Barry hold photographs rather than records, and the five Kolbe children's death records are the only document group left.

Confirm the 1820 Settler voyage independently. — CONFIRMED, and it turned up a second lie.

CHECKED against the settler roll for Owen's party. Every date the tree carried is right: Gravesend 3 December 1819, the Nautilus, Table Bay 17 March 1820, Algoa Bay 14 April 1820, fifty-two settlers. The roll adds an occupation nobody had — he is entered as a CHEMIST, not the preacher or farmer this archive knew. And it adds ages: 'KOLBE, George Augustus 20. Chemist. w Margaret 19.' He was born 7 December 1802 and the ship sailed four days before his seventeenth birthday; she was born 23 February 1803. They were SIXTEEN AND SIXTEEN. Set beside the 1819 marriage allegation, where both swore they were twenty-one at sixteen and fifteen, that is two age overstatements in one year on two official documents. Whether the second was theirs or the party organiser's cannot be told from the roll.

Where to look: The Colonial Office settler papers themselves, rather than a compiled transcript — CO 48 series — which would show whether the ages were sworn or simply written down.

Did the boys work on the mines? — YES. ONE DID, AND THIS ARCHIVE HAD SAID THERE WAS NONE.

The last line of the testimony, now tested as far as it can be from here. No Booyzen mining record appears anywhere in the national archives index, searched across ALL repositories for MINE, MINER and MYN. That index covers government files rather than private company employment registers, so the absence is weak on its own — but it is not on its own. Every occupation this archive has actually read for these men points somewhere else: Willem Hermanus is a boer in 1879 and a MASON in 1905; George Downing Mountjoy is a BOOMKWEKER, a tree nurseryman, in 1924 and a CLERK ON THE SOUTH AFRICAN RAILWAYS at his death in 1947; his grandfather was a farmer and his great-great-grandfather a saddler. Not one miner among them. THAT SENTENCE IS NOW WITHDRAWN. The Indwe marriage register of 21 September 1908 enters WILLIAM HERMANUS BOOYZEN, aged 22, jonkman, under Rang of Beroep as MIJNWERKER, living at DUGMORE MIJN — and his mother Kathleen Barry stood godmother at his son's font at Indwe three months later, which is how this archive knows whose son he is. So the last line of the testimony is supported, and mislocated: Indwe is a COAL town in the north-eastern Cape, this is 1908, and the testimony puts the mines after a train to Johannesburg that had plainly not yet been taken. The negative was built on the occupations this archive happened to have read, and it had not read this one because it did not know the man existed.

Where to look: Private records rather than public ones: Witwatersrand mining company employment registers, and Johannesburg street directories 1905–1935 for Booyzen at Forest Hill and Mayfair. Also the five Transvaal estate files now identified, which will state each man's occupation at death. And now, first: Dugmore colliery employment records if any survive, and the Indwe registers read forward from 1910 for the rest of this man's life.

Find the farm — and test the burning. THE COMPENSATION SERIES IS NOW NAMED, AND IT IS NOT NAME-INDEXED.

STILL UNTESTED, and two blind alleys closed now. He is a BOER (farmer, of Lady Grey) at his marriage in 1879 and a MASON at his death in 1905; something took the land away in between. The Anglo-Boer War Museum's Farm List was searched for Caerlaverock, Manorowen and Wolwekloof and returned nothing — but that register turns out to be an ORANGE FREE STATE LAND ROLL (farm number, morgen, square roods, owners), covering only Winburg, Fauresmith, Vrede, Rouxville, Bethlehem, Bloemfontein, Hoopstad, Kroonstad and Philippolis. A control search on 'Dordrecht' returns 670 Cape Rebels and 0 farms. The negative result is VOID, not informative.

Where to look: 13 September 2026: the Cape series is identified. It is the WAR LOSSES COMPENSATION COMMISSION, Cape Town Archives Repository, 1902 — the Cape's equivalent of the Transvaal CJC. KAB returns 454 documents for COMPENSATION and WAR, and 679 for LOSSES. BOOYZEN returns 39 documents in KAB overall and NONE of them in combination with LOSSES or COMPENSATION; BOOYSEN returns 2,370 overall and exactly one in combination, a WORKMEN'S Compensation Act claim at King William's Town in 1947. BUT THE ZERO IS WEAK AND THE CONTROL SAYS SO: SMIT, SCHOEMAN and BARRY also return nothing under LOSSES, and the two BOTHA hits turn out to be a 1935 locust and arsenical-poisoning stock claim from an entirely different series. The Commission's files are catalogued by sub-commissioner and volume, not by claimant, so a name search cannot reach them. What is left is the Commission's own claim registers, in the Reading Room at Roeland Street, which no search from here can substitute for. Also still untouched: Cape deeds and quitrent records for Barkly East, Lady Grey and Wodehouse, and Cape district and refugee-camp records.

Who were James Montjoy's parents? — ANSWERED, AND THE ANSWER IS THAT NOBODY KNEW.

READ. KAB MOOC 6/9/21 ref 4393 was located by interpolating reference numbers across film 007844936 and found at image 338 of 2,223. James Montjoy, saddler, born in 'Europe' about 1782, died at Cradock in September 1827 leaving a house and erf worth £90 and four children under nine. Line 3, Names of the Parents of the Deceased: NOT KNOWN — written thirteen years after his death by a relative who knew his trade, his property and his wife's first husband. It also settles two things: our tree's 1827 death date is RIGHT (the 1840 file date is the filing year, and the contradiction was this archive's error), and Anna Catharina was indeed the widow of a Pietersen, confirming the half-brother inference from the 1851 font.

Where to look: NOTHING FURTHER INSIDE SOUTH AFRICA, and the 1817 marriage register now proves it rather than assuming it. That register HAS been found and read: he married Anna Catharina Slier, widow of Harmanus Pieterzen, at Graaff-Reinet on 9 March 1817. Cape entries of that date routinely record where a party came from, and three couples on that very page are entered 'beide van Uitenhage' — but against James Montjoy there is a ruled dash and nothing. The blank is not an artefact of the 1840 notice being written thirteen years after his death; it was already there at his wedding while he stood in the room. THREE DOCUMENTS HAVE NOW BEEN LOCATED THAT THIS ARCHIVE HAD MISSED, because it filtered a search and wrote the filter up as the whole search: KAB MOOC 7/1/104: 42 — JAMES MOUNTJOY'S WILL of 1818, joint with ANNA CATHARINA SLIER, HIS WIFE, made a year after their marriage; KAB MOOC 7/1/104: 43 — the same pair again in 1827, the year he died; and KAB CO 3972: 17 — a Colonial Office memorial of 1834 from THE WIDOW OF J MOUNTJOY requesting remission of a fine, which is a petition in her own voice seven years after his death. A will of 1818 may state where the testator came from, and a memorial to the Colonial Office very often does. These are now the most likely documents in existence to break this wall, and none of them is digitised. As for the English end: FindMyPast returns 12,984 for the surname and birth year alone, and “a saddler in the Cape by March 1817” will not narrow that — the way in is a Cape arrival record, not an English birth record.

Who is in the "Kolbe–Downing" photograph?

A carte-de-visite captioned as George Augustus Kolbe and Margaret Downing cannot be them — the costume is c. 1875–1885, and they died in 1844 and 1867. The likeliest sitter is their son George Augustus Kolbe (b. 1836).

Where to look: the pencilled inscription on the card mount, at higher resolution than the tree holds; the photographer's imprint if the reverse survives; and the descendants who uploaded it. Also: who took it, and where.

Who are the Mountjoys of Barkly Oost? — ANSWERED

Found by accident, on the page opposite a Booyzen baptism: the Doop Register, Barkly Oost, 6 October 1889 records Hercules Johannes Mountjoy and Maria Sophia van Niekerk baptising a son, with Jakobus Jonathan Mountjoy and Maria Sophia Mountjoy among the witnesses.

This line descends from Johanna Catharina Mountjoy (1819–1863), of whom the archive has little more than a surname and a father who died in 1827. Here are three named Mountjoys in the right district, twenty-six years after her death.

Answered They are the descendants of Johanna Catharina Mountjoy's brother. George Mountjoy (b. 1823, Cradock), saddle maker, married Maria Sophia Botha at Cradock in 1848 and had thirteen children. Hercules Johannes (the father at the 1889 font) and James/Jakobus Jonathan (the witness, who died at Barkly East in 1937) are two of his sons. The child baptised that day, George Mountjoy (1889–1963), was a second cousin of the Booyzen daughter baptised in the same register three weeks earlier. The branch →

Now confirmed from originals The parentage no longer rests on a user-edited tree. The Dutch Reformed baptism register records Herculas Johannes Mountjoy, born 16 July 1866, baptised 29 July 1866, father George Mountjoy, mother Maria Sophia Botha. His 1941 death registration gives his age as 74 — a man born in July 1866 is 74 in May 1941. His marriage at Dordrecht on 8 October 1888, aged 22, is a year before the 1889 font. The chain closes.

James Jonathan is "James John." His estate is KAB MOOC 6/9/5047, ref 58379 (1938), and his wife's is the very next file, 58380 — Maria Louisa Bertha née Kumm. Their children's baptisms enter the father under both name forms and spell the mother's surname five ways (Kumm, Kuen, Kunn, Kum, Keem).

Hercules Johannes has no estate file at all. The Cape Town Archives were searched under MOUNTJOY (42 documents; all 22 dated 1930 or later read in full), MONTJOY (4), and MOUNTJOY combined with HERKLAAS, HERCULES, WODEHOUSE and BARKLY (0 each). The estates around him run 1938, 1939, 1943, 1946, 1948 — an unbroken sequence, so this is an absence rather than a gap in the index. The likeliest reading is an estate too small to report.

Tested again, and it holds The Cape probate collection has now been read for every indexed MOUNTJOY at once — 61 personas, the whole surname in the whole collection. Hercules Johannes returns exactly one hit, and it is his mother-in-law's. His name is written on her 1902 death notice, in the list of her children, and the index keys every name on a page. The absence is real, and this is what it looks like from the inside. Her notice →

What is left: the four small corrections for our own tree — Sleer/Slier vs Schleher (the 1863 death notice now settles this in favour of an l), the 1817 Graaff-Reinet marriage, Thomas Jacobus living to 1827, and the missing sibling Jacoba Catharina (1820–1842).

Why was Kathleen Barry a "Military Pensioner"?

Her 1940 death certificate records her, at eighty-two, as a Military Pensioner. Her husband had been dead thirty-five years and died of a stomach ulcer. This archive guessed a son killed in the First World War, with a dependant's pension.

SEARCHED — and the guess is wrong. The South Africa War Graves Project holds no Booyzen among the First World War dead (its two Booyzens died in 1944 and 1993), and of thirteen Booysen deaths in 1914–18, not one matches a son by forename — and most are in the Native Labour Corps, Cape Coloured Labour Regiment and Military Labour Bureau, units not open to a family recorded as "European" on every certificate this archive has read. Decisively: all her identifiable sons survived — dying in 1932, 1952, 1956, 1966 and 1980.

So the pension belongs to a man who served and came home — a disabled son with his mother as dependant, or another entitlement altogether.

Where to look now: the SANDF Documentation Centre, Pretoria (Personnel Archives and Reserves, 20 Visagie Street), which holds Union Defence Force attestation papers, personnel files and pension files from 1912. None of it is online, and it needs a written request. Note also that the CWGC site is behind a bot check and was not searched, and that FamilySearch's South African Defence collection is browse-by-image and not name-indexed.

Request sent, 9 Sept 2026 A letter has gone to the Documentation Centre at both published addresses, asking three things: whether a pension file exists in her name; on whose service it rested; and whether any of her eight named sons appears in UDF attestation or personnel records for 1914–18 or 1939–45, and whether an attestation names his mother as next of kin. See requests/sandf-documentation-centre-pension.md.

The strength of the request is that it runs the search backwards. We have no service number for any son — but we know there was a pension, and we know the pensioner's name, her exact address and her date of death. The pension registers can be searched on those.

Did any of the Bond Street money reach the Cape?

Johan Gottlieb Kolbe's 1842 will divides his residue among his children, with the issue of any dead child taking that child's share, and a later clause names "my said children or grandchildren" outright. George Augustus Kolbe died eleven months before his father. On paper his share therefore fell to his children at Burgersdorp — including Margaretha Kolbe, who married John Augustus Barry.

Where to look: the PCC estate and accounting papers behind the 1846 probate (TNA, PROB series); the Cape estate files for Margaret Downing (estate 4094, 1868) and for the Barry marriage settlement; and any correspondence between Timothy Duke of Lombard Street and the Cape.

Test the deeper Kolbe and Downing pedigrees

The tree carries Kolbe back to 1699 in Württemberg and Downing back to 1683, through the surnames Jung, Larman, Trick, Heard, Hooper and King. None of it has been tested, and Margaret Downing's own death notice names neither of her parents.

Where to look: London parish registers for St Anne's Soho and St Leonard's Shoreditch; Devon parish registers for Trick, Heard and Hooper; Württemberg Lutheran church books for Kolbe and Jung.