The papers in the house

The informant was not family. Rose Lilian Theys signed it on 28 March 1950 as “Present at death” and “Executrix Nominate” — the woman he lived with at No. 7 Forth Road, described in the liquidation account as a spinster and no relation. She could not name his parents. Nor did any of his three living adult sons supply them.

Cheryl Defranceski wrote to her English cousin in 2020: “My Father never discussed his parents with me or my siblings so we never knew anything about either of them.” That silence is now dated. It had already closed by March 1950.

What it does add. Three things this archive did not have.

1. He was a Catholic. Married at St Dominic’s, Wynberg, by Bertram W. Glynn, R.C. Priest, after banns. It is the first religious affiliation this archive has for him, and it is consistent with an Argentine, Italian or Spanish origin.
2. “Horse-dealer”, in 1911. Twenty years before the 1931 stables plans and twenty-nine before the passport says Trainer. He began as a dealer.
3. Both parties of Diep River. They were neighbours before they were married, and banns require settled local residence — so he was established at the Cape well before September 1911.

And a discrepancy, recorded rather than smoothed. The register makes the bride 27 last birthday. This archive carries Mary Septima Taylor born 17 September 1884, which would make her 26 that day — she turned 27 a fortnight after the wedding. Her Northam baptism of 30 October 1884 supports 1884, so the likely answer is that somebody rounded up to a birthday two weeks away. The Taylors →

What they do give. Rogue’s notice names his father ROBERTO LERENA — the anglicised Robert Paul form, written by his own widow in 1973. It ties Pablo Armando and Robert Paul together in a family document rather than in a clerk’s index. His mother is Mary Septima Lerena.

Neither son followed his father onto the turf. A retired railwayman and a salesman. The horses stopped with Pablo Armando.

And Nuno’s five children are listed, among them Cheryl Ann Lerena, minor — whose DNA is read on this archive’s DNA page — and Catherine Tertia, the third, standing beside her grandmother Mary Septima, the seventh. The naming habit runs the whole length of the family.

A discrepancy left standing. This archive’s register gives Rogue’s birth as 25 November 1905 from a Corpus Christi Wynberg baptism. The death notice and his identity number both say 6 December 1905. Eleven days. Both are recorded; neither is quietly preferred.

Roque Luis Armando. Anno 1905 die 25 mensis Nov. natus, et anno 1911 die 12 mensis Junii baptizatus est — Roque Lois Armando, filius Pablo Armando Lerena et Mary Septima (olim Taylor) conjugum. A me Bertram W. Glynn.

Read the dates. He was born 25 November 1905 and baptised 12 June 1911 — at five and a half years old, and three months before his parents married. The priest who baptised him, Bertram W. Glynn, is the same priest who married them at St Dominic’s that September, and he wrote conjugum — “of the spouses” — three months early.

And the godparents are the first Hispanic names ever found around him in the Cape: Patrinus fuit José Bretón (proxy); Matrina fuit María Luisa Bretón (proxy). Both by proxy — which is what a parish does when the real godparents are overseas. Two Spanish-named sponsors, standing in absentia, at the baptism of an Argentine’s first son. Nobody has ever looked for them.

Later annotations on the same entry: he married Rosalina Wilhelmina Chappell at St Joseph’s, Johannesburg, on 21 September 1936; and, as a widower, again at St Charles, Victory Park, Johannesburg, on 12 March 1966. The register confirms she was already a Chappell when he married her — which is the relationship the DNA clusters produced independently the same day.

Nuno Fernando, no. 4540, born 6 October 1924, baptised 16 November 1924 — six weeks, not five years. Godparents Michael Joseph Duddy and Mary Anne Duddy. And against the mother, in the priest’s hand: Mater Anglicana.

Marino. Not Lerena, and nothing like it phonetically. The three sons are exactly right — Louis is Roque Luis Armando, Cardo is Ricardo Juan Carlos, Nuno is Nuno Fernando — so the memory is anchored in real people. It is the surname that has drifted, or that was never Lerena in the first place.

Marino is one of the commonest surnames in Italy. This archive has argued from two companies’ independent readings of one granddaughter’s DNA that Pablo Armando carried Italian ancestry. Here, from an entirely separate direction, written down by an English historian before any DNA was tested, is a family memory that he was called Marino. The DNA →

The rest of the memory is wrong in an instructive way. He was no widower with three sons: the baptism names Mary Septima as Roque’s mother and the register calls them bachelor and spinster. What the Devon family were told was the respectable version of a woman who went out at nineteen and had a child six years before she married.

One more thing came out of that folder, and it is not this family’s. A 1991 burial index page for the FA— surnames, carrying Falco Carmine Antonio, Caterina, Filomena and Raffaele. It is misfiled here. It belongs to the Falco archive and it is left where it is, noted and untouched, because this estate does not mix its families.

What the convergence actually delivered. Not the Bailey cluster. Something duller and better: the Taylor maternal line is now corroborated in three independent places — a family tree that carries it back to John Brayley of 1747, an English cousin’s written history that carries the same people, and a match list in which Brayley, Temple and Walker all turn up as shared ancestral surnames at fourth-to-fifth-cousin distances.

For Mary Septima Taylor’s mother’s family, this archive moved from a wall to a documented ascent of six generations in an afternoon. For Pablo Armando it moved nothing at all.

Put two records side by side. This census was taken on 30 March 1851. John Brailey died on 4 May 1851, indexed in the St Thomas district — the district containing the county asylum at Exminster. So on census night he was alive, and he was not in the house. His wife is a lodger in his father’s home, described as married, with four children, five weeks before he died. Sue Rowbotham’s family history has a chapter called “The mystery of the missing husband and daughter”. Here is the household he is missing from, dated.

And it corrects two things and adds a person. John is five, which fits the tree’s 1845 birth and not the 1900 death index’s implied 1847 — the informant was wrong and the tree was right. Georgina is eight months old, so born about July 1850, and the tree’s “1851” is a year late. And Isabella, ten, born in the City of London, is a daughter this archive did not have — for whom Mary Ann Hellen would name her own second daughter twenty-three years later.

Controlled: Westleigh in 1851 was searched for Brayley first and returned zero. A Taylor search in the same parish and year returns twelve, so the parish is transcribed and the zero is real — and expected, since the family had moved to Bideford.

The tree’s own words, on a record. The current tree gives Mary Ann Hellen Brayley the occupation House Servant and nothing to support it. Here she is at eighteen, entered as House Servant in the household of Michael Prust, china dealer — and she went into service four doors from her mother, schedule 38 against her mother’s 27, on the same street.

And the family did not leave. Lower Gunstone in 1851 and Lower Gunstone in 1861; Mary Ann Hellen marries at Bideford in 1870; her mother dies at Bideford in 1900 aged 85; she and her brother die there the same year. Four generations on one street for at least fifty years. John is sixteen here, which puts his birth at 1845 for the third time — two censuses now agree against the one informant who said 1847 in 1900.

One age still does not fit and is recorded as not fitting. Peggy Reed is 78 in 1851, implying about 1773, against the tree’s 12 January 1777. She died in January 1858, eight years before the death index began carrying ages, so her gap cannot be closed from an index at all — it needs the Braunton baptism register.

What it settles. William Taylor is a retired army sergeant driving a cab — a trade the tree had mistakenly attached to an infant who died at nine months in 1825. His wife gives her birthplace as St Bartholomews, City of London, which is exactly what the tree claimed and exactly what the birth index has no registration for. And William J. and Kathleen G. are both twenty and both born at Bideford: the tree’s two children born in the same month, which read like a slip, are twins.

What it does not settle. Two children are missing from it — Isabella Temple, who would be sixteen, and Mary Septima, who would be six. A county-wide check of all 368 Devon Taylors born 1882–1886 does not find her either, and the obvious hypothesis — that she was with her grandmother — fails, because her grandmother is alone in an alms house. That null is soft, because FreeCEN’s Devon is transcribed parish by parish; Northam itself is complete, which is the only reason her absence from it counts for anything.

And the grandmother is in the same parish, found only by changing the spelling. The household above was found by searching Taylor. Searching Brayley in Northam in the same year turns up Georgina Brayley, widow, 77, “Living On Means”, born East Lothian — living alone in the ALMS HOUSE, a different enumeration district and a short walk from her daughter’s family. That completes a sentence the tree only half-wrote: it gives her occupation as “Monthly Nurse & Shoemaker Wife Pauper”, which has always read like three things run together. Follow her across four records and the whole life is there — “Shoemaker Wife” in 1851, a married lodger in her father-in-law’s house with her husband five weeks from dying in the county asylum; “Mangles Clothes” in 1861, a widow keeping her own household; the alms house in 1891; and a death at Bideford in 1900, aged 85.

A candidate, graded as a candidate. The same search finds Georgina Brayley, 20, general servant, born London Kilburn, in a draper’s household in Tower Street, Northam — which is precisely the pattern of Mary Ann Hellen herself, in service in a china dealer’s house at eighteen. The obvious reading is a granddaughter of Georgina Temple, most likely a daughter of John Walker Brayley, who was born in London and was twenty-six in 1871. None of that is proven here — the census states no relationship to anybody in this family.

The cost. A ranked list of archive files to buy, drawn up in good faith, whose top two entries were already in the house. Had it gone out unchecked it would have bought two documents twice, at R2,850 for the first file, and the second-ranked one does not even contain what the list said it would. It is logged as a correction.

The lesson, written down so it binds. This archive has a register of what has been read and a rule that a null is not a finding until a control says so. It had no rule at all about looking in the family’s own papers first. It has one now, and it is on the method page: before any list of documents to acquire, list the documents already held.

What it is worth. A marriage act, a religion, a trade nine years earlier than anything else, a birthplace that closes a question, a father named by his own daughter-in-law, and a blank line on a consular form that says more about the Rosario search than three weeks of reading registers did.