Everything unproved, set out together

Hypotheses

Every proposition this archive is currently entertaining but has not proved — each with what suggests it, what would settle it, and how much weight it deserves. Set out together so that none of them can quietly harden into fact.

A hypothesis is not a finding. Nothing on this page may be cited as though it were. When one is proved it moves to the page it belongs to and is marked documented; when it is disproved it stays here, marked as such, so that nobody spends a second afternoon on it. Method →

1. Where the surname comes from

That Lerena is a Basque-formed house-name of the upper Ebro, not a reduction of Llerena in Badajoz.

For: Spain has exactly one real cluster of the name and it is La Rioja, at 39.6× the national density; Andalusia and Madrid sit at 1.4×, which is merely what population size predicts. La Rioja lies on the upper Ebro, immediately south of the Basque provinces, where Basque house-names in -ena ("the house of") spill into Castilian country. Extremadura does not appear in the Spanish distribution at all.
Against: Llerena has 36,828 bearers and Ll- does reduce to L- readily in Spanish-American registers.
To settle it: the La Rioja parish registers; and whether Lerena and Llerena ever alternate for one person in early River Plate records.

13 September 2026 — the test was met, and it answered the other way

The line above says what would settle it: whether Lerena and Llerena ever alternate for one person in early River Plate records. Following the 1866 Rosario act back through the Montevideo family produced a trunk, and at its root:

Sancho Llerena Aguilar, born Córdoba, Andalusia, 1767; a soldier; married at Canelones, Uruguay, 8 January 1791; resident at Montevideo; died 1832. Great-grandfather of both the Lerena Lenguas and the Lerena Traibel — and so of the Luis Lerena Lenguas named in the Rosario act.

Fourteen Uruguayan parish records are attached to him. They spell him Lerena in 1793, 1840 and 1858; Llerena in 1804, 1811, 1827 and 1830; and once, in 1828, Sancho de Llerena.

That last form is the strongest item in the list. De Llerena is the toponymic construction — of Llerena, the Badajoz town — and a Basque house-name in -ena does not take de.

It does not overturn the distribution. La Rioja really is where the spelling clusters in Spain today, and that cluster has to be something. The honest synthesis is that both can be true at once: a Basque-formed Lerena of the upper Ebro, and separately a River Plate Lerena that is a reduction of Andalusian Llerena, carried over by a soldier from Córdoba and smoothed to one l by Uruguayan clerks within a generation. For this archive only the second matters — the question was never where the name is dense in Spain, but where this family’s name came from.

Tier: the trunk and the attachments are secondary — FamilySearch Tree is user-submitted, and nobody here has opened the fourteen acts to confirm they are one man. What is checkable by anyone who looks is the narrower fact: the Uruguayan parish registers spell this family both ways. And no Juan Carlos appears anywhere in that tree.

Split in two, 13 September — the River Plate half now points to Andalusia The name →

1b. That the family was ITALIAN, not Spanish

That Juan Carlos or María Lerena was an Italian immigrant to Rosario, and the family’s name is nearer LERINA than Lerena.

For: a granddaughter’s DNA carries 0% Iberian and 11.1% Italian, northern-dominant. Her other three grandparents are English and Cape Afrikaner, so the Italian has nowhere else to come from; at one quarter it implies roughly 44% in him — about one Italian parent. The DNA →
For: it explains the missing marriage. A couple who married in Italy before emigrating would never appear in the Rosario register, which has now been read clean for 1867–1885.
For: his death was registered LERINA — treated here for a month as a clerk’s slip. CEMLA records Lerina as an Italian surname, arriving from Genova. The “error” may be the one document that got it right.
For: the register around his birth, read act by act, is full of Ligurian and Piedmontese names. Rosario in 1882 was the most Italian city in Argentina.
Against: ethnicity estimates are not records. At one quarter the noise is large, and MyHeritage is known to distribute Iberian across French, North Italian and Sardinian. And every indexed Lerena arrival at CEMLA is Española; it is the Lerina arrivals who are Italiana.
To settle it: a DNA match with a documented Italian or Argentine tree, and a sweep of the Rosario indexes under LERINA, which was never separately looked for.
Against, and it arrived within the hour: at low confidence all eight genetic groups are shown, and no Italian group is among the five that are legible — they are two South African, two British Isles, and the Río de la Plata one. The easiest confirmation was available and did not appear. Three group names remain unseen.
Against, 13 September, and this one is heavier: the Rosario baptism index has now been read end to end, 1731 to 1901, and the one Lerena in it is a Uruguayan from the Montevideo patriciate — a Lerena Lenguas married to a Juanicó, with an Oribe in the generation above. The surname in the River Plate has a documented home, and it is not Liguria. What was read →
Still standing, and not dismissed: the death certificate says LERINA, and nothing found today explains that. The four LERINA arrivals of 1889 remain excluded — but on their dates, not on a judgement about the surname, which was corrected the same day.

New, and weaker than when it was written — twice over The DNA →

1c. That the family came from URUGUAY, not Argentina

That Juan Carlos Lerena was a Uruguayan who came to Rosario, and that the Lerenas of the River Plate are a Montevideo house rather than a Santa Fe one.

For, and it is new: the Rosario baptism index has now been read end to end, both volumes, 1731 to 1901. The surname LERENA occurs once in a hundred and seventy years. The act behind that one entry was opened the same day, and it says of both parents: “naturales del E. Oriental” — natives of the Estado Oriental del Uruguay. The sweep →
For: the mother in that act is a Juanicó, and the father a Lerena Lenguas. Both are Montevideo names, not Santa Fe ones.
For: the godfather — another Don Luis Lerena — did not attend. He was represented by proxy. Godparents stand by proxy when they are somewhere else, and for this family the somewhere else is across the river.
For, by explaining four separate negatives at once: no Rosario baptism for Pablo Armando; none for Juan Carlos; no Lerena marriage at Rosario, 1867–1885; and no Lerena in the parish index at all but for one Uruguayan. A family that lived in a parish leaves baptisms. This one leaves nothing — because it was not there.
Against: no link has been shown between Luis Lerena Lenguas and Juan Carlos Lerena. Two men sharing a surname in one city sixteen years apart is a lead, not a relation. The 1866 child is emphatically not Pablo Armando’s sister.
Against: Pablo Armando himself was born at Rosario — documented twice over, on his passport and his enrolment card. Uruguayan origin for his father is not Uruguayan birth for him.
Where the DNA sits: awkwardly, and honestly so. The Río de la Plata genetic group that can only come from him spans both banks. It cannot tell Buenos Aires from Montevideo, and never could. What it does say is that the Argentine and the Uruguayan hypotheses are, genetically, the same hypothesis. The DNA →
To settle it: Uruguay, Registros Parroquiales, 1750–1930 — a baptism for Juan Carlos Lerena in the 1840s or 1850s, and a marriage to a María before 1882. Then Luis Lerena Lenguas and Julia Juanicó in Montevideo, whose own marriage would fix the generation above.

The same evening — two routes meet

The act names the father Luis Lerena Lenguas and the proxy godfather Don Luis Lerena. That pair is enough to find the household in published Uruguayan genealogy: Luis Lerena y Fernández (1811–1878), widower of a Oribe, married secondly Justiniana Lenguas González, daughter of Gen. Pedro Lenguas. Their children carry the compound. The Montevideo patriciate.

Two things follow. The proxy godfather gets a name — the child’s paternal grandfather, in Montevideo — and the child’s fifth given name is Justiniana, for that grandmother. The act and the genealogy describe one family, and neither was written with the other in view.

And one of his sons is already in this archive. Gilberto Justiniano Lerena Lenguas, Montevideo 1855 – 1912: co-founder of the Argentine Stud Book, breeder of the Quadruple Crown winner Old Man, the man for whom a Group 1 at Palermo was renamed in 1914. He has sat in this register since the 1895 Buenos Aires census, marked high interest, for a reason with nothing to do with Uruguay — Pablo Armando Lerena trained and owned racehorses.

That was always the loudest coincidence in the file, and it was set aside as a coincidence. It still is one. But the parish register of Rosario and the turf of Buenos Aires now arrive at the same Montevideo house from opposite ends, by methods sharing no assumption. The horses →

The evidence tiers matter here. The act is primary and was read at full resolution. Everything about the generations above it is secondary — Geneanet, Geni, a genealogical blog — none citing a checkable source. They agree with each other and with a document they were not written from. That is the best that can be said until the Montevideo registers are opened, and it is not proof.

And a base rate, from evidence already on the shelf

Pablo Armando’s enrolment card lives in army drawer “Cajón 985 (Lera)”, which is filed by sound — so its Lerena section is a near-complete roll of Argentine Lerena men of enrolment age, each card naming his father and mother. It was read on 10 September to confirm that no card but his names a Juan Carlos and a María. It still doesn’t. But the fathers were never followed up. Four of them trace:

The father on the cards	His wife	Where he was born
Gilberto Lerena	Julia Salvanach	Montevideo, 24 May 1855 — Gilberto Justiniano Lerena Lenguas
Alejandro M. Lerena	Julia Bassani	Uruguay, 1839 — and a son born at Montevideo, 1886
Arturo Lerena	Amalia Díaz	Montevideo, 1858 — son of Avelino Lerena and Ambrosia Traibel
Nemesio Ramón Lerena	Laura Escobite	married at Salto, Uruguay, 1903 — then Concordia, Entre Ríos, across the river

Four branches, four different provinces of settlement — Entre Ríos, Mendoza, Misiones, Buenos Aires — and one common origin. Three more fathers could not be traced either way.

It is not a link; none of these men is Juan Carlos Lerena. It is a base rate: in this generation an Argentine Lerena is a Uruguayan family’s son far more often than not — in every traceable case in the one drawer where they are gathered together. Juan Carlos Lerena, who left no trace whatever in the province where his son was born, fits that shape.

And the negative, which is worth as much. The indexed Uruguayan record was searched the same evening. There is no Juan Carlos Lerena born in Uruguay between 1830 and 1870 in Uruguay, Catholic Church Records 1726–2000, in Uruguay, Civil Registration 1879–2020, or in the Uruguay Baptisms 1750–1900 index; and no Lerena groom marrying a María in Uruguay between 1865 and 1885. Every Juan Carlos Lerena the index returns is a twentieth-century civil-registration card, decades too late.

The record does not hand him over. What that narrows is which un-indexed pages are worth turning: the Montevideo parish registers, image by image, the way Rosario was read.

Strong lead, no link proved — 13 September 2026 What was read →

2. How an Argentine came to be on a ship out of England

That the River Plate reached the Cape through Europe, so he need only have changed ships at Southampton.

For: in the 1900s there was no dense direct Buenos Aires–Cape Town passenger service; sailing to Europe and transshipping was ordinary. Southampton was the hub of the mail run to the Cape. On this reading "he came from Argentina" and "they met on a ship from England" are not in conflict at all.
Also for: the South African War shipped roughly 360,000 horses into the country, Argentina among the sources. He was 17 when it began and 20 when it ended, and he was a horseman. He was moving with a trade.
And for her: orphaned at 15 and 18, in the very years the Colonial Office and the emigration societies were running an organised scheme to send single British women to South Africa.
To settle it: UK outward passenger lists (BT 27), indexed from 1890. Note that she was Taylor until September 1911 and they may have travelled separately.

The meeting itself is family lore The Taylors →

3. The consulship — and it may be the wrong country

That the consular post, if it existed, was Uruguayan and not Argentine.

For: the family's own record carries an occupation entry "Uruguay consulate, Cape Town", and a note that he was "the ambassador for Argentina for a while — although Yvonne Lerena claims it was Uruguay."
Why it matters: this archive has searched the Argentine side and found nothing, and on the 1940 Argentine passport he is plainly the bearer, not the issuer. If the post was Uruguayan, both facts stop being puzzling at once.
And it fits the name. Uruguay has the densest Lerena population on earth — a small country where the name is common enough to make a resident Lerena a natural choice for an honorary post.
To settle it: the Uruguayan consulate at Cape Town — its officers, and the exequatur recognising them in the Union Government Gazette. A far narrower search than the Argentine one, and untried.

Newly opened, and the better lead

3b. Or the tradition grew out of the passport itself

That "he was the Consul General" is a family memory of the family's Argentine consular passport.

For: the 1940 passport is a striking object, embossed, sealed and issued by the Consulado General Argentino at Cape Town — exactly the sort of heirloom a family remembers as a connection to the consulate. On the document itself he is plainly the bearer; the consular signature belongs to A. B. Bayne.
The alternative still open: an honorary consulship at some other date. Resident foreign nationals of standing were commonly appointed, and it would leave a trace in the host state's gazette but not in Argentine career foreign-service lists.
To settle it: the exequatur in the Union of South Africa Government Gazette; the Argentine Boletín Oficial; and the Cape Town consulate's staff lists across 1900–1950 (look for A. B. Bayne to date the incumbency).

10 September 2026 — a date that gives the story a mechanism. Argentina and South Africa established diplomatic relations only on 10 September 1947. South Africa opened a consulate at Buenos Aires in 1938; Argentina opened its legation at Pretoria in 1950. Before 1938 the published histories record nothing.

Yet this family holds two Argentine documents proving a consular office at Cape Town in 1908 (the enrolment card’s “Oficina enroladora de Capetown”) and in 1940 (the passport’s Oficina Consular Argentina, with seal and a 16.50-peso consular stamp). Thirty-nine years before there were diplomatic relations, and thirty before the first consulate the histories mention.

That is not a contradiction — consular relations are not diplomatic relations, and the usual instrument is the honorary consul: a resident merchant, unpaid, commissioned to stamp passports and register nationals. Such posts predate legations by decades and leave almost no trace. A. B. Bayne is not a Spanish name.

So the tradition is not proved, but it is now explicable — which is a different and more honest thing. There was an Argentine consular office at the Cape, it ran for at least thirty-two years, and it was almost certainly honorary and locally staffed. In a city with a handful of Argentine nationals, the man who held the country’s passport and dealt with its consulate is exactly the man a family remembers as “something with the consulate”.

The claim as told is disputed The passport →

4. The ostrich farm

That there was no ostrich farm, and the tradition has attached itself to the wrong man or the wrong country.

For: a sweep of South African deeds registers finds him holding no land at all. Every document places him in Cape Town racing — stables at Rugby, a training yard, "race horse owner" at death, "horse-dealer" at marriage.
Against dismissing it: deeds coverage is partial; a farm could have been leased, leaving no transfer; and Oudtshoorn's own records have not been searched. Ostriches were also farmed in Argentina's near relative, the rhea — a tradition could have crossed with him.
To settle it: Oudtshoorn and Little Karoo farm and lease records; the C.P. Nel Museum; the Cape deeds registry under both Lerena and Lerina.

Doubtful, not disproved South Africa →

5. Where Pablo Armando's land was

That he held land at Blouberg, which the deeds sweep failed to find.

For: the family record states plainly that "he owned a lot of land up around the Blouberg area" — the coast north of Cape Town, beyond Milnerton and Rugby, where his stables were.
Against: a search of the South African deeds registers returned no land at all in his name.
Most likely explanation: the search, not the claim, is at fault. Deeds indexing is partial and his surname is written Lerena, Lerina and Larena across different records.
To settle it: the Cape deeds registry for the Blouberg and Milnerton areas, under every spelling.

Open — and it bears on the ostrich farm above

6. That he left Argentina as a political refugee

10 September 2026 — answered from Amsterdam, and it goes against the story. The International Institute of Social History, the principal repository for the international left, searched its OCR’d corpus of Latin American anarchist and labour periodicals, 1880–1940: “nothing popped up.” Re-run here the same day and the null holds — the 171 apparent “Lerena” hits are the Conde de Lerena of the 1787 Spanish census and Osimani y Llerena, a street in Montevideo where an anarchist weekly had its office; the 16 “Lerina” hits are OCR breakage of ballerina.

But that is the weakest of the three objections, and it should not be dressed up. A horse-dealer in his twenties would not be in the anarchist press unless he were notable, and most people never appear in any periodical. The real objection is the enrolment card: in 1908 he walked into his own government’s consular office at Cape Town and wrote down his name, his conscript class, his birthplace and both his parents. A man hiding from the Argentine state does not do that. And Ley 4144 deported foreigners, not nationals — the mechanism the story implies could not have been used on him.

Not disproved. Now unlikely. The AGN expulsion files remain the only place that could settle it positively.

That Pablo Armando fled Argentina because he was in political trouble on the left.

Family testimony, carried three generations and repeated to David by his mother, Cheryl Anne Lerena, in September 2026: that he “ran away from Argentina as he was a communist on the run.” Never proven.

Why it deserves better than folklore: it is the only story the family carries that explains a departure. Rosario, the horses, the consulship, the ostriches — all describe what he was. This alone says why he left, and a reason to leave is precisely what the documentary record has refused to supply.
The correction the story needs: the Argentine Communist Party did not exist until 1918. He left around 1903–05. The radical movement in Argentina then was overwhelmingly anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist. Families routinely retrofit “communist” onto earlier left politics once that becomes the available word — so the claim to test is “in political trouble on the left,” not the literal one.
The mechanism that would make it true: Ley 4144, the Ley de Residencia of November 1902, which let the government deport any foreign-born person deemed a threat without trial or appeal. It was used hard against anarchist organisers in exactly 1903–05. And Rosario — great river port, rail head, big dock and railway workforce — was among the most militant anarchist cities in the country.
The chronology fits tightly. Born February 1882; his son Roque born at Cape Town in November 1905. He left Argentina somewhere in 1903–05, aged 21 to 23.
*** And here is the part that may matter most. *** The Ley de Residencia applied to foreigners. An Argentine national could be prosecuted but not deported under it. So if he was expelled, he was not Argentine-born — and our failure to find him in the Rosario baptism register stops being a puzzle and becomes a consequence. That would sit with the Uruguayan density of the surname, the Uruguayan-born Lerenas in the 1895 census, and the family note that the consulship may have been Uruguayan.
Against: nothing documentary supports it yet, and he was issued an Argentine passport in 1940 — so he was neither stateless nor permanently barred. If he merely fled prosecution rather than being deported, he could be Argentine-born after all.
To settle it: Ministerio del Interior expulsion files at the Archivo General de la Nación; Santa Fe provincial and Rosario police records 1902–05; the anarchist press, chiefly La Protesta, much of it held at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. None has been asked.

Family lore — untested, falsifiable, and pointing at named archives

7. The Llorens baptism

That Pablo Armando descends from the Roberto Llorens and Francisca Fernández named in a San Miguel baptism of 1872.

Why it was ever entertained: the child baptised there was Roberto Juan Roque, and both Roberto and Roque recur in this family — a Roberto Juan Roque Lerena was born in 1944.
Against: the surname is Llorens, a Catalan name meaning Lawrence, not a variant of Lerena; and the streets and parish point to Buenos Aires, not Rosario. David Defranceski states plainly that these records are unproven, and this archive treats them so.
To settle it: Pablo Armando's own baptism at Rosario, spring 1882, which would name his parents outright and end the question.
What happened when it was tested: the Rosario index has now been read across all twenty-six letters for 1882, and there is no Pablo Armando under any surname — the F section, where a Fernández registration would sit, is clear. That does not make the Llorens baptism false; it removes the one route that could have connected it to him.

Unproven; not cited elsewhere on this site

8. A Carmen in the Argentine line

That the name Carmen, surviving into 1958, descends from Pablo Armando's own mother or grandmother.

Against: Carmen is among the commonest female names in the Spanish-speaking world — a devotional name from Nuestra Señora del Carmen. This family was Catholic; a devotional choice needs no ancestor to explain it.
For: look at what the family actually used. The male Spanish names are abundant and persistent across three South African generations — Pablo Armando, Roque Luis Armando, Ricardo Juan Carlos, Nuno Fernando, Roberto Juan Roque, Anton Armando, Juan Carlos, Gilberto. The female ones are scarce, and Carmen is the clearest survival among them.
And the grandmothers do not account for it. Patricia Carmen Lerena's grandmothers were Mary Septima Taylor, an Englishwoman of Devon, and the mother of Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen, an Afrikaner. Neither was a Carmen. Spanish custom names children for grandparents; if this name descends rather than being chosen fresh, it descends from further back on the Lerena side.
Use: weak as proof, useful as a filter. In Argentine and Uruguayan Lerena records, give extra weight to any household containing a Carmen.

Inference from naming — modest, and worth carrying

9. The remaining smaller ones

Hypothesis	Standing
The 1879 twin was a girl	Required by the arithmetic of "Septima": Mary Septima is only the seventh daughter if the twin was female. Sound but formally unproved
The family was regularised in the church in 1911	Son baptised 12 June 1911; parents married 3 September 1911, both bachelor and spinster; the marriage examined by a "Bert…" who is very likely Bertram W. Glynn, the priest who performed the baptism. Strong
Gavin Lerena's descent	Pablo Armando → Ricardo → Carlos "Tex" → Gavin, per the family chart, and the racing press independently describes the same succession of trainers. Family chart, not independently verified
He imported horses for the government	The family record states he "used to import horses into South Africa from Argentina for the ZA government", and separately for his own stables. This is precisely the testable form of the horse claim that this archive set out on day one. Family testimony; find the contracts
He left Argentina for a political reason	The family record says he "ran from Argentina for a communism related reason" and flags it as unsubstantiated. He was Argentine by birth and served in the National Guard, so this would place his departure after 1915. Unsubstantiated
The family concealed the illegitimacy	The family record notes that on a copy document of 1916 the marriage "dates have been manipulated to show an earlier year… but it was 1911" — which would place the wedding before Roque's 1905 birth. Strong, and the 1916 copy is worth finding
Two men called "Bob"	The family record gives the nickname Bob to both Pablo Armando and his son Ricardo. The Sporting Post's "Bob Lerena, grandfather of Spike" must still be Pablo Armando, since Ricardo was Spike's father — but the ambiguity is a live hazard in racing records. A trap to watch for

Retired

Proved That Mary Septima Taylor was born in England. This archive doubted it for part of one day, on the strength of a badly filtered search that returned no English record. The family's own sourced tree carries the answer: born at Bideford, Devon, 17 September 1884, cited to the England and Wales birth registration index and the GRO at Southport, and christened at St Margaret's, Northam. The doubt was mine and it was wrong. The Taylors →

Proved That "Rosalina Wilhelmina Chappell" was a previous married name. This archive proposed it as one of two readings. The family record settles it: Roque married Rose Forbes, who was Doreen Chappell's mother — so Chappell was Rose's name by her first marriage, and Roque married his own brother's mother-in-law. The horses →

Disproved That Pablo Armando Lerena and Robert Paul Lerena were brothers. This archive proposed it for one day, on the ground that the names and ages would not reconcile. The Corpus Christi baptism register named Pablo Armando as the father of the son whose death notice names Roberto — one man, two forms of his name. The inference is withdrawn. The passport →

Disproved That the 61 South African Lerenas are one kindred. At least two unconnected populations bear the name there. South Africa →