Open questions

1. Who were Juan Carlos and María Lerena?

Answered on 10 September 2026, and immediately replaced by a harder question. The army enrolment card names Pablo Armando’s parents: Juan Carlos Lerena and María Lerena. Nothing else is known of either of them — not a date, not a marriage, not a death.

• María’s maiden name — and one branch of it now closed. She is written with her husband’s surname. On these cards hijo de X y de Y usually gives each parent’s own name — which would make her a Lerena by birth and the marriage one between kin — but some clerks used the married name. The card cannot tell.
  
  A marriage between kin needs a dispensation, so on 13 September the Arquidiócesis de Montevideo dispensation register, 1856–1932, was searched by its own formulae. It holds eight Lerena dispensations in seventy-six years — and no Juan Carlos, and no Lerena–Lerena pairing at all. Every Lerena in it marries out: Fernández, Peláez, Álvarez, Cordero, Márquez.
  
  So if she was a Lerena by birth, they did not marry in the archdiocese of Montevideo. What that does not show is that they did not marry there at all — the register records only exceptions, and an ordinary marriage between unrelated people leaves no trace in it. A weak negative, filed as one.
• The rest of Cajón 985. The cards are filed alphabetically, so every Argentine of enrolment age surnamed Lerena sits within a few frames of this one, each naming his own parents. Brothers, cousins and the shape of the family are sitting unread in that drawer.
• The missing baptism, and it is now much starker. As of 13 September both volumes of the Rosario baptism index have been read end to end — 1731 to 1901 — and the surname appears once in a hundred and seventy years. 1881, 1882 and 1883 were also swept across all twenty-six letter sections for a Pablo Armando under any surname. He is not there; neither is his family, before him or after him. That is no longer a gap in the searching. What has been searched →
• And the one Lerena who is there was Uruguayan. Folio 229, February 1866: the act says of both parents “naturales del E. Oriental”. If the surname’s home in the River Plate is Montevideo, then Juan Carlos Lerena came to Rosario from somewhere, and the first somewhere to try is across the river. Does anyone hold a Uruguayan Lerena line with a Juan Carlos born in the 1840s or 1850s, married to a María? That is the single most useful thing a stranger could tell this archive today. Hypothesis 1c →
• The consular matrícula. A man enrolling at the Cape Town consulate in 1908 had a file there. The request to the Argentine foreign ministry is already lodged.

2. Was he really a Consul General?

• Search the Government Gazette for the exequatur — the host state's formal recognition of a foreign consul. Crisp, dated, decisive.
• Search the Argentine Boletín Oficial and the Foreign Ministry's diplomatic lists for the appointment.
• Test the honorary-consul hypothesis. A resident merchant holding an honorary post would appear in the gazettes but not in the career foreign-service lists — and would reconcile a diplomat with a man who bred horses and farmed ostriches. Hypothesis
• Establish which post: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria or Durban, and in which years.

3. The horses

• Search the South African Stud Book and Jockey Club registers for Lerena as owner, breeder or importer — particularly imports from Argentina, which would corroborate the claim directly.
• Search the Argentine Stud Book at the other end.
• Establish who Gilberto Justiniano Lerena Lenguas was in family terms — his dates, household and descendants — and whether he connects to this line at all. The horses →
• Trace Haras El Viejo: its records, its sale or dispersal, and its succession.

4. The ostrich farm

• Search the Oudtshoorn and Little Karoo farm records, and the C.P. Nel Museum's holdings on the feather trade.
• Test the date. The feather boom collapsed in 1914; if the farm was real it most likely predates that, which in turn constrains when the family arrived.
• Search the deeds registry for land held under the surname.

5. Basque or Extremaduran?

• Obtain the INE provincial distribution for Spain. Forebears summarises the Spanish Lerenas as chiefly La Rioja, Andalusia and Madrid — awkward for both theories, and it needs the real figures rather than a summary.
• Look for Lerena and Llerena alternating for the same individual in River Plate records. That, more than any etymology, settles whether the two names are one.
• Find the emigration record, which normally names the town of origin outright. The name →

6. Rosario, and the crossing

• Search Santa Fe civil registration and the Rosario parish registers for the family.
• Search CEMLA and the Buenos Aires passenger lists for the arrival from Europe.
• Find the outbound crossing to South Africa — the date, the ship, and who travelled.
• Keep Uruguay live throughout. It has the world's densest Lerena population, and if Argentina stalls it is the next move, not the last resort. Argentina →

7. The South African kindred

• Establish whether the 61 South African Lerenas are indeed one family, and whether this line founded it. South Africa →
• Work out the Booyzen marriage — an Afrikaner connection, and evidence of settlement rather than a posting.
• Test whether Taylor and Barry attach to this line or to another branch of the tree. Unexamined

Recorded so they are not repeated

• The Chrome extension was not connected on 8 September 2026, so the MyHeritage tree could not be read in this session. It requires a logged-in browser session; it is not a public source.
• Forebears' Spain page for the surname returned no content to an automated fetch. The provincial breakdown will need another route — the INE, or a read by hand.