The passport

What it says

What it settles

Rosario — exactly as the family said

Nacido en Rosario de Santa Fe, República Argentina · Día 22, Mes Febrero, Año 1882

Documented The family remembered an Argentine great-grandfather and named Rosario for him. A passport in his own hands gives Rosario de Santa Fe and the date 22 February 1882. The tradition was accurate, and this archive's Argentina page is no longer a page of method waiting for a subject.

He is recorded as nativo — Argentine by birth, not naturalised. Whatever brought the family to the River Plate, it happened in an earlier generation than his.

The horses — no longer family lore

Profesión: Trainer

Documented The word is written in English on a Spanish form, which is what a Cape Town clerk would do with a profession that had no neat Spanish equivalent on the page. The family said he brought horses; his own passport calls him a trainer.

And the horses reach back to Argentina. Under military service the passport records that he served in the Guardia Nacional, 6º de Caballería — the 6th Cavalry — in 1915. He was a horseman in Argentina before he was a trainer at the Cape. The horses →

Rugby — the same street as the stables

Documented He gives his address as Rugby, Cape Town. The South African National Archives hold a 1931 Cape Town municipal file: plans of proposed stables, Koeberg Road, Rugby — RP Lerena.

Two independent sources, found on different days from different archives, put a Lerena and a set of stables in the same small suburb. What the archives returned →

What it does not settle

He was not the Consul General — at least not on this day

Disputed The family holds that he was Consul General between Argentina and South Africa. This document does not support that, and it is the kind of document that would.

He appears here as the bearer of a passport, not its issuer. The signature in the consul's box is A. B. Bayne, Encargado — the officer in charge of the Consulado General Argentino at Cape Town in December 1940. Pablo Armando Lerena is the private citizen on the other side of the counter.

That does not disprove the tradition outright. He may have held an honorary post at another date, and an Argentine national of standing resident in Cape Town is exactly the profile from which honorary consuls were drawn — a hypothesis this archive recorded before the document was found. But the claim now has a document pointing the other way, and it is demoted accordingly until something else says otherwise.

He is the head of the line — the question is closed

Documented This page previously set Pablo Armando Lerena beside Robert Paul Lerena, could not reconcile them, and proposed — thinly, and as inference — that they were brothers. That was wrong. A parish register settles it: they are one man.

The baptism register of Corpus Christi Catholic Church, Wynberg, recording the baptism on 12 June 1911 of a boy born 25 November 1905:

… baptizatus est Roque Lois Armando, filius Pablo Armando Lerena et Mary Septima Lerena (olim Taylor) conjugum …

That is the same son — Roque Luis Armando Lerena — whose own death notice of 1973 gives his parents as "Roberto Lerena" and "Mary Septima Lerena". Same mother, same son, same marriage. The father called Pablo Armando in the Catholic register of 1911 and Roberto Paul in the civil papers of 1950 is one man under two forms of his name — the Spanish at the altar, the English at the registry.

Pablo is Paul. The Roberto is best explained by who signed that 1973 form: Rhena May Lerena, Roque's second wife, whom he married in 1966 — sixteen years after her father-in-law's death. She never met him, and was reporting a name she had only been told.

Which makes the passport the founding document of this archive

Corrected One consequence: the age of 76 on his 1950 death certificate is wrong. Born in February 1882, he was 68 when he died in March 1950. The informant, W. Fraser of Observatory, was the man "causing burial" and not a relative — an age reported at second hand, against a passport the deceased carried himself. The passport wins.

The smaller things

He was a widower by December 1940, so his wife died before that date. He was travelling to Portuguese East Africa — Mozambique — in the second winter of the war, presumably on racing business. He stood 1.80 m, had blue eyes and grey hair, and carried a scar on his forehead that nobody now living put there.

The passport also carries his right thumbprint and his signature. It is the most personal document in this archive.