Roadmap
The question this archive was built to answer has been answered. This page says what replaced it, ranks the ways at the new one, and marks plainly which routes are finished, which are live, and which need a person rather than a search.
The question that started it, and its answer
Who were Pablo Armando Lerena’s parents? For most of this archive’s life that was the whole of it. The line below him was closed and documented; above him there was nothing at all, and the Argentine record refused three times over.
It was answered by a document he filled in himself. His 1908 Argentine army enrolment card names them: Juan Carlos Lerena and María Lerena. Corroborated by his eldest son being christened Ricardo Juan Carlos, and independently by a granddaughter’s DNA, which carries a Río de la Plata genetic group that can only have come through him.
It is also the archive’s worst near-miss. The card was written off for a month on four objections, three of which turned out to be artefacts of a machine index. Opening the image took two minutes. The correction → · The card →
Who were Juan Carlos and María Lerena, and where did they come from?
Two names on a card, and nothing behind them. No baptism, no marriage, no census entry, no death for either of them has been found anywhere. And the reason that mattered so much on 13 September is that the last place they could plausibly have hidden was checked, and they are not in it.
The Rosario baptism index, 1879–1901. End to end. No Lerena in any spelling, and no Pablo Armando under any surname in 1881, 1882 or 1883.
The Rosario baptism index, 1731–1879. Eighty openings. The surname occurs once, and she is Uruguayan.
The Rosario marriage index, 1867–1885. No Lerena. They did not marry in that parish.
They were not a Rosario family — and the one Lerena in that parish was Uruguayan
Strong lead, no link proved — 13 September 2026
The single Lerena baptism in the whole index, folio 229, February 1866, was opened the same day it was found. The act says of both parents: “naturales del E. Oriental” — natives of Uruguay. The father is a Lerena Lenguas, the mother a Juanicó, and the godfather — another Don Luis Lerena — stood by proxy, which is what one does from the other side of the river.
And the family that produces is one this archive had been circling from the opposite direction for four days: the sons of Luis Lerena y Fernández and Justiniana Lenguas González of Montevideo, one of whom is Gilberto Justiniano Lerena Lenguas, co-founder of the Argentine Stud Book — already in the register, marked high interest, because Pablo Armando trained and owned racehorses.
Nothing links Juan Carlos Lerena to that house. But it explains four separate refusals at once, and it says where to look. Hypothesis 1c → · What was read → · The horses →
1 · The Montevideo registers worked once, and the indexes came back empty
Run on the evening of 13 September, once FamilySearch let this session back in. The indexed Uruguayan record was searched for the man himself: there is no Juan Carlos Lerena born in Uruguay between 1830 and 1870 in Catholic Church Records 1726–2000, in Civil Registration 1879–2020, or in the Baptisms 1750–1900 index; and no Lerena groom marrying a María there between 1865 and 1885. FamilySearch’s full-text search — which reads handwriting across un-indexed images, and which does cover Montevideo — returns exactly two hits for the phrase “Juan Carlos Lerena” in the entire corpus, both twentieth-century and neither ours.
What is left is the reading. Full text does not cover everything, and an index is not a register. The Montevideo parishes — the Matriz, San Francisco de Asís, the Cordón — hold marriage registers for the 1870s that have to be turned page by page, the way Rosario was. The target is a Juan Carlos Lerena marrying a María before 1882. The Arquidiócesis marriage-dispensation register, 1856–1932, is the shortest way in: if she was a Lerena by birth, the marriage needed a dispensation, and dispensations are a thin volume rather than a parish’s worth of acts.
2 · The consulate that issued the passport letter sent, 9 Sep 2026 — no reply yet
To be issued an Argentine passport in 1940 he had to prove nationality, so the Cape Town consulate held a matrícula consular on him, and those files went home to the Archivo Histórico de Cancillería. Sent to archivo@cancilleria.gob.ar, an address taken from the Cancillería’s own contact page rather than guessed. It asks whether the matrícula survives, whether the 1940 passport file survives and whether it names his parents, and — flagged as minor — whether he ever held a consular appointment, which puts the family’s Consul General tradition to the only body that could settle it.
3 · The rest of his own army file letter sent, with the card attached
The 1908 enrolment card is an index card. Behind it sits a legajo — the service file — which would carry his birthplace, his parents’ details in full, and quite possibly his parents’ own origins. Written to the Archivo General del Ejército with the card itself attached, so they have the reference number rather than a description of it.
4 · He came with the horses untried, and still the biggest idea here
We have been hunting a passenger. He may never have been one. The South African War shipped some 360,000 horses into the country, Argentina among the main sources. He was seventeen when it began and twenty when it ended, a horseman by trade and a horse-dealer at the Cape by 1911. Horses travel with conductors, grooms and muleteers, engaged at the port of loading, and those men are written down in military remount paperwork, not civilian passenger lists — which would explain why he is invisible in every passenger index searched.
Where: The National Archives, Kew — WO 108 and related Remount Department series; the Cape remount depots, chiefly Stellenbosch; and the British purchasing commissions at Buenos Aires. None of it has been touched.
5 · The 1935 mission census needs a person in Brisbane
Both younger sons appear in an LDS South African Mission census of 1935, each indexed as “Son” — which means a head of household stands on that page, and it should be Pablo Armando, giving his own birthplace five years before the passport and independent of it. The image is not online; it needs a reader at an affiliate library. Why two Catholic boys of eleven and fifteen are in a Mormon mission census in the year their mother died is a question in itself.
6 · The Ley 4144 expulsion files needs David, and a passport
The family tradition is that he left Argentina as a political refugee. The Ley 4144 of 1902 deported foreigners, which is the flaw in the story and also the test of it. The Archivo General de la Nación portal needs an account; the Spanish text is written and ready to paste. The errands →
7 · Rosario, again closed — do not reopen without a new reason
Both volumes of the baptism index read end to end. 1881, 1882 and 1883 read across all twenty-six letter sections for a Pablo Armando under any surname whatsoever — roughly two hundred image-reads, more than twenty near misses logged and excluded, including the only two Armandos in three years. The marriage index read at full resolution. The 1895 national census: not one Lerena in Santa Fe.
And on 13 September the index itself was put on trial. Every Rosario null here rests on a typescript compiled in 1945, and whether that typescript is complete had never been tested. So the register was read act by act, from the margins at full resolution: acts 113 to 862, 1 February to 22 July 1882, seven hundred and fifty baptisms. Everywhere the index says there is no Lerena, the register says the same. The index and the register agree — so he is not there, and the index is not the reason. The sweep →
This route is exhausted, not merely unsuccessful.
What would close it fastest
Route 1, as soon as FamilySearch lets this session back in. It costs nothing but time, it is the first place the evidence now points, and it is the only route that could name Juan Carlos Lerena’s own parents rather than merely confirm his existence.
Routes 2 and 3 are already out and can only be waited on. If both come back empty, route 4 is where the real thinking has to go — because if he came to Africa with a cargo of horses rather than a ticket, then no passenger list will ever have him, and we have been looking in the wrong archive from the beginning.