Research log
What was done, in the order it was done
An archive is only as trustworthy as its account of itself. This is the working record — including the leads that went nowhere, which are the ones most worth writing down.
| Step | Status | |
|---|---|---|
| Harvested the source | The MyHeritage tree read in full — 164 people, 648 facts with their citations. Five duplicate records found and collapsed; about a hundred people identified as a surname index rather than descent. | Documented |
| Checked it against the Bundesarchiv | All four Leibholz men found in the Gedenkbuch. Jacob was deported on 26 February 1943, not killed in 1945 — and Georg, born at Hammerstein two months after Jacob was born at Schubin, cannot be his brother. | Documented |
| Read the DNA | Derrick carries 0.0% Ashkenazi Jewish where a quarter is required, and 1.4% Germanic where a quarter is required. The paternity of record does not survive it. | Inferred |
| Found her name | The 1948 divorce file names her in full: Ivone, born MOTA FIGUEIREDO. "Mota" was never a nickname. Her father was a Figueiredo and her mother a Mota. | Documented |
| Surveyed Mozambique | FamilySearch has never filmed anything genealogical for Mozambique. The Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique holds the civil registers for 1865–1934 and takes requests online — and Ivone was born in 1924. | Documented |
| Worked the passport registers | Porto closed as a dead end: its series begins in 1951. Aveiro gave one candidate, Augusto Pereira de Figueiredo, bound for Lourenço Marques in October 1904. | Documented |
| Read the 1883 baptism book | Fifty-one images, no name index, entry Nº 35. Augusto born 12 August 1883, four grandparents named — and a marginal note giving his death at Amadora in 1954, with the registration number that will decide whether he is Ivone’s father. | Documented |
| Worked the British DNA cluster | Five matches who are first cousins to each other are all second cousins to Derrick. One sits a generation closer — her grandparent was a sibling of his biological father, and her own father was born in Johannesburg. Surnames: Halsey, Parr, Fenton. | Inferred |
| Yad Vashem | Samuel appears in the List of Jews murdered in Auschwitz as Samuel ISRAEL Leibholz — which is where the compulsory Nazi middle name on this family’s records comes from. Oskar confirmed on the Theresienstadt list, Georg on the Łódź list. | Documented |
| Opened the photographs | Twenty-two people in the tree carry attached images, and several of the “photographs” are documents nobody had read: Julius Leibke’s 1942 Berlin death register, naming a whole new generation — Abraham Leibke and Christine née Berger — and Henriette Katz’s 1926 newspaper death notice, in which the family itself pairs Trude with Oskar. | Documented |
| Read the 1956 marriage register | The largest of those images, 3,918 × 5,245 px, turned out to be the duplicate original register of Kurt’s second marriage — entry No. 169 of 1956. It records his status as DIVORCEE with an order filed, which confirms the 1951 decree from outside the court; and its parents’ columns, which this form has and the 1948 form did not, are ruled through and empty. | Documented |
| Wrote to three archives | Letters sent 15 September 2026, in Portuguese, to the Arquivo da Defesa Nacional at Paço d'Arcos, the Arquivo Histórico Militar in Lisbon and the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique in Maputo, asking whether Henrique was recenseado at Lourenço Marques in 1961 and what his military registration says. The Maputo letter is a different letter: this archive already knew their civil registers stop at 1934, so it does not ask for a birth certificate — it asks whether the recruitment-district records stayed in Mozambique after 1975. Each archive is told what the others have been asked. | Documented |
| Found Kurt's estate notice | Government Gazette 2525 of 26 September 1969, page 109: estate 7584/69, wound up from the Boedelafdeling at Sanlam Building 806, 63 Commissioner Street, Johannesburg. Sanlam Trust handled it. That file contains his own death notice on form J294 — which names his father and mother, and therefore records what the family said in 1969 about whose son he was. | Documented |
| Found Henrique's estate | The same free gazette archive that found the hat shop also found the deceased estate of Ivone's first son — number 12294/2023, gazetted three times in 2023 as DA ROCHA, HENRIQUE FIGUEIREDO PINTO. A South African estate file contains form J294, which asks for the father's full names. The man the family tree can only call "Unknown da Rocha" is named on a printed form in a government office, and the file can be ordered by number. | Documented |
| Found the shop | A page of the Union Government Gazette for 30 October 1942, supplied by the family, names Kurt in a partnership notice. Chasing it found Gazettes.Africa — free, full-text, 54,313 South African issues — and eight Luwinski entries. He bought the Piccadilly Hat Company at 81 Eloff Street on 1 November 1941, ran it with Walter Oppenheimer for exactly a year, took it over alone on 31 October 1942, and was still trading there in 1952. Fifteen blank years between his arrival and his marriage are no longer blank. | Documented |
| Swept all 5,464 matches by surname | The archive's oldest outstanding item, closed. The search box on the DNA Matches page takes a name OR an ancestral surname and searches the whole list. LEIBHOLZ: no matches. LUWINSKI: no matches. MyHeritage indexes both as Derrick's own ancestral surnames, so the search had real terms and still returned nothing across 5,464 people. The German and Jewish absence is now an exhaustive search rather than a sample of six. | Documented |
| Withdrew the Portuguese half of it, hours later | The same sweep returned 27 for FIGUEIREDO and 13 for MOTA, and this archive called it the best lead on Ivone's parentage it had ever had — before opening a single match. Opened, the Figueiredo tag turns out to pair her with a woman born before 1713, and MyHeritage states that the Mota matches share no ancestral surname with Derrick at all. A surname tag on a match card is a string comparison between two trees, not a finding. Withdrawn in public, because that is what the corrections layer is for. | Withdrawn |
| Tested the Y-branch surnames | FamilyTreeDNA Discover names the surname projects on R-S11477 — Ballew, Stafford, Blakely, Byrd, York. All five were searched against Derrick's match list. Everything came back between 10 and 28 cM, fourth-to-fifth cousin, the noise floor — exactly what a common ancestor in 200 BCE predicts. A negative worth recording, because it says which tool to reach for next and it is the autosomal one. | Inferred |
| The Y-DNA came back | R-S11477 — R1b, branch U106/Z381, the North Sea lineage that peaks in the Netherlands and England, and not one characteristic of Ashkenazi paternal descent. The archive had named this as the test that would break the paternity finding or confirm it. It confirmed it, from an independent direction, and the label stays Inferred because a conclusion does not become Documented by surviving a test. | Documented |
| The 1939 census | Addresses at last. Jacob, Auguste and Siegfried at Meraner Straße 2, Schöneberg. And two corrections: Gertrud Leibke was Oskar’s wife, not Georg’s — and Georg’s wife, Lydia née Perl, died on the same day he did. | Documented |
| Read two words in column four | The 1952 Johannesburg marriage register was opened at full resolution to look for the parents of Mervin Halsey. The 1952 form has no parents' columns — but it has column (4), Country of Birth, and it says Mervin was born in the CAPE PROVINCE and his bride Cynthia Wear in ENGLAND. A week spent on the surname Halsey had been spent on the wrong half of the couple. Cynthia's GRO birth entry (Q2 1931, Hitchin, 3A/1345) names her mother as a CASTLE; the only Wear-Castle marriage in the entire English index is Hitchin, Q4 1914; the 1921 census gives her as Martha Maud Wear, born Baldock, Hertfordshire; and the 1901 and 1911 censuses put the whole Castle household at Baldock — with two children, Hilda b.1902 and Ernest b.1904, that the match's own tree never recorded. Two of Derrick's closest matches descend from that one couple through two different daughters, 297.5 and 292.7 cM. The Castles were never Norfolk; only the Browns were. | Documented |
Where the open work stands
| Line of enquiry | State |
|---|---|
| Arolsen Archives — the International Tracing Service files | Confirmed to hold 213 Leibholz person records and 43 document topics. Not yet enumerated. |
| Sweep all 5,464 DNA matches for Leibholz and Luwinski | Six opened in full, three British and three Portuguese; every one reports no shared ancestral surnames. Strong, not exhaustive. |
| Henrique's South African trail | A useful negative — no Halsey records in the Transvaal depot at all. His 1962 immigration and 2022 death notice still unfound. |
| Szubin Jewish registers | Not yet attempted. Where the family predates Berlin. |
| Reichsanzeiger expatriation lists | Digitised and full-text searchable. 39,006 people were denaturalised across 359 lists, 1933–1945. If the Reich stripped Kurt's citizenship he is in them. |
The next fifteen
Ordered by expected value against effort, not by how interesting they are. The first five need nobody's permission but the applicant's own, and three of them are already located to a document number.
| Action | Why it is worth doing | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Order estate 12294/2023 | Henrique's J294 death notice asks outright for the full names of the father. The likeliest single answer to question 8 |
| 2 | Order estate 7584/69 — from the National Archives, not the Master Corrected | Kurt's own J294 — what the family said in 1969 about whose son he was. Corrected the same day: he died in 1968 and files of that age went to Pretoria long ago. NAAIRS indexes it as TAB, MHG 7584/69 |
| 3 | Send the Porto óbito request | Portuguese death records name both parents outright. Drafted months ago, never sent |
| 4 | Send the 1924 Lourenço Marques birth request | 1924 falls inside the Maputo archive's 1865–1934 range, unlike Henrique's 1941. Should give parents and grandparents |
| 5 | Henrique's 1968 marriage record | 1968 South African registers do carry parents — unlike the 1948 form, which has no parents column at all |
| 6 | The June 1948 ante-nuptial contract | Found by re-reading column 10 at full resolution. Executed the month Derrick's parents married, registered in the Johannesburg Deeds Office, and not confined to an eleven-column form |
| 7 | The February 1956 contract | He did it again with Frances. Same office |
| 8 | Write to the closest British match | Her common ancestors with Derrick are his own grandparents, and her shared ancestral place is South Africa |
| 9 | Write to the 10,715-person tree | Ask whether a cousin of her father's went to South Africa — and about the grandfather her tree records only as Unknown |
| 10 | Big Y-700 | There are 42 branches below R-S11477. A Big Y places him on one and opens FamilyTreeDNA's Y match list, which MyHeritage does not have |
| 11 | Kurt's naturalisation | The Union gazette published naturalisation lists, giving birth date and place over an official signature. Bears on question 4 — the Israel |
| 12 | Finish the gazette sweep | Oppenheimer, de Witt, Figueiredo, Salkow narrowed to Johannesburg — and when did Kurt let the hat shop go after 1952? |
| 13 | Gertrud's death register, 27 Feb 1943 | She died in the city, not in a camp, on the day of the Fabrikaktion. The entry gives cause of death |
| 14 | Auguste and Jacob's divorce file | Recorded with no date — and in a Berlin Mischehe the date is the whole meaning of the act |
| 15 | Szubin and Hammerstein registers | Settle whether Georg was Jacob's brother or his cousin. Born two months apart in different provinces, which no mother manages |
Six letters, one bounce, and two bad addresses 15 September 2026
Sent: the Arquivo da Defesa Nacional; the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique twice, once for the recruitment records and once for Ivone's 1924 birth certificate — which, unlike Henrique's 1941 birth, falls inside their range; the Arquivo Histórico Militar; and the Master of the High Court for the J294 in estate 12294/2023.
One bounced, and it was my fault. The Military Archive's published address,
ahm@mail.exercito.pt, failed with NXDOMAIN. A DNS lookup shows exercito.pt
has mail servers and mail.exercito.pt has none — the subdomain has been retired, so the
address that appears on reference pages everywhere was never going to work for anyone. The resend
went to ahm@exercito.pt and says so in its first paragraph, so the archive learns its
own contact is broken.
Then it happened again an hour later. A summary offered
MastersJohannesburg@justice.gov.za for the Master's office. That office's own contact
sheet says, in capitals on its first page, that the address is not in use. Reading
the document instead of the summary also produced the thing that mattered: Johannesburg allocates
estate files to controllers by the last digit of the file number. 12294
ends in 4, so the request went to the named controller for 4 rather than into a general inbox.
The corrected address works. Within nine minutes the Arquivo Histórico Militar acknowledged receipt — “Confirma-se a receção da sua correspondência eletrónica a qual será tratada pelos nossos serviços. Enviaremos a informação solicitada, caso exista, com a brevidade possível.” So the DNS lookup was right and the address printed on the reference pages is simply dead.
Their reply also corrects a third stale fact from a search summary the same morning. The summary placed the archive at Largo dos Caminhos de Ferro; the archive says it is at Largo do Outeirinho da Amendoeira, that its reading room needs no appointment, and that it is open Monday to Friday, 10:00–12:15 and 13:45–16:45, with document requests and reproductions 10:00–12:00 and 13:45–16:00.
Check the MX record before sending, and read the source rather than the summary of it. Two lessons, one morning, and both are written down here because an archive that hides its own mistakes is worth less than one that does not.
Nine letters out by the end of the morning
Added to the six already listed: the Landesarchiv Berlin, in German, carrying three questions at once — Gertrud's death entry of 27 February 1943 and its cause of death, the Leibholz–Luwinski marriage of 5 January 1924 and the date of the divorce, and Kurt's own 1912 birth entry, which may carry a marginal note of Vaterschaftsanerkennung. He was born twelve years before his parents married and under his mother's name, so that margin is the paper basis of the whole Leibholz descent.
Also sent: the National Archives in Pretoria for the J294 in estate TAB, MHG 7584/69, and the 1ª Conservatória do Registo Civil do Porto for Ivone's death record — the latter asking, since her date of death is unknown, whether a search by name in the indexes is possible at all.
Every address was checked for an MX record before sending, which is how three of the day's five candidate addresses turned out to be wrong before they cost anything.
Eleven letters, and only one has ever bounced — the one sent before the checking began. Two archives have acknowledged receipt: the Arquivo Histórico Militar in Lisbon, and the Archiwum Państwowe w Bydgoszczy, which adds a useful warning — requests are dealt with in order of arrival, complicated ones can take more than a month, and anything sent without a full name is not considered at all. It also asks, dryly, that the sender check their spam folder while waiting.
Three of the fifteen will not be done by this archive Yours to decide
Items 6 and 7 — the two ante-nuptial contracts. A South African deeds registry “may not give out information acting on a letter or a telephone call.” Copies require attendance in person, or a commercial search service that charges for it. So this is not a letter anybody can write; it needs a person in South Africa or a paid order, and the archive records that rather than pretending otherwise.
Item 5 — Henrique's 1968 marriage record. Searched on both the groom and the bride; FamilySearch's South African marriage collections are patchy after the mid-1960s and it is not indexed. It may simply arrive inside the estate file already requested, which is the cheaper way to the same fact.
Items 8 and 9 — the two letters to living DNA matches. Both are written and neither has been sent. Everything else this archive has posted went to an institution; these go to two private people who did not ask to be contacted, about a finding that touches their family as well as this one. They are drafted to open with a narrow question rather than with non-paternity, to ask only about the dead, and to say plainly that the DNA and the paperwork disagree — so that nobody feels drawn in under false pretences. And Derrick should probably be told before a stranger is. That is not the archive's call, and it is why they are sitting still.
Item 10 — Big Y-700 — is a purchase, and this archive does not spend other people's money.
Parked, and why
Arolsen Archives. 213 Leibholz person records are confirmed to exist. The declaration of consent carries a criminal-liability clause, and this archive will not tick it on anybody's behalf. It needs the family's own signature.
And one thing that will not appear here at all. The archive has been told that Derrick served on the Mozambique border in the 1970s. He is living; this archive names him and publishes nothing else about him, and that includes his service. The single fact such a file could hold that would be publishable is a next-of-kin address for Ivone in the 1970s — and nobody knows where she was between the Salkow marriage in 1953 and her death at Porto. But it is his record, it needs his own request, and asking him would be faster than asking Pretoria.
Leads closed, with reasons
These cost time and produced nothing, which is exactly why they are written down — so that nobody spends the same time discovering the same nothing.
- FamilySearch for Mozambique. The catalogue holds 51 items for the country and not one is a vital record. The search cannot succeed.
- Porto passport registers. The surviving series runs 1951–1991, is described at series level only, and is not digitised. Half a century too late.
- MyHeritage record collections for Ivone. Nine results, eight Brazilian and one Floridian. No Portuguese or colonial civil registration in them at all.
- Augusto Pereira de Figueiredo is a candidate and probably a coincidence: no Figueiredo–Mota connection exists anywhere in Aveiro, and his brother emigrated to Brazil like most of that district.
- Halsey in the South African national archives. Forty documents, not one from the Transvaal depot. Whoever that family was in Johannesburg, they left no estate file in the index.
- Leibholz in the South African gazettes: zero, across all 54,313 issues — matching the NAAIRS result. The name never entered South African public record at all.
- Colonial Mozambican gazettes are not held by Gazettes.Africa; its Mozambique run begins at independence in 1975. And Projecto GERMIL, the Portuguese military master books, stops in 1908 — thirty years too early for Henrique.
- The 331,829 new Mozambique images at the Lisbon overseas archive. They are described at file and series level only — not searchable by personal name. They exist; they cannot be queried for Ivone. They would have to be read.
Sibling archives
Same method, same author. The Defranceski (Istria), The Lerena (Rosario, and the hinge into this one), The Falco (Arienzo). The Lerena archive recorded this archive's subject under a wrong given name and a wrong year; it has been corrected to Lynn Derrick Luwinski, and the two now point at each other.