Status

Every open thread in one place, and the date it last moved

This page exists because the answer to “are you keeping track of all this?” was honestly: in four places, and the published one was already stale. This is the one that is not.

10Delivered

2Acknowledged

9In flight

1Waiting on you

The letters

Eleven sent, and exactly one has ever bounced — the one sent before every address was checked for a mail record first. That is now standing procedure, and it has since caught three dead addresses before they cost anything.

Sent	To	Where	Asking for	State
14 Sep	Arquivo da Defesa Nacional	Paço d’Arcos	Henrique’s 1961 military registration	Delivered
14 Sep	Arquivo Histórico Militar	Lisboa	Same request, after the bounce	Acknowledged
14 Sep	Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique	Maputo	Recruitment-district records, 1950s–60s	Delivered
15 Sep	Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique	Maputo	Ivone’s 1924 birth certificate	Delivered
15 Sep	Master of the High Court	South Gauteng	J294 in estate 12294/2023 — Henrique	Delivered
15 Sep	Landesarchiv Berlin	Berlin	Gertrud’s death 1943 · the 1924 marriage and divorce · Kurt’s 1912 birth entry	Delivered
15 Sep	National Archives	Pretoria	J294 in estate TAB MHG 7584/69 — Kurt	Delivered
15 Sep	1ª Conservatória do Registo Civil	Porto	Ivone’s death record, date unknown	Delivered
15 Sep	Archiwum Państwowe	Bydgoszcz	Standesamt Schubin 1884 — Jacob’s birth	Acknowledged
15 Sep	Archiwum Państwowe	Koszalin	Standesamt Hammerstein 1884 — Georg; and Sally, 1847	Delivered
14 Sep	Arquivo Histórico Militar	—	Sent to a dead domain	Bounced — resent

Item 8 answered itself, 15 September Closed

The letter asking the closest match who her grandfather’s parents were went out in the morning. By the afternoon the question was moot: a column on the 1952 marriage register shows her grandfather was born in the Cape Province and her grandmother in England, and the English side is the one that matters. Her grandmother’s birth entry names the mother as a Castle, of Baldock, Hertfordshire — the second of Derrick’s top matches descends from the same couple through a different daughter. The chain →

The fifteen

	Action	State	Where it stands
1	Order estate 12294/2023 — Henrique’s J294	Sent — awaiting reply	Sent to the named estate controller for files ending in 4, with a line asking her to redirect it if the estate sits elsewhere.
2	Order estate 7584/69 — Kurt’s J294	Sent — awaiting reply	Corrected mid-flight: this is a National Archives request, not a Master’s one. Kurt died in 1968 and files that old went to Pretoria long ago.
3	Ivone’s Porto death record	Sent — awaiting reply	A false claim of kinship was caught in the draft and removed before sending. Asks whether a search by name is possible at all, since her date of death is unknown.
4	Ivone’s 1924 Lourenço Marques birth	Sent — awaiting reply	Her 1924 birth falls inside the Maputo archive’s 1865–1934 range — it was Henrique’s 1941 that fell outside. Asks for parents and, if recorded, grandparents.
5	Henrique’s 1968 marriage record	Not doable from here	Searched on both groom and bride. Not in FamilySearch — the South African marriage collections thin out after the mid-1960s. May simply arrive inside the estate file at item 1.
6	The June 1948 ante-nuptial contract	Not doable from here	A South African deeds registry “may not give out information acting on a letter or a telephone call.” Needs attendance in person or a paid commercial search.
7	The February 1956 ante-nuptial contract	Not doable from here	Same office, same obstacle.
8	Write to the closest British match	Acknowledged	SENT 15 September. ANSWERED BY DOCUMENT THE SAME DAY, and not in the way the letter expected: the 1952 register's birthplace column shows Mervin Halsey was born in the Cape Province and Cynthia Wear in England. The link is the grandmother, not the grandfather. Her GRO birth entry gives her mother's maiden name as CASTLE, and the censuses put that Castle family at Baldock, Hertfordshire. The question the letter asked — who were Mervin Halsey's parents — no longer matters.
9	Write to the keeper of the 10,715-person tree	Acknowledged	SENT 15 September as a follow-up inside the June 2025 thread — and again at 09:27 the same day, this time carrying a finding rather than a question: her own Castle family in the Baldock censuses, two children her tree is missing, and the correction that Caroline was born a Walls. The question back is narrow — what became of the Castle sons, and did any of them go to South Africa.
10	Big Y-700 on Derrick’s kit	Waiting on the family	A purchase. This archive does not spend other people’s money.
11	Kurt’s naturalisation	Not doable from here	Done as far as it can be. The Union gazette did publish naturalisation applications — his partner made one in February 1942 — and Kurt appears in none of them under any spelling the OCR catches. Recorded as a negative with its limits.
12	Finish the Gazettes.Africa sweep	Not doable from here	Done. Leibholz zero, Salkow zero, “Piccadilly Hat” nothing after 1952, Walter Oppenheimer seven including his naturalisation, Ivy Fuchs seven including her husband’s estate.
13	Gertrud’s death register, 27 February 1943	Sent — awaiting reply	Asked as one of three questions in the Berlin letter. The cause of death is the point.
14	Auguste and Jacob’s divorce file	Sent — awaiting reply	Same letter. In a Berlin Mischehe the date is the whole meaning of the act.
15	Szubin and Hammerstein registers	Acknowledged	Two letters, one to each archive, each told what the other was asked. Both civil registries opened in 1874, so an 1884 birth entry names both parents outright.

Two messages sent on the finding itself 15 September, 09:27 and 09:28

To	Carrying	Asking
The 292.7 cM match keeper of the 10,715-person tree	Her own Castles, found in the 1901 and 1911 censuses at Baldock — including two children her tree does not have, Hilda b.1902 and Ernest b.1904, and the correction that Caroline was born a Walls, her widowed father Joseph living in the house.	What became of the Castle sons — George W. b.1885, Frederick b.1890, Ernest b.1904 — and whether any of them, or their children, went out to South Africa.
The 297.5 cM match a correction, an hour after the fact	That the letter sent to her at 08:12 asked the wrong question. The link is her grandmother, not her grandfather, and the chain from the register to the Baldock censuses, laid out so she can check it.	Anything the family holds about Cynthia’s own people — and who she knew in Johannesburg before she got there, because a young woman does not sail from Hertfordshire alone and by chance.

Neither was a new approach. Both went into threads opened in June 2025. The second exists because a wrong question had been put in writing that morning, and leaving it standing would have been worse than sending twice in one day.

Replies sent into the June 2025 threads

To	Shared with Derrick	The one thing asked
The closest match	297.5 cM	Who were Mervin Halsey’s parents, and where was he born? Either Mervin was a brother of Derrick’s biological father, or Mervin’s parent was
The second cousin who offered his tree	333.9 cM	His mother’s parents and grandparents, where his Brown sits · and how the Rocha matches arise, the one fact the two-cluster model cannot absorb
Walley Brown’s great-grandson	165.9 cM	Whether his sister will talk · and what is known of Walley Brown, married twice and possibly at once — is he Walter George Brown, 1889–1971?
The keeper of the 10,715-person tree	292.7 cM	Sent earlier: siblings of Walter George Brown or Agnes Kate Castle whose children were never traced

All four went into threads that already existed, each opening by owning a fifteen-month silence rather than glossing it. None was a cold approach, because none could honestly have been.

What is actually waiting on you

Three things, and none of them is research.

Reply to the match who offered his whole tree in June 2025 and was never answered. He is on Ancestry, not MyHeritage, which is why his tree here holds three people. Fifteen months late, but the offer may stand.
The remaining letter to a living DNA match. Written, and sitting still. Everything else went to an institution; these go to two private people, about a finding that touches their family as much as this one. And Derrick should probably be told before a stranger is — which is not this archive’s call to make.
Big Y-700. A purchase, and the one test that would place Derrick on a branch young enough for a surname to mean something.
The two ante-nuptial contracts, if you want them. They need somebody in a South African deeds office, or a paid search.

Everything else is either in the post or finished. The next movement in this archive comes from somebody else’s filing cabinet, and Bydgoszcz has already warned that a complicated request can take more than a month.

And the ones that came back negative

Recorded because a search that found nothing is still a search, and the next person should not repeat it.

Leibholz — zero across all 54,313 South African gazettes, and zero in NAAIRS. The name never entered South African public record.
Mota — zero in NAAIRS. Salkow — zero in the gazettes.
Colonial Mozambican gazettes — not held by Gazettes.Africa; its Mozambique run begins at independence in 1975.
Projecto GERMIL — the Portuguese military master books stop in 1908, thirty years too early for Henrique.
No Theory of Family Relativity exists on any of Derrick’s 5,464 matches. Nothing here will be found by machine.

The full working record → · The ten questions →