The Booyzen Archive
61 places at 49 positions · 5 off the map

The Atlas

Where this family actually was, plotted from latitude and longitude. A band of Karoo and north-eastern Cape districts, a jump of four hundred miles to the Rand — and, at the top left, a district that shares the surname and is not the family at all.

Five of the fifty-one places are not drawn here: four London parishes and a street, which sit off the southern African view, and one Brisbane. The plot below is this archive's own and shows the band and the jump without borrowing anyone's coastline.

26°S 28°S 30°S 32°S 34°S 22°E 24°E 26°E 28°E Mossel Bay Mossel Bay — Town Uitenhage Uitenhage — Town Stutterheim Stutterheim — Town Graaff-Reinet Graaff-Reinet — Town, Cape Colony Cradock Cradock — Town, Cape Colony Achter Sneeuwberg Achter Sneeuwberg — Farming district (A region rather than a point. The name means the country behind the Sneeuberg and covers a wide stretch of the Karoo north of Graaff-Reinet; the pin is put in the middle of it and stands for the area, not a farmstead.) Queenstown Queenstown — Town Middelburg + Zevenfontein Middelburg — Town and district · Zevenfontein — Farm (The district is documented — Brak River, later Middelburg — and the farm is not surveyed here. The pin is placed in that stretch of the Brak River valley and is approximate to several kilometres.) Indwe Indwe — Colliery town Dugmore Mine Dugmore Mine — Colliery (The colliery at Indwe, where a Booyzen is entered as a MIJNWERKER living at “Dugmore Mijn” in 1908. The town is certain; the shaft's position is not established here, so the pin sits at Indwe.) Dordrecht + Wodehouse Dordrecht — Town · Wodehouse — District (A district, pinned at Dordrecht, its magistracy. The marker stands for the whole division and not for a point in it.) Steynsburg Steynsburg — Town Ivanhoe Ivanhoe — Farm (Named in the Cape Rebel register as Fred J. Barry's farm, district Barkly East / Wodehouse. As with Jerpoint, the register gives the division and not the position, so the pin stands for the division.) Caerlaverock Caerlaverock — Farm (The farm where the 1901 marriage took place, in the Wodehouse–Barkly East division per the Cape Rebel register. The division is documented; the farm has not been located on a survey diagram, so the pin is approximate.) Burgersdorp Burgersdorp — Town Cherryville Cherryville — Farm (The third named Barry farm at Barkly East, where Harriet died of typhoid. District documented, farm not surveyed here; the pin stands for the district.) Slang River Slang River — Locality (A locality rather than a farm, named in the records without a survey reference. The pin follows the river's course in the north-eastern Cape and is approximate along its length.) Colesberg + Knap Daar Colesberg — Town · Knap Daar — Farm (farm unlocated, placed at Colesberg) Lady Grey Lady Grey — Town Jerpoint Jerpoint — Farm (Named in the Cape Rebel register as Richard Peter Barry's farm, with no district finer than the Barkly East and Wodehouse division. The pin is a placement inside that division and nothing narrower is known.) Barkly East + Manorowen Barkly East — Town and district · Manorowen — Farm (Barkly East district is certain: John Barry died here on 25 August 1903 and the 1903 registration enters the place as “Manor Owen Ward IV”. The ward is not enough to survey from, so the pin sits in the ward's general area.) Bethulie Bethulie — Mission station, later town Philippolis Philippolis — Mission station, later town Bloemfontein + Kaalspruit, Panfontein Bloemfontein — Town, capital of the Orange Free State · Kaalspruit — Farm (placed at Bloemfontein on a name pair, not a survey) · Panfontein — Farm (The farm itself is not pinned. The prisoner list gives the DISTRICT of Bloemfontein and no farm coordinate, and several Panfonteins exist in the Free State — so this sits on Bloemfontein and says so. A grave shown in the middle of a district is worse than one not shown: the first is wrong and looks right.) Leeuwberg Leeuwberg — Farm (About two hours' ride from Bloemfontein, per the 1870 auction advertisement that sold the neighbouring farm. The direction is not stated, so the pin is put at that distance north-west of the town, beside Kaalspruit, and is approximate.) Hoopstad Hoopstad — Town Volksrust Volksrust — Town, and a camp Wakkerstroom Wakkerstroom — Town and district Heilbron Heilbron — Town Piet Retief Piet Retief — Town Klerksdorp Klerksdorp — Town Potchefstroom Potchefstroom — Town Vereeniging Vereeniging — Town Johannesburg + West Park Cemetery, Brixton Cemetery, Turffontein, Mayfair, Booysens Johannesburg — City · West Park Cemetery — Cemetery · Brixton Cemetery — Cemetery · Turffontein — Suburb · Mayfair — Suburb · Booysens — Suburb, Johannesburg (A Johannesburg suburb, pinned at its centre. The archive has people in the suburb and no street address for any of them, so the pin is the suburb and not a house. The name is a coincidence of spelling and is not this family's.) Vaalbank Vaalbank — Farm (Two deaths on this farm thirty-five years apart put the family on it beyond doubt, and the district — Lichtenburg — is documented. The farm has not been placed on a survey diagram, so the coordinates are a placement within the district.) Roodepoort Roodepoort — Town Lichtenburg Lichtenburg — District Goedehoop Goedehoop — Place (Named as a place near Pretoria where David Schalk Booijzen was living in 1904. Neither the farm nor the erf has been located, and Goedehoop is another repeated name; the pin is a placement outside Pretoria and is weak.) Brakfontein Brakfontein — Farm (District Rustenburg is documented — Hendrik Stefanus Booijzen is entered as a widower “of Brakfontein” at his 1892 marriage. The farm itself is not surveyed here and Brakfontein is one of the commonest farm names in the Transvaal, so the pin is placed in the district and is approximate.) Pretoria + Market Street, Pretoria Pretoria — City · Market Street, Pretoria — Street (The street is named in the 1900 document — a zinc building in Market Street — and no number is given. The pin is placed on the street and is not a building.) Voorbedacht No. 401 Voorbedacht No. 401 — Farm (The farm number is known and the district is Rustenburg, but this archive has not read the survey diagram that would place number 401 on the ground. The pin is a placement in the district and the number is the part that is solid.) Rustenburg Rustenburg — Town Zwartruggens Zwartruggens — Town Tolosberg Tolosberg — Hill, place of capture (position inferred; Jeppe's 1899 map does not carry the name) Koedoesfontein Koedoesfontein — Farm (District Rustenburg is documented — Hendrik Stefanus Booijsen died here on 11 May 1908. The farm is not surveyed here, and Koedoesfontein is a common Transvaal farm name, so the pin is a placement in the district.) Driefontein Driefontein — Farm, Groot Marico (Given in the records as a farm in the Groot Marico, district Marico. Driefontein is among the most repeated farm names in the country; the district is what is documented and the pin stands for it.) Marico Marico — District Zeerust Zeerust — Town, district Marico Kwaggafontein Kwaggafontein — Farm (The district and the post office are certain — Marico, PK Kafferskraal — and the farm itself is not placed. The pin is put in the north of the district near Kafferskraal and says so.) town, plotted farm, placed at its district town

A plotted chart, not a drawn map. Positions are latitude and longitude on a plain graticule — no coastline is drawn, because this archive would be inventing its shape. The dashed line is the family's own route, not a road.

The Cape cluster

Everything before 1900 sits in a band about a hundred and eighty miles across — Graaff-Reinet and Cradock in the Karoo, then east to Colesberg, Burgersdorp, Lady Grey, Barkly East, Dordrecht and Indwe.

The whole of the Mountjoy line, the whole of the Barry line, the 1820 Settler's grave and every farm in the testimony fall inside it.

And then the Rand

After 1905 the family is at Johannesburg — roughly four hundred miles north of Indwe, in a place that did not exist as a settlement until 1886.

That jump is the testimony's train, and it is the same jump the surname statistics show: Booysen is a Cape name, Booyzen is a Gauteng one. The name →

The cluster this archive was too sure about

Marico, top left, was drawn here as a warning. Seven Booyzen claims for compensation as burghers were filed from that district in 1903–04, and the Booyzen children who died in the Johannesburg and Vereeniging camps came from farms there. It is a substantial Booyzen family who fought, were burnt out and were compensated — everything the testimony describes.

This page used to say, flatly, "They are not this family. This one was in the Cape until about 1907, and reached the Transvaal by railway rather than by commando." The second sentence is now known to be false, and the first was resting on it.

The direct ancestor died in district Rustenburg on 1 September 1876 — a quarter of a century before the war, two generations before the railway. His Sterfkennis was written on a farm called Brakfontein and signed by a son who was living there. The document →

Rustenburg is not Marico, and nothing yet connects this family to a single one of those seven compensation claims. But the reason for keeping the two clusters apart was that this family had no business being in the western Transvaal in the nineteenth century, and it did.
And since then it has moved again. The 1876 man's son Jan Gerthardus Lodewikus died on the farm Vaalbank in the district of Lichtenburg on 25 May 1885, and his daughter died on the same farm in 1920. Read the districts along this map from east to west: Rustenburg 1876 · Lichtenburg 1885 and 1920 · Marico 1903. They are neighbours. The correction →

The test, run

With three neighbouring districts in a row, the obvious thing is to put the Marico claimants against the names this archive now has. The seven compensation claims are indexed by initials: JPJ (1903) · PJ (1903) · GL (1904) · JPJ (1904) · L (1904) · JC (1904) · HE (1904). The eight children on the 1876 Sterfkennis are David Schalk, Magdalena Johanna, Petrus Jacobus, Anna Eliezabet, Jan Gerthardus Lodewikus, Eliezabet Cornelia, Hendrik Stefanus and Anna Maria.

Three of the seven sets of initials fit — PJ, GL, L — and three do not. That is about what chance would give you with a family this repetitive about names, and by 1903 the 1876 children were dead or in their eighties, so any real claimant would be a grandson and the initials would have to be matched a generation further on than this archive can see.

And one fact points the other way. The Marico patriarch in the index — Jacobus Petrus Johannes Booyzen, the JPJ of two of those claims — is entered as born at Pietermaritzburg, Natal, in 1841, and dead at Rhenosterfontein in the district of Marico in November 1900. This family is Graaff-Reinet. A Natal birth is not where a son of Brakfontein comes from.

So the test was run and it does not settle it. It is recorded because a question that has been asked and not answered is worth more on a page than a question nobody has touched, and because the next person should not have to run it again. What was searched →

So the map now carries three districts and one honest answer: unresolved. The Marico family may be cousins and may be strangers, and this archive has no document either way. What it will not do again is convert the absence of a link into the presence of a boundary. The testimony →   What was withdrawn →

Off this map

Five places in the archive are nowhere near southern Africa.

Soho, London · LondonShoreditch · LondonConduit Street · LondonGerman Savoy Church · LondonBrisbane · Brisbane

Four of them are within two miles of each other in London — a Soho font, a Shoreditch wedding, a Mayfair deathbed and a Strand burial, all belonging to the Kolbes. The fifth is where the line reads this.

All 66 places → · The timeline → · Everyone →