What changed

The people register follows twelve lines, and one of them is called Testimony Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found IT IS A CONFIDENCE LABEL SITTING IN THE LINE FIELD. One person — a living Booyzen, held on testimony — carried l: "Testimony", and Testimony is this archive's own word for s: "lore", three fields away in the same record. So the reader was offered “Testimony (1)” in the line filter on /people/, between Daschner (15) and Lerena (1), as though this archive followed a family of that name. NOBODY WAS MISDESCRIBED AND NOTHING WAS CLAIMED ABOUT HER — the line field only groups — but the register's own list of the families it follows was wrong, and that list is read as a statement. IT WAS FOUND SIDEWAYS, while counting the l values to answer a different question entirely: what the Record Atlas should be told this archive's families are. A field whose values are never counted can hold anything. The line is now Booyzen, which is her surname and was always the answer. →

The Frederik Fortunatus Hofmeyr Kolbe in the DSAB's printed index is probably a misreading Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found IT IS A BIOGRAPHICAL ENTRY, AND IT NAMES HIS PARENTS. Row 173 met the name in a user tree, found the same string in the Dictionary of South African Biography's index, and wrote that it was probably a misreading — reasonable caution about an index line nobody had opened. The entry is at Volume V, page 419: born and died at Wakkerstroom, 27 September 1919 and 18 June 1969, an agricultural extension officer, the son of Frederick Fortunatus Kolbe and his wife Anna Margaretha Catharina Moolman. The dates match the tree to the day and the dictionary adds the two names the tree did not have. THE CAUTION WAS RIGHT AND THE GUESS INSIDE IT WAS WRONG, and the difference is that the index was treated as a thing to explain away rather than a thing to open. Still nothing is joined: a published entry about a man at this archive's Kolbe place is a lead, not a descent. →

A gate added yesterday was grading a build from a fortnight ago Method

found Two faults, one of them in the new gate. check:pin had been refusing the build since the kit was repinned on 9 October. CI was green on that very commit — which settles it: CI installs from the pin, so the pin was fine and the thirteen-day-old local node_modules was not. npm ci fixed it and left the lockfile byte-identical. Then the install revealed the second fault. The new check:nav was wired --dist dist, hardcoded, where every other --dist script honours ARCHIVE_OUT. This archive’s build.sh exists so that sessions can build into private directories without clobbering each other — so the gate was reading site/dist: 807 pages from 27 September, 352 people, and neither of the two added yesterday — and reporting “conforms” on a 843-page build it had never opened. The kit tool names the variable in its own error message: “Build first, or point ARCHIVE_OUT at the build you made.” The wiring ignored it. One line, fixed in this archive’s own package.json and proved in both directions.

“25 records and genuinely filtered — every one has a Kolbe parent” Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found FIFTEEN OF THE TWENTY-FIVE. The other ten are KOLOBE, KOLKOBET, COLBERT and CULBERT — Sesotho and other surnames reached by FamilySearch's fuzzy name matching, which is the index working as designed. THE FILTER IS REAL AND THE NAME IS FUZZY, and those are different claims. q.fatherSurname does restrict to records having a parent of that surname; it does not restrict to the spelling you typed. HOW IT HAPPENED, WHICH IS THE PART WORTH KEEPING: the result rows were scraped with a /kolbe/i test that returned fifteen, and the page's own total of twenty-five was then reported as though all twenty-five had been looked at. Counting the hits and quoting the corpus are two different measurements and only one of them was made. Caught within the hour by going back to read all twenty-five rather than the matching ones — which is also what turned up an eleventh child for the Commandant. →

Three pages carried the John Barry conflation as unresolved for three weeks after it was resolved Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found THE WORK WAS DONE ON 14 SEPTEMBER AND ONLY THE PERSON'S OWN ENTRY WAS TOLD. The Yorkshire John Barry was separated from the Cape one and followed past the date the Cape one died — the 1851 census has him a SHIP OWNER at Ruswarp, Whitby, the only man of that age and name in the county, with Whitby deaths registered in 1858 and 1860; and the Bilsdale burial he was supposed to have is absent from 5,934 indexed Bilsdale burials. Work list row 83 was closed the same week. MEANWHILE THREE PLACES WENT ON SAYING THE OPPOSITE. /tree/ carried a panel ending “until they are separated nothing above it can be trusted”; /disputed/ graded the dispute FATAL with the instruction “Separate them”, on a page that has a Resolved status and uses it elsewhere; and the ancestor chart labelled him “John Barry, 1796–1853”, which is the conflated pair — 1796 is the Whitby man's birth year and the Cape man has none. THE TEXT LIVED IN THREE PLACES AND THE TRUTH IN A FOURTH: a hardcoded panel in tree.astro, a wall node in pedigree.json, a row in disputed.astro, and the finding itself in people.js. Correcting one corrects nothing. All four now agree, and the person's birth field says plainly that 1796 belonged to the other man. THIS ONE REACHED READERS, unlike the latent contradiction corrected earlier today: /tree/ and /disputed/ are both linked from the main menu. →

MHG 1095/48 reported as still needing to be ordered from Pretoria Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found IT WAS READ A MONTH AGO AND ITS IMAGES ARE ON THIS SITE. The death notice of George Downing Mountjoy Booyzen is transcribed at /documents/ with three images, and it is the document that corrected his death date to 11 December 1947 — 21 February 1948 being the day the notice was signed. THE MISTAKE WAS METHOD, NOT READING. Today's sweep tested every item on the held Pretoria order against FamilySearch, found this man indexed only as the Spouse on his wife's 1944 file, and concluded from that alone that his own estate “stays on the order”. Searching one outside index is not the same question as asking what this archive already holds, and only the second question was skipped. THIS IS THE THIRD INSTANCE TODAY AND THE SECOND AFTER THE RULE WAS WRITTEN. A correction filed this morning named the same habit; row 212 was then given a rule saying each item is to be checked against this archive BEFORE it is opened; the rule was applied to the six Mountjoy estates and not to the Pretoria order an hour later. THE SOURCE REGISTER WAS ALSO CARRYING IT BOTH WAYS and would have caught me: the estates table chipped the file Blocked while the read table vouched for the same document with its image published. Both corrected. A gate was considered and refused — only two references in the whole register are vouched by the read section, so a check would be measuring a population of two. →

“Not one of the ten is joined to this house yet”, written of the Mountjoy estates on 27 September Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found TWO OF THE TEN WERE ALREADY DRAWN AS CHILDREN OF THAT HOUSE, AND HAD BEEN FOR SEVENTEEN DAYS. Estate KAB MOOC 6/9/5047: 58379 was read and published on 10 SEPTEMBER, and its distribution account names the heirs of James Jonathan Mountjoy of Barkly East. ANNIE LOUISA NEPGEN, BORN MOUNTJOY and LOUISA ELIZABETH DIESEL, BORN MOUNTJOY are two of them, and both appear on this site’s own /households/ page as his daughters. The NAAIRS sweep of 27 September then listed the same two women among ten estates it called unattached. THE SENTENCE WAS NOT STALE, IT WAS WRONG WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN — the search result was written up without being checked against this archive. THAT IS THE THIRD INSTANCE OF ONE HABIT. Work list row 212 did it again on 8 October, listing an estate image to open that question 12 already records as READ; and a letter of 20 September asked a paid researcher for a death notice “for the parents” of a woman whose parents were already held here. The failure is never the searching. It is writing down what a result list says without asking what this archive already holds. →

James Montjoy's death notice cited as image 338 of film 007844936 Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found IT IS AT IMAGE 339, AND 338 IS ANOTHER FAMILY'S DEATH NOTICE. Both frames were opened on 9 October: image 338 is the death notice of CHRISTOFFEL HENDRIK OLIVIER, trader, aged 56 years 4 months and 10 days, who died at his own house in the town of Graaff-Reinet on 15 June 1840 — his parents, not he, are the Cornelis Hermanus Olivier and Agnieta Elizabeth van Wyk on line 3, and this draft said otherwise for ten minutes before line 1 was read. Image 340 is WILLEM JACOBUS VAN DER MERWE of Bouwbosch Fontein. NO CONNECTION TO THIS ARCHIVE'S OLIVIERS IS CLAIMED OR LOOKED FOR; the name is here only to prove the frame is not Montjoy's. The James Montjoy notice, stamped 4393, is at 339, which is where the FamilySearch record ark 1:1:QP4Z-WK68 lands. THE READING OF THE DOCUMENT WAS NEVER IN DOUBT — every fact this archive published off it is confirmed: saddler, born in “Europe”, parents NOT KNOWN, a house and erf at Cradock worth £90, died in the village of Cradock in September 1827, and four children named James, George, Johanna and Jacoba, all minors. WHAT WAS WRONG WAS THE WAY BACK TO THE PAGE. A citation off by one sends the next reader to a stranger's family, and this one was published in THREE places — /sources/, question 12, and /documents/, which also sets out the arithmetic that produced it. THAT ARITHMETIC IS THE LESSON AND IT IS BEING KEPT: the reference numbers do not ascend by exactly one per image, because an estate running to two or three frames breaks the step, so interpolating from image 330 at reference 4386 predicts 4393 at image 337 and the narrowing stopped one frame short. An interpolated citation is a PREDICTION and has to be re-read off the frame it landed on. →

William Frederick Thomas Barry was born on 29 September 1861 Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found THAT IS HIS BAPTISM DATE, AND THE REGISTER RECORDS NO BIRTH DATE FOR HIM AT ALL. Entry 79 of the Graaff-Reinet baptism register is headed “Gedoopt 29 Sept. 1861” — baptised. The entries on either side carry a birth date and his does not: 78 is geb. 24 April 1861, 80 is geb. 16 Aug. 1861, and 79 is a name with no geb. This archive took the one date on the entry and filed it as a birth, which is the commonest error there is in a baptism register and the easiest to make when an index labels its single date Event Date. What is actually known is that he was baptised on 29 September 1861 and born at some point before it. AND A SECOND THING GOES WITH IT: this archive reasoned from “born 29 September 1861 at Graaff-Reinet” that the household had returned to Graaff-Reinet between Burgersdorp and Dordrecht. The godparents are the mother's sister and her husband. A child is christened where its godparents are; a baptism place is where the font was, not where the family slept. →

The Commandant's eldest, found by asking for a father instead of a name Found

found Catharina Wilhelmina Kolbe was an inference built from a year, a town and a surname. She is now documented, and she is the eldest of the twelve. Her 1909 civil death registration gives father JAN GERSEM ELIEZER KOLBE, STOCK FARMER, mother ANNA JACOBA, and — in the field that asks a twice-married woman to name the other husband — PIENAAR, which ties her to the Bloemfontein bride of 8 October 1860. Born 1844 in the Cape Colony, a year after her parents married; dead at Veelroem, district Ladybrand, of heart disease and dropsy. Her son registered it and signed JAN G. E. ANDERSON, his grandfather’s three names entire, four lines below where that grandfather is named. The Commandant gains a trade — stock farmer, from a document rather than an obituary. And the method is the part worth keeping. She is indexed under ANDERSON, a surname this archive never held, so no search for her could have found her. Searching the index for her FATHER did. q.fatherSurname=Kolbe returns 25 filtered records in that collection — but only as the sole name term; paired with a surname it merely re-ranks, and a count that moves proves the field was read, not that it filtered.

A knot untied in September, still tied on three pages in October Taken back

found The John Barry conflation was resolved on 14 September — the Yorkshire ship owner separated out and followed past the date the Cape man died — and only his own entry was told. /tree/ went on ending its panel “until they are separated nothing above it can be trusted”; /disputed/ went on grading it Fatal — Separate them, on a page that has a Resolved status and uses it for four other disputes; and the ancestor chart went on labelling him 1796–1853, which is the conflated pair, 1796 being the Whitby man's year. The sentence lived in three places and the finding in a fourth — a hardcoded panel, a wall node in pedigree.json, a row in disputed.astro, and the person in people.js. All four now agree, and the wall is stated as what it actually is: not a contradiction but an absence — no birth, no arrival, no burial, and a son registered in 1903 as an Irishman born in Ireland.

A collection that ends in 1961, and two references from 1969 Method

found The held Pretoria order tested item by item against the film. One comes off it: MHG 40293 is filmed, free and read, and its reference needed no completing — so the favour row 193 was holding open can be closed without asking anybody for anything. The other four stay, and two of them could have been ruled out in a sentence: collection 2520237 ends in 1961, so the two /69 references are outside it by eight years. Row 202 had guessed “likely free too” from a neighbouring success in 1918. A collection's date range is the first thing to read, not the last. And the search method itself was nearly wrong. FamilySearch does not fold BOOYZEN and BOOYSEN — 249 records against 2,417, two different populations — and the first pass of this sweep searched one spelling only. Two negatives were written before that was checked. Separately, three source entries contradicted their own rows — 2428/40, 2945/44 and 1928/42 each carried a blanket “located; most are unread and on hold against cost” while their own rows said Read and linked to a transcription. Three of the four Read rows in that table. Corrected to say the file is filmed and the image published here. AND THE DAMAGE WAS LATENT, WHICH IS WORTH SAYING RATHER THAN OVERSTATING. That held line is rendered by SourceBlock on pages that cite an id, not by /sources/ itself; it reaches a reader on 10 pages for other entries, and on NONE for these three, because no page cites them yet. Nobody was told the wrong thing. The next page to cite one would have been.

The ten Mountjoy estates were two families, and the question that would join them is blank on every form Found

found The last six opened, and row 201 closes. Two of the ten were always this archive’s own — Barkly East daughters it had published a month ago. At least three belong to a different Mountjoy house in the Transkei, whose head is now documented: GEORGE MOUNTJOY OF KOKSTAD, born in the Orange Free State about 1862, dead at Tongaat in 1943 at eighty-one, married to Mary Fischer in the King Williamstown district, nine children named on his death notice. His daughter Minnie is the Wilhelmina Louisa Burger of the list; his son Alfred married the Aletta Johanna Hattingh of it. ELIZABETH MARIA DEMMER FITS NEITHER HOUSE — born at Dordrecht about January 1862, which makes her fifteen months older than the Barkly East mother and so no daughter of hers. And the one line that could join or separate these families is refused every time it is asked. “Names unknown.” “Do not know, both deceased.” “Not Known.” A hundred and two years apart, three informants in this surname were asked who the dead person’s parents were, and none of them could say. Ten estates have become three orders.

A daughter who died too early to be counted, and a list that was never held up against the archive Found

found Four of the ten Mountjoy estates opened. The find is WILHELMINA ERNESTINA BRUMMER, BORN MOUNTJOY, dead at twenty at Barkly East in June 1898, whose death notice names father John James Mountjoy and mother Maria Louisa Bertha — three forenames that match this archive’s Maria Louisa Bertha Kumm exactly, a birth in the town that couple married in, a death in theirs. She is entered as a person and refused as their daughter, because the 1938 distribution of her supposed father’s estate pays two grandchildren their dead mother’s share and pays no Brummer anything. A daughter who died forty years before her father is invisible to his estate; that is why her own notice is worth having, and also why it cannot be checked against it. The other finding is about this archive, not the Mountjoys. On 27 September it wrote that not one of the ten was joined to this house — seventeen days after it had itself published two of them as daughters of exactly that house. The search was fine; the write-up was never held against what was already held. Third instance of one habit, and now on /corrections/.

The biggest single gap, and the parents were never in the index Found

found TAB MHG 40293 is read from the film. The death notice of Frederik Fortunatus Downing Kolbe, dead at twenty-seven in the influenza of 1918, names Vader George Augustus Kolbe and Moeder Martha Sofia Kolbe, geboren Klopper — a parentage this archive had only from a brother’s death registration and a sister’s estate file. The index attached to the same record says there are no other people in the group. The parents are on the image and were never indexed. And the mother’s name is what decides it: two men called George Augustus Kolbe lie in one cemetery at Wakkerstroom, born two years apart, and only one of them married a Klopper. It also takes a file off a paid order — the reference needed no completing, and the index’s “Villieria, Pretoria” is a farm portion in the district of Wakkerstroom, where this archive already had him.

The estates were never behind a counter — both probate series are filmed and free Found

found Row 201 wanted ten Cape Mountjoy estates ordered as one enquiry. They do not need ordering: the Cape probate series is name-indexed and imaged on FamilySearch — 116 Mountjoy records, including one of the ten with her birthplace and exact death date, and James Mountjoy the saddler, question 12's man. So is the Transvaal series, and its volumes are titled PROBATE ESTATE CASE FILES, not an index — the image opened is a Sterfkennis. TAB MHG 40293, the file this archive calls its biggest single gap and that David is holding off on cost, has an ark and a picture, and the index puts the death at Villieria, Pretoria rather than Wakkerstroom. No image is read yet and nothing is adopted from an index.

The publishing debt closed, and a gate that had been telling the truth for three weeks Method

found Rows 183, 184, 185 and 189 are done. Sources: 0 of 42 → 46 of 46 accounted for, unlocked by this morning's refactor — the kit reads held only on a dict row, and these rows were lists, so the archive could not have declared a holding however it tried. Hosts: the row said three undeclared, it was six, and three of them I added myself this fortnight while leaving the sources page alone — the row's thesis demonstrated on its author. Pages: 0 bespoke, and one of the two exemptions was justified by a blocker removed this morning, so it is rewritten with a reason that is true. Lines: measured, and two of the row's claims are out of date — Luwinski uses BranchRivers now, and this archive has no families page at all.

Seventeen pages declare their sources, and twenty-five record why they do not Method

found Row 186 finished. The instinct was a SourceBlock on all 42 pages and that would have been worse than the gap — /errands/ lists what this archive has NOT got, /searched/ rows are already citations, /sources/ cannot rest on itself. 17 declare, 88 items, every id resolving; 25 are exempt with a reason each. Automated assignment was tried and measured first: 34 of the 46 sources carry an archival reference and those references appear on almost no narrative page, because the pages argue from names and the register lists numbers. The gate enforces that every page has been THOUGHT about, not that every page declares.

Sources given ids, and four pages now say what they rest on Method

found 0 of 41 pages declared their sources, and the cause was that the sources had no names. sources.json was four tables of HTML cells; every row now carries an id derived from its own first cell, not its position, 46 of them with no collisions, and the rendered page is byte-identical to before. /kolbe/, /barry/, /women/ and /direct-line/ now carry 29 declared ids, all resolving. And a gate now reads data-missing — the attribute SourceBlock leaves when it silently drops an id it cannot resolve, which nothing had ever looked at.

The 1861 font read: a sister at the font, not a family on the move Found

found Entry 79 of the Graaff-Reinet baptism register, read at the page. The place was never an index artefact — the volume is the parish book. The godparents are CATHARINE MARIA SOPHIA KOLBE, the mother's own sister, standing with a JOUBERT, which is what a married couple does at a font. So the baptism 250 kilometres from Burgersdorp needs no migration to explain it, and this archive's four-stage Barry journey was over-read from a place field. A third godparent is RALPH PETER THOMAS and the child is William Frederick THOMAS. And the date on the entry is Gedoopt — a baptism, not the birth this archive filed it as.

The Colesberg marriage was always there, indexed under BERRY Found

found Entry 735, 23 February 1846 — the date this archive adopted eleven days ago from a book and marked inferred. It is documented now. The clerk wrote John BERRY and the man signed John BARRY, three lines apart, which is why no search for Barry in twenty-seven years found it; the search that worked used his wife's surname and not his. New from the page: their residence at Stormberg Spruit, the minister Thomas Reid, and a consent column reading “de Weduwe Kolbe, moeder” with nothing on the groom's side where the entries on either side each name two fathers.

Ireland searched for John Augustus Barry, and the instrument's edge found before the answer Found

found Seven days of subscription left and the planned campaign already done, so it went on the question his 1903 death registration opened: born about June 1819, Irishman born in Ireland, mother born Neagle. No John Barry of a Nagle mother is baptised anywhere in Ireland in that window — 47 records, Johns at 1811, 1845, 1860, 1876, and the window demonstrably covered. The more useful finding is the boundary: of FindMyPast's Irish sets only the Catholic baptisms and civil births from 1864 index a mother's surname, so the search could only ever have found a Catholic child. And 45 of the 47 are County Cork.

Pama's Barry migration tested against fonts already held, and it fails twice Found

found No service, no order, no letter — a book's claim checked against registers this archive had already read. Pama said the children were born at Burgersdorp up to Nicolaas, then at Dordrecht. The fonts say Graaff-Reinet 1847, 1848, 1850, Burgersdorp from 1852, Graaff-Reinet again in 1861, Dordrecht in 1864 — and the 1847 entry was read at the image, with three Kolbes standing as witnesses. Pama's pivot child has no font at all, so that half of the claim is tested only by itself. A reading that would make him right about the wrong generation is recorded: the sentence fits the SONS' household, Burgersdorp 1873–1883 then Dordrecht, almost exactly.

John Augustus Barry I and Margaretha Kolbe married about 1850 at Burghersdorp Taken back

did A conclusion that does not follow — the documents read correctly and the inference drawn wrongly, or a control that tested the wrong thing.

found THEIR ELDEST SON WAS BORN IN 1847, AND THIS ARCHIVE DREW HIM UNDER THAT MARRIAGE. The 1850 rested on one word — “probably” — written by their son R. P. Barry on his father's death notice in 1915, sixty-five years after the event. The same son had written “Unknown” on his mother's notice three months earlier, which this archive quoted elsewhere as a sign of how little he knew, and then used his guess as a date anyway. Meanwhile people.js said “married 1846” the whole time. Two of this archive's own files disagreed, and the marriage page published the wrong one. WHAT IT IS NOW: 23 FEBRUARY 1846 at COLESBERG, marked inf because the exact date and place come from Pama, reported in a letter of November 1999 that had been in David's files for twenty-seven years. THE BOOK IS NOT WHAT MAKES IT SAFE — this archive does not let a book overrule a page. 1850 is refuted by arithmetic on the archive's own data, and 1846 was already here. HOW IT WAS CAUGHT MATTERS MORE THAN THE DATE. Not by a gate, not by an audit, but by a stranger's letter arriving at a page nobody had re-read. There is a gate now — child-before-wedding refuses a household whose marriage postdates a child drawn under it, and it fired on this row and on James Henry Barry, born 1848, before the fix. →

A 1999 letter corrects a marriage this site has been publishing wrong Found

found Three more Barry letters out of David's files, one of them this family entirely. Pama, via a correspondent in November 1999: John Barry married Margaretha Wilhelmina Elizabeth Kolbe at COLESBERG on 23 FEBRUARY 1846. This site said 1850 — a son's “probably” on a 1915 death notice — while drawing that couple's eldest son, born 1847, underneath it. Two of this archive's own files disagreed and neither noticed. There is a gate now, and it fired on two children before the fix. Also gained: birth years for Hendrik Nicholaas (1857) and Pieter Richard (1866), and a Burgersdorp-to-Dordrecht move to test against fonts.

A 2008 letter in the inbox answers a lead this archive raised in September Found

found David remembered a long email about the Barrys. It is there: 11 June 2008, a complete descendant report of the English/Swellendam Barrys — 1,604 people, eleven generations, twelve years' work — and not one name this archive holds appears in it, though it names South Africa 200 times and Swellendam 129. The Swellendam lead is answered and it is a no. Its writer also sorts the South African Barrys into three groups and names a third, “from London in the late 1700”, which she had not then traced and which this family probably belongs to. The letter sat unread here for eighteen years, which is a finding about method and not about the Barrys. AND SHE SENT ONLY ONE OF HER TWO TREES. Ireland appears nowhere in the 400,000 characters; the Irish Barrys — her own line, and the one this family's lore points at with “as an Irishman, John Barry…” — are untested, and she finished that tree too.

A civil marriage entry gives ages, occupations, fathers' names and witnesses — so the image would name the fathers Taken back

did A conclusion that does not follow — the documents read correctly and the inference drawn wrongly, or a control that tested the wrong thing.

found IT DOES NOT, AND THIS ARCHIVE SHOULD NEVER HAVE SAID IT WOULD. The claim was written into the work list, into two people's records, into two marriage rows and into a timeline entry, and it was the whole reason for wanting the images. THE FREE STATE CIVIL MARRIAGE FORM OF 1869–72 HAS NO PARENTS' COLUMNS. Read at the page, its columns are: No., Datum, Volle naam en toenaam, Ouderdom, Staat, Ambt of beroep, Woning ten tijde des Huwelijks, Huwelijksgeboden of Licentie, Toestemming — then the parties' own signatures, the witnesses', and the minister's. CONSENT IS RECORDED BY RELATIONSHIP AND NOT BY NAME: the 1872 entry says “Moeder” and stops. WHERE THE ERROR CAME FROM is the shape of other countries' civil marriage registers, which do carry fathers — an assumption about a record set, made without opening one, and then repeated confidently enough that it survived being written down five times. WHAT IT COST AND WHAT IT DID NOT. No conclusion rested on it, so nothing has to be unpicked; but it stood as the justification for a piece of work, and a reason to do something is a claim like any other. WHAT THE IMAGES GAVE INSTEAD IS BETTER THAN WHAT WAS EXPECTED: a condition, an occupation, and a farm that puts three of these people in one household. →

Williem Johannes Kolbe of Panfontein was born on 9 July 1847 in the district of Philippolis Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found THE REGISTER SAYS 2 AUGUST 1847, AND FAURESMITH. The 9 July came from the Afrikaans Wikipedia article, which cites P. J. Nienaber, Afrikaanse Biografiese Woordeboek (1947), p. 139 — a page this archive has never seen, reached at two removes. The baptism entry (FamilySearch 1:1:Q2HL-BYCG, Free State Dutch Reformed registers, entry 18) gives born 2 August 1847, baptised Fauresmith 12 March 1848, of a father the register abbreviates to “John Kolbe” and of Anna Jacoba van der Merwe. A REGISTER WRITTEN SEVEN MONTHS AFTER THE BIRTH BEATS A DICTIONARY WRITTEN A CENTURY LATER, and the archive now carries 2 August. WHAT IS NOT CORRECTED IS THE PEDIGREE — Nienaber's parents are exactly the register's, which is the dictionary being vindicated on the thing that mattered and wrong on a date. THE DISCREPANCY IS LEFT VISIBLE rather than tidied: four weeks is too small to be a different man and too large to be a slip of the pen, and somebody may one day know why. A NOTE ON THE ATTRIBUTION BELOW THIS ENTRY. The register's abbreviation of the Commandant — John Kolbe — is also, letter for letter, the whole held name of a different man in this archive: the Settler's son John Kolbe, who has nothing to do with it. The attribution tool matched him, correctly by its own rule and wrongly in fact, and he is refused in corrections-who-deny.json. A quotation is not a mention, and a tool that cannot tell the difference needs a human to say so once. →

Two collaborative trees disagree about Frederik Fortunatus Kolbe of Bloemspruit's birth year, so neither settles anything Taken back

did A conclusion that does not follow — the documents read correctly and the inference drawn wrongly, or a control that tested the wrong thing.

found TRUE, AND THE REASONING UNDER IT WAS WRONG. This archive wrote on 20 September that the disagreement between Geni's 1857 and the FamilySearch tree's 1859 showed the two were not independent witnesses. The opposite turns out to be the case: each tree is following a different document. 1859 is his gravestone; 1857 is the age of 73 on his civil death registration. THE TREES WERE THE ONLY HONEST PARTIES IN THE ROOM — they disagreed because their sources disagree. AND GENI'S DATE IS A SPLICE: “22 October 1857” takes the day and month from the stone and the year from the death form, so it reproduces neither document while looking more precise than both. THE RULE THAT SURVIVES, SHARPENED: where trees differ, do not ask which tree is right — ask what each one is copying, because a compiled date can be a composite of two sources and match neither. AND THE FIRST DRAFT OF THIS ENTRY WAS FILED AGAINST THE WRONG MAN. Written with the bare name, it was attributed to Frederik Fortunatus Kolbe (1839–1929), the Settler's tenth child — a different man by twenty years, whose page would have carried a correction about somebody else's gravestone. The archive holds four men of this name and the tool prefers the longest, so the fix was to write the longer one. Caught the same morning, by reading what the tool printed rather than that it exited 0. →

Of three Johan Casimir Kolbes in this archive's own register, not one is joined to this house Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found ONE OF THEM WAS THE SETTLER'S SON, AND THE EVIDENCE WAS ALREADY PUBLISHED HERE. Written on 21 September while resolving the Casmier spelling, and correct in its reasoning: a shared surname is not a relationship, and the three men were index rows rather than witnesses. BUT THE SECOND ROW — JOHAN CASIMIR KOLBE, married ELIZABETH GEERTRUIDA PIENAAR — IS HIM. His banns were called at Colesberg on 1 May 1867, the town his father's death notice was signed in and his mother died in that year; their children include a George Augustus and a Margaret Dewning. WHAT WENT WRONG IS NOT THE RULE BUT THE TENSE. Not joined is a statement about what has been done; not joinable is a statement about the world. The sentence was written as the first and read ever afterwards as the second, and so the row was never worked. THE FIX IS A HABIT, NOT A GATE: when this archive refuses a lead for want of a link, it should say what would supply the link — here, the mother's name, which is exactly what found him six days later. →

A search set published twice, because a script saved one file and then crashed on the next Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found THIS ARCHIVE PUBLISHED THE SAME SEARCH SET TWICE AND NOTHING SAID SO. A script appended the FamilySearch signed-out set to searched.json, saved it, and then died several lines later on a max() over a work-list column another session had typed as a string. The crash message was about the work list; the damage was in searched.json, already written. The corrected re-run appended the set again, and the page carried it twice through two commits. WHY IT IS A CORRECTION AND NOT A TYPO: /searched/ is a record of what work was done, so a set printed twice says this archive searched the same ground twice on the same day. That is a claim about the work and it is false. THE GENERAL FAULT, which will happen again: a script that writes several files is not atomic, so a failure in the last one leaves the earlier ones committed — and re-running it is not idempotent unless somebody made it so. Caught by an assertion in the very next script, which expected two matches and found three; a gate now refuses two sets sharing a heading and a date. →

Nine of the Commandant's twelve children, eight of them on a register Found

found David signed FamilySearch back in and the five held-back children are entered with their arks: George Augustus 1845, Petrus Jacobus 1852, Margaretha Elizabeth 1854, Anna Susanna 1860, Anna Jacoba 1864, each named of 18xx because four of the five collide with names already here. The fonts also record a move nobody wrote down — Colesberg 1846, Fauresmith 1848 and 1849, Bloemfontein from 1860. And there is a real Anna Jacoba Kolbe, born 1864, six years old at the marriage that produced this archive's duplicate.

DASCHNER and MOUNTJOY swept at NAAIRS for the first time, and there are now two databases Found

found Fifty-eight Mountjoys and twelve Daschners, neither surname ever searched here before. The find is ten Cape estates of Mountjoy women, seven of them filed under married surnames — the filing that hid the Commandant's widow — and every death notice names parents. Also a new Daschner child's estate, TAB MHG 10287/69. And a trap worth more than the finds: NARSSA now runs TWO databases, the old complete one (503 today) and a new one it says in writing holds only part of 8.3 million migrating entries. A nil from the new one is not a nil.

Two gates built, and the one thrown away taught more than the two kept Method

found married-twice refuses a build where one person marries twice inside a year with no death of the first partner recorded between — the arithmetic that caught this archive's own duplicate four days ago, proven to fire on exactly that row and to pass a documented widowhood. custody.json finally writes down what this archive physically holds, with a check making the register and the directory agree in both directions. The gate that was NOT built is the lesson: reading pages for long quotations near an archival reference would have failed 40 of 54 references, and nearly every one of those 40 is this archive being honest about a document it wants and has not got.

No Colesberg font for Johan Casimir — and a whole life at Colesberg instead Found

found The baptism asked for is not in the Cape Dutch Reformed index, tested and controlled. What is there is everything else: membership at Colesberg in 1866, banns there in 1867 to Elizabeth Geertruida Pienaar, six children including a George Augustus and a Margaret Dewning, and a death at Smithfield in 1906 whose register names both his parents. A man with no documented life at breakfast has a parish and an estate. And his marriage had been published on this site since 21 September, filed under not one of them is joined to this house.

Searched on the mother instead of the father, and seven of the twelve came out Found

found The Commandant's name is spelled six ways across six documents and cannot be searched; Anna Jacoba van der Merwe's is stable. One query on her name returned seven baptisms of their children. Jan Hendrik's parentage — a user tree's claim this archive refused to adopt for a week — is now a register's, and so is Willem Johannes's, whose birthday the font corrects from 9 July to 2 August 1847.

Two marriage images read: a widow confirmed, a farm gained, and a premise lost Found

found The 1871 entry calls Anna Jacoba “Kolbe, geb: van der Merwe”, 46, WEDUWE — the duplicate withdrawn four days ago on arithmetic is now withdrawn on a document. Both entries place their people on LEEUWBERG, the Commandant's own farm: his widow in 1871, and Jan Hendrik Kolbe, veeboer, 23, with a bride living there too, in 1872. And the reason for reading them was wrong — the Free State form of 1869–72 has no parents' columns, so the fathers this archive went for are not in this register at all.

Anna Jacoba Kolbe married Francis McCabe on 13 July 1871 — one of two marriages between the Commandant’s children and the Landdrost’s Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found SHE IS NOT A DAUGHTER. SHE IS THE WIDOW, UNDER HER FIRST HUSBAND'S SURNAME, and this archive briefly held one woman as two people. South Africa, Civil Marriage Records enters ANNA JACOBA KOLBE; the archive already held ANNA JACOBA VAN DER MERWE, widow of J. G. E. KOLBE, remarrying Francis McCabe “about April 1871” on a Geni profile. Same groom, same year, three months apart — and a widow is recorded under her married name, which this archive already knew, having noted that the Free State estate index files her under McCabe for the same reason. THE TELL WAS ARITHMETIC, NOT PALAEOGRAPHY: a man does not marry twice in three months, and the duplicate stood on the page for a day before anybody added the two dates together. WHAT SURVIVES AND IS BETTER THAN WHAT WAS LOST: the marriage now carries a documented date, 13 July 1871, in place of a family tree's about April. The duplicate person is withdrawn, the two timeline entries are merged, and the marriage register names the widow. WHAT WOULD PUT IT BEYOND DOUBT: a civil marriage entry records each party's condition, so the unread image says “widow” or it does not, and settles it in a word. The second McCabe marriage is untouched — Jan Hendrik Kolbe and Rose Maria McCabe, 4 June 1872, remains two young people and not a widow. 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 — THE IMAGE IS READ AND IT SAYS THE WORD. The register enters her “ANNA JACOBA KOLBE, GEB: VAN DER MERWE”, 46, WEDUWE, and him WEDUWNAAR. The withdrawal was right, and it is now held on the document instead of on the arithmetic that found it. WHICH IS WORTH SAYING PLAINLY: THE ARITHMETIC WAS ENOUGH TO ACT ON AND NOT ENOUGH TO REST ON, and four days passed between the two. →

TAB MHG 52653 is not a file — the reference is probably wrong, and what is wanted is the correct number from the paper MHG index for the 1920s Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found IT IS A FILE, IT IS AVAILABLE, AND THE RESEARCHER SAID SO ON 15 SEPTEMBER. Anne Brest answered this a week before the archive published it as an open question. She pasted a NAAIRS link to the record itself and wrote: “MHG 0 52653 BOOYZEN, JACOBUS NICHOLS. THE DATE IS 1923. DON’T WORRY that it is not appearing after the 52653 number. . some references are like this.” The missing year suffix is normal for some references — and that missing suffix is the exact feature this archive had treated as evidence the reference was broken. SHE WAS THEN TOLD TWICE NOT TO HUNT IT, and said noted each time, having already found it. The claim above went out in a letter to her on 21 September, and she corrected it the next morning: “THIS IS A FILE … it IS available and I have it on the list. I did explain this in the last email.” THE ARCHIVE’S OWN OBSERVATION WAS NEVER WRONG — it genuinely could not find 52653 on microfilm, and it is not name-indexed under any spelling. What was wrong was the inference: from not on film to the reference is bad, when the answer was that it is a paper reference of a shape the 1920s used. THIS IS THE SECOND TIME IN A FORTNIGHT that a correspondent answered a question and this archive read past the answer — the first was Melanie Geustyn naming the DSAB’s author in her covering sentence. The rule stands and was not followed: READ THE COVERING LETTER, NOT ONLY THE ENCLOSURE. A researcher who tells you a thing is findable has told you something no index can. →

Commit 5d5e90e, in this archive’s own history: “Every gate in this archive has been grading somebody else’s build … this archive’s package.json passes --dist dist on the command line.” Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found TRUE OF SEVEN ARCHIVES AND NOT OF THIS ONE. This archive's package.json has passed --dist "${ARCHIVE_OUT:-dist}" since commit 5708174 on 21 September — the variable is expanded by the shell before the flag is built, so the flag carried it rather than overriding it. Checked across four commits: 5708174, 88c90bc, 5d5e90e and 9507493 all pass the variable. And verified both ways just now: with ARCHIVE_OUT=dist-probe the gate names dist-probe and refuses; unset, it reads dist and passes 811 pages. So no gate here was grading a directory it had not built, and the sentence “every check run here today graded whatever was in that directory” is not true of this archive. THE UNDERLYING FIX IS GOOD AND IS KEPT. kit/tools/outdir.py makes the environment beat the flag for all four tools, which is right for the seven archives that still hardcode --dist dist and is a no-op here, since flag and variable already agree. The kit also gained the empty-build refusal this archive wrote for itself yesterday — “only 0 page(s) under … the build is unfinished or in flight” — which is the better home for it. The correction is only to the description of this archive, and it is published rather than amended because the commit is pushed and the tree is shared. →

Commit faa05bc: “The kit also gained the empty-build refusal this archive wrote for itself yesterday.” Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found THE KIT HAD IT EIGHT DAYS EARLIER AND IT CAME FROM FALCO. The refusal — “only 0 page(s) under … the build is unfinished or in flight. Refusing to pass.” — entered kit/tools/checkliving.py at c8548ee on 14 September 2026, “Two living-people guards become one, with three policies”, and the same day at 0f1e3f4, “Falco's living-people guard, generalised to all eight”. This archive's own no-site guard in checkregisters.py went in on 22 September. So the kit did not gain it today, and this archive did not write it first. THE LANDING SESSION REFUSED THE CREDIT I OFFERED IT and said so plainly rather than accepting a thank-you for a line it had not written, which is how the error was found at all. THE TWO GUARDS REMAIN THE SAME IDEA REACHED TWICE, eight days apart, by different archives against different faults — Falco's from the living-people rule, this one from a run that reported 205 failures over a site with no pages in it. That convergence is worth more than either of us having handed it over, and it is not a claim of provenance. Checked in the kit's own history before this correction was written, which is what should have happened before the commit message was. →

The archive audited itself and found the registers had stopped Method

found A check of every page against the week's findings: twelve of fourteen had reached readers, and the registers behind them had not. SOURCES STOPPED ON 17 SEPTEMBER — ten sources found since were absent from the page that promises everything traces to a record below. The timeline and the atlas stopped on the 15th. All are now current, and the timeline carries a correction as well as four additions. Also today: the mention count on every person page had been publishing 24,981 where the truth is 9,556, because the generator was reading its own previous output back in.

Commit d3828d3, “The tailor was right: it is James Hogg”, is a record of that afternoon’s work Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found IT IS A RECORD OF TWO SESSIONS’ WORK UNDER ONE SESSION’S MESSAGE. It was staged with git add -A scoped to three directories — which is still -A — while the landing-site session had staged surgically and was waiting on a build. ALSO IN THAT COMMIT, AND NOT ITS AUTHOR’S: GENERAL WILLEM JOHANNES KOLBE (1847–1941), who led the Bloemfontein commando, was made general at the siege of Kimberley and rode in De Wet’s Cape invasion — and whom this archive already held as one line in a prisoner list; the Herinneringe van genl. W J Kolbe memoir at the Free State Archives; the finding that the DSAB was terminated after Volume V in 1987, so Schoeman’s February 1992 draft was written for a series that had already stopped; the discovery that two sections of /documents/ shared the id pow-1901 with fourteen links reaching the wrong one; and the #pow-wo108 rename that fixed it. THE COMMIT IS NOT AMENDED. It is pushed, two sessions share this tree, and FORCE-PUSHING TO REWRITE SHARED HISTORY WOULD BE A WORSE FAULT THAN THE ONE IT CORRECTED. This archive records its mistakes rather than erasing them, and row 160 had already logged this hazard four times — every one of them pointing the other way. →

Every person page printed a mention count — “N mentions across N pages” — as a count of where that person appears in this archive Taken back

did A fact derived from a reference, written into the record, and then cited back as evidence.

found THE NUMBER WAS ABOUT TWO AND A HALF TIMES THE TRUTH, ON ROUGHLY 350 PAGES, FOR AS LONG AS THE TOOL HAS RUN. It published 24,981 mentions where the real figure is 9,556. tools/dossiers.py counts a person by scraping the BUILT site — and the built site prints what the tool wrote last time. Every person page carries an “Every mention, page by page” section holding the stored excerpts, so 7,307 of 9,008 excerpts, 81%, were harvested from person pages: four fifths of what the tool read was its own previous output, re-rendered. The counts came back too, quoted inside the excerpts — 1,732 of 9,008, 19% — because the pages print the numbers as well. THE FILE NEVER SETTLED. Generate, rebuild and generate again and all 347 dossiers changed, 24,981 down to 24,636, and again the cycle after. Two consecutive runs were byte-identical and proved nothing, because both read the same build. The test that catches it is generate → rebuild → generate → diff, and it now runs as a gate: checkregisters.py refuses a build where a person page prints a different number of excerpts than the file holds. Found by the landing-site session, which asked why the diffs were unreadable and would not accept two identical runs as an answer. The tool now strips the generated section before it reads a page, and the count converges: three cycles in a row at 9,556, unchanged. WHAT A READER LOST AND DID NOT LOSE. The count under a name was wrong and the quotations chosen were partly drawn from the archive quoting itself. No document, date, name or relationship anywhere in this archive was derived from these numbers — nothing is sourced to a mention count, and no page sums them into a total. The two large “N times” figures on /sources/ and /register/ come from elsewhere and are untouched. →

Commit e40087d says the regenerated dossiers changed order and nothing else — “345 are reordered and nothing else … zero have changed content” Taken back

did A conclusion that does not follow — the documents read correctly and the inference drawn wrongly, or a control that tested the wrong thing.

found THE TEST THAT PRODUCED THAT SENTENCE COULD NOT HAVE RETURNED ANY OTHER ANSWER. The comparison did sorted(json.dumps(x) for x in a[k]) where a[k] is the dossier DICT, not its hits list — so it iterated the KEY NAMES, n, slug, mentions, pages, hits, which are identical for every person in the file. The “reordered only” branch was guaranteed true. It was not a weak test; it was a test of nothing, and it returned the reassuring answer because that was the only answer available to it. Redone against hits: identical 2, reordered-only 0, content changed 345, and anna-catharina-sleer shares 12 of its 26 excerpts with the version before. So 345 dossier pages showed a reader different quotations than the day before — a reader-visible change, written up in a commit message as a tidy-up. Caught by the landing-site session, which ran the same comparison order-insensitively and got the opposite result. The commit is pushed and is not being amended; this row is the record. The rule is the one this archive has now logged three times in a day — an untested reference is untested code, a number read off an unstable object is not a number, and a check that cannot fail has not checked anything. →

“FindMyPast is the wrong tool and that is worth writing down: it indexes Württemberg almost entirely as a birthplace field in emigration records, not as German parish registers. Kolbe + Württemberg returns 0 there against a working control.” Taken back

did A conclusion that does not follow — the documents read correctly and the inference drawn wrongly, or a control that tested the wrong thing.

found FINDMYPAST HOLDS A GERMAN MARRIAGE INDEX, AND THE ZERO WAS A BROKEN FILTER. Germany Marriage Index 1558–1929 is a FindMyPast record set holding 338 Kolbe marriages, giving both parties, the year and the parish — and it reaches Württemberg: Agnes Kolbe × Jerg Raisch, 1685, Evangelisch, Groetzingen, Schwarzwaldkreis, Wuerttemberg, and Albrecht Jonathon Kolbe, 1741, Knittlingen, Evangelisch, Neckar, Wrtt. THE PLACE FILTER ON THAT DATASET RETURNS 0 TO EVERYTHING. place=wuerttemberg returns 0 against records read minutes earlier; place=knittlingen returns 0 against a Knittlingen record on the same page; and place=westfalen returns 0 when seven of the eleven Kolbe marriages in the 1778–1798 window are Westphalian. The dataset filter works and the year filter works — 338 cuts to 11 — and only place is dead. So the earlier “working control” was a control of the wrong thing. It showed that FindMyPast answered, not that the place filter applied, and a filter is not tested by a search that does not use it. What survives, and it is narrower and better: no Gottlieb Kolbe marries anywhere in that index between 1778 and 1798, all eleven Kolbe marriages in the window are Prussian, and the index's coverage in those years does not reach Württemberg at all. That is still not evidence he did not marry there. The rule, met twice today: before believing a filter's nil, search it for something you have already seen with your own eyes. →

Work list row 177, on the 2012 Barry register report: “There is no Casmier, Casimir or Kasimir anywhere in this archive.” Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found HE IS IN BOTH OF HIS PARENTS' DEATH NOTICES. The Settler's notice, signed M. Kolbe — Margaret, the widow — at Colesberg in January 1845, names ten children and JOHAN CASIMIR KOLBE is the fifth of them. Margaret Downing's own notice of 25 November 1867, signed by her son-in-law G. D. O. Werdmuller, names him again — and that document is careful about the dead, entering Mary Elizabeth as “(dead), who was married to George F. Enslin” and him plainly. So he was alive at about twenty-three. Both transcriptions have been in notes/documents-transcribed.md since 10 September. He is also on the archive's own Kolbe page, in the list of children, with the variant spelling “Casiner” already recorded — and the same page's prose singles out Casimir by name as one of the family's extraordinary forenames. WHAT WENT WRONG IS THE SHAPE OF THE SEARCH. The archive's people list was searched and the archive was reported on. people.js is where a person's record lives; it is not where the archive's evidence lives, and this man had no record precisely because nobody had joined the notice to the list. A search of the index is not a search of the holdings, and the one place he was missing is the one place that was looked. The compiled report was right and this archive was wrong about its own documents — its “Casmier” is a third spelling of a name in two primary sources. He now has a record. →

Commit e212628: a build failure that afternoon “did not reproduce. Green on the re-run — one failure is the weather.” Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found IT WAS NOT THE WEATHER. IT WAS A BUG IN build.sh THAT HAD BEEN THERE ALL DAY, AND THE RE-RUN PASSING IS EXACTLY WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. The two build steps read cd site && npm run build >/dev/null && cd .., and set -e does not abort on a failing command inside an && list. Proven with a three-line script: cd site && sh -c "exit 143" && cd .. falls through to the next line, leaves the working directory in site/, and the script exits 0. So when astro was reaped, the pass failed, cd .. never ran, the script carried on, and python failed to find site/tools/links.py — two steps downstream of the real event, with the trap faithfully reporting “NOT KILLED, exited 2 during: links.py”. The re-run passed because nothing killed it that time, not because there was nothing wrong. AND THE WORSE HALF: A KILLED BUILD COULD HAVE EXITED 0. The three-line proof does exactly that. If the reaped step had been followed by steps that happened to pass, build.sh would have printed “build complete” over a build that never finished. Found only because the D'Arcy session asked this archive to test its own stopper, which meant killing a live build on purpose — the first time a build here was killed deliberately rather than by the machine. The fix is a subshell, ( cd site && … ), which restores the directory by construction and propagates the failure, so set -e fires on the step that actually failed. Verified by killing a build mid-flight: it now stops at “KILLED by signal 15 during: first pass”, with nothing surviving. THE RULE THIS BREAKS IS MY OWN, STATED THE SAME DAY: three identical failures is a fault and one is the weather. That is a decent heuristic for load and a bad one for a bug that only shows when something else goes wrong, because the trigger is intermittent and the fault is not. A failure that does not reproduce has not been explained; it has only been survived. →

The tailor was right, and the story he asked about is fiction by James Hogg Found

found In 1830 the father devoted two of his four pages to a magazine story — a settler near the Xhosa, orang-outangs, a wife carried off — and asked his son whether it was true. FIVE SEARCHES FAILED. It was found by downloading the volumes and reading them: The Mirror of Literature, Vol. XIV (1829), pp. 313–318, “Communicated by Mr. Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd”. IT IS JAMES HOGG'S FICTION, printed as a settler's letter home. And the reason five searches failed is the tailor's one mistake: he gave the colonist's name as Williams or Williamson, and the narrator is anonymous — WILLIAM is the son. A negative built on a detail remembered is a negative about the memory.

Two names out of a compiled report, and both answers were already in this building Found

found A forty-one page Kolbe register report has been public on a Barry family website since 2012 and this archive had never opened it. Two names in it were not held here. BOTH WERE SETTLED FROM THIS ARCHIVE'S OWN SHELVES IN TWENTY MINUTES, after a day of failing to reach registers that were all shut. JOHAN CASIMIR KOLBE is named in BOTH his parents' death notices — he was missing only from people.js, which is the one place the search had been run, and a search of the index is not a search of the holdings. And “KEETOR Peter Benjamin” is not a name: the report gives PETER RECTOR KOLBE, which is, and a great-uncle called Rector would explain Anton Rector Kolbe Barry of 1882. The report also splits that one man into two children, which is how it inflates its own count.

FindMyPast holds German parish indexes, and the zero that sent us abroad was a dead filter Taken back

found This archive had written FindMyPast off for German registers on a nil return. IT HOLDS GERMANY MARRIAGE INDEX 1558–1929 with 338 Kolbe marriages, reaching Württemberg at Grötzingen in 1685 and KNITTLINGEN in 1741 — one of the very parishes the first pass had named — and a birth and baptism index with 952. The zero came from a PLACE FILTER THAT RETURNS 0 TO EVERYTHING, including westfalen while seven of eleven records on the page are Westphalian. What survives is narrower and better: all eleven Kolbe marriages between 1778 and 1798 were read, no Gottlieb among them and not one in Württemberg, so the index cannot answer the question in that period rather than answering it no.

The researcher stood down, and the reason was this archive's preparation Method

found Anne Brest had seven files pulled from the strongroom at Preservation, checked the wanted pages were in them before travelling, approached Ms Xaba about the contents and paid an assistant upfront. THE VISIT WAS STOOD DOWN AT TWO DAYS' NOTICE because the list was wrong, not because her work was. The brief had asked for six death notices “FOR THE PARENTS” — and the parents were already held, in church registers read a fortnight earlier. Checked properly, three of the six were answerable from what was on the shelf and a fourth is not a file at all. She halved her invoice unasked and credited it against the next list; it is paid.

MSB 751 is a letter written to George Augustus Kolbe “on his ordination” Taken back

did A fact derived from a reference, written into the record, and then cited back as evidence.

found It is not. The National Library’s catalogue described it that way and this archive repeated the catalogue without ever asking whether the date fitted. The DSAB draft that came with the letter dates the ordination to 25 MAY 1833 — two years and nine months after the letter of 23 August 1830 — and the letter itself says George had been “fully accepted by the [L.M.S.] as one of their Missionaries”, which is a different step. THERE WERE THREE STEPS AND THE ARCHIVE HAD COLLAPSED THEM INTO ONE: mission assistant on 8 February 1828, accepted as a missionary in the summer of 1830, ordained by Arbousset and Casalis on 25 May 1833. A CATALOGUE DESCRIPTION IS A FINDING AID, NOT THE DOCUMENT. This archive quoted one as though it were the second, and the document itself corrected it the day it arrived. →

The Settler’s parentage — father AND mother — is on the parish register Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found The father is. The mother is not. The Westminster baptism of 2 February 1803 names “John Gottlob and Mary”, and “Mary” is all it gives, at that font and at eight others in the same family. The German Lutheran burial register of 1814 gives her death, her burial and her age of 46 and NO MAIDEN NAME. “MARY LARMAN” COMES FROM THE FAMILY TREE AND FROM NOWHERE ELSE THIS ARCHIVE HAS READ — and this archive’s own person record has said so all along (“her surname before marriage is not known and no marriage has been found”), while the page beside it put the tree’s surname inside a sentence ending “is on the parish register” and chipped it Documented. THE DATA WAS RIGHT AND THE PROSE WAS WRONG. Found while testing a FamilySearch memory of 2017 that makes the same claim; the search engine returned this archive’s own repository as the authority for it, WHICH IS WHAT CIRCULARITY LOOKS LIKE FROM THE INSIDE. →

The DSAB typescript is unsigned, and this archive will not name its author Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found IT IS UNSIGNED. THE EMAIL THAT CARRIED IT IS NOT. Melanie Geustyn of the National Library, with the Background File open in front of her, wrote: “I am also sharing with you a two page document that was written for the DSAB … The author, KS, WOULD BE DR. KAREL SCHOEMAN who worked here at the National Library.” This archive opened the two attachments, read four pages of manuscript and two of typescript, reasoned its way to Schoeman from the inside — the Bethanie claim has only his 1985 book behind it, and the paper was typed where he worked — and published the attribution as an inference it would not assert. THE ANSWER WAS IN THE COVERING SENTENCE, UNREAD. The Background File also holds nothing further about the donation or about any other deposit by Dr Griffiths, which answers a question the enquiry asked and which this archive likewise did not notice it had been given. THE RULE: READ THE COVERING LETTER, NOT ONLY THE ENCLOSURE. An archivist who goes to the trouble of answering in prose is a source, and the prose is part of the reply. →

The list of what MSB 751 contains — published as “WHAT IT DOES CARRY” Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found IT WAS A SAMPLE PRESENTED AS AN INVENTORY. The letter was first read in a mail client’s PREVIEW OVERLAY on a screen eight hundred pixels wide, because this archive had declined to download the files. Nothing published from that reading was wrong. Opened properly as a PDF two days later, the same four pages also carry: DR PHILIP IN LONDON, “exceedingly glad” at the acceptance and promising to write to George himself — where this archive had him only as a courier; A JACKET AND WAISTCOAT FOR “JOHN” with “tell him his old father has sent it him, & to make haste to fill them out”; A YEAR OF NEWSPAPERS, one number lost by Henry “who has them every week, after I have done with them”; and FIVE NAMED FRIENDS OF THE HOUSE — Mr and Mrs Stanhope, Mr and Mrs Warner, Mrs Field and her daughters, and Miss Mary Field who had married a Mr Bellew, a surgeon. THE RULE: A DOCUMENT READ IN A PREVIEW IS NOT A DOCUMENT READ. If it is worth quoting it is worth opening. →

The DSAB entry is wrong about exactly one thing, and its first source is a reference this archive did not have Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found BOTH HALVES WRONG, AND BY THE SAME CAUSE. The eleven-item source list was worked through WITHOUT FIRST BEING CHECKED AGAINST THIS ARCHIVE. Source 1, the death notice MOOC 6/9/35 no. 7698, HAS BEEN READ HERE SINCE BEFORE SEPTEMBER — it is published with two photographs and a transcription — and a work-list row was raised to order it. Struck. AND BECAUSE THE NOTICE WAS ALREADY IN HAND, THE ENTRY’S SECOND ERROR WAS THERE TO BE SEEN AND WAS NOT: Schoeman writes that the death notice records only eight children. IT NAMES TEN. So the archive published “wrong about exactly one thing” while holding the document that shows a second. The same reading also over-claimed Knapdaar as a new name to search; this archive already had it, from that same notice. THE RULE, WHICH IT ALREADY HAD AND DID NOT APPLY: a sweep that returns a name is checked against the archive before it is called a find — AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY IS A SWEEP. →

The Pretoria estate files are wanted “for the parents” — and a researcher was about to be paid on that reason Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found THE PARENTS ARE ALREADY DOCUMENTED, FROM CHURCH REGISTERS, AND HAVE BEEN FOR DAYS. Catharina Maria Sophia Booysen was baptised at BARKLY OOST, 24 MAY 1891, ENTRY 120; her brother Henry James at BARKLY EAST in 1887, the register naming WILLEM HERMANUS BOOÿSEN AND CATHARINA MARIA SOPHIA BARRY in terms. The brief of 15 September asked for six death notices “for the parents, the birthplace, the occupation and the list of children”, and that brief was still being repeated on 20 September in a letter about money — MHG 3734/46 described as “the one I most need, for her parents”. DAVID CAUGHT IT, from a Google result, by asking what the files were actually for. HIS SEARCH RETURNED MYHERITAGE, WHICH IS THIS FAMILY’S OWN TREE READ BACK TO IT — circular, and not evidence — BUT THE CONCLUSION WAS RIGHT ANYWAY, because the archive holds the registers behind it. THE FAULT IS THE DAY’S THIRD OF ONE KIND: a list worked without first being checked against what is already held. The files have been re-justified one by one on what is genuinely missing, WHICH IS CHILDREN AND NOT PARENTS. →

FindMyPast barely covers London baptisms for 1800–1806, so the missing Downing baptism proves nothing Taken back

did A conclusion that does not follow — the documents read correctly and the inference drawn wrongly, or a control that tested the wrong thing.

found THE COVERAGE IS EXCELLENT AND THE NIL IS REAL. Published within the hour on the strength of a count: 1,131 Downing baptisms in England for 1800–1806 and almost none in London. THAT WAS THE WRONG CONTROL — counting one surname by county tests where the Downings were, not whether the index reaches London. THE RIGHT CONTROL IS A COMMON NAME: of 100 SMITH baptisms sampled in the same window, THIRTY-SEVEN ARE LONDON, MIDDLESEX OR WESTMINSTER; of 76 KOLBE baptisms, six. The index covers London well. So the near-absence of London Downings is not the index failing — THERE WERE VERY FEW DOWNINGS IN LONDON. AND THE CORRECTION REVERSES THE ARGUMENT TWICE: the nil is a real negative, and a family with a London birth in 1803, no London baptism and no London kin in the registers IS WHAT A FAMILY NEWLY ARRIVED FROM THE COUNTRY LOOKS LIKE — which strengthens the Welcombe marriage of 1802 instead of weakening it. THE RULE THIS ARCHIVE ALREADY HAD AND MISAPPLIED: a nil return is worthless until a control shows the search works, AND THE CONTROL HAS TO TEST THE THING YOU ARE DOUBTING. →

The Welcombe marriage of 10 May 1802 is a candidate for Margaret Downing’s parents, and a strengthened one Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found IT IS NOT. WITHDRAWN THE SAME DAY IT WAS RAISED. Published this morning as a candidate on a name match and a nine-month interval; called STRENGTHENED at lunchtime when a London baptism could not be found for her. THE QUESTION NOBODY ASKED UNTIL EVENING WAS WHETHER THE WELCOMBE COUPLE STAYED. They did. Every Downing record in that parish reads: 1802 JOHN MARRIAGE, 1803 JOHN BAPTISM, 1806 William baptism, 1809 Emmey baptism, 1810 Elizabeth baptism. THEY BAPTISED A CHILD AT WELCOMBE THE YEAR AFTER THE WEDDING AND WENT ON DOING IT. Margaret was born in LONDON in February 1803. AND THE LAST LINE OF THE PARISH LIST EXPLAINS THE WHOLE THREAD: a MARY DOWNING BURIED AT WELCOMBE IN 1834, which is the year both trees give Margaret’s mother. A previous researcher almost certainly found the one Downing–Pooley marriage in England and a Mary Downing burial in the year they wanted, in the same tiny parish, and joined them — the same search this archive ran today, stopping one question earlier. SO “MARY KING POOLEY, 1768–1834” IS PROBABLY NOT A RECORD BUT A RECONSTRUCTION, which also explains why this archive’s own copy of the tree calls her MARY P KING: two compilers, the same fragments, two guesses. →

www.familysearch.org is down, and so are The National Archives at Kew and the University of Edinburgh Taken back

did A conclusion that does not follow — the documents read correctly and the inference drawn wrongly, or a control that tested the wrong thing.

found NONE OF THEM. /sources/ published that table for five days, and FAMILYSEARCH IS CITED 7,276 TIMES ON THIS SITE. FamilySearch answers 403 — a bot check — and Kew and Edinburgh answer 200; all three were used from this desk on the day the table was found to be wrong. THE CAUSE: checkexternal.py identifies itself honestly as “TheBooyzenArchive”, and firewalls refuse unfamiliar user-agents at the connection, before any HTTP status exists — so the tool’s own sensible rule that 403 means GUARDED never ran, and a refused connection was written down as DOWN. THE FIX IS NOT TO DRESS UP AS A BROWSER. This archive identifies itself and will go on doing so. The fix is to stop calling a silence a death: there is now a state UNVERIFIED, kept apart from DARK, which means does not resolve in DNS and is the only state here that means gone. AFTER THE FIX: 27 up, 11 unverified, 5 mail-only, 4 dark, and NO HOST CLAIMED DOWN. The rule was on /method/ the whole time — a nil return is worthless without a control, and a refused connection is a nil return with no control. →

The Library named the author in the covering letter and this archive read past it Found

found The National Library sent the Dictionary of South African Biography entry on George Augustus Kolbe, and MELANIE GEUSTYN's covering sentence named its author: KAREL SCHOEMAN, writing in FEBRUARY 1992 and heading it voorlopige teks — provisional text. This archive read the enclosure and not the letter. The entry was then tested line by line against what is held here: NINE STATEMENTS AGREE and TWO ARE WRONG. It says the death notice records eight children; it names ten. And it says Knapdaar is not a name this archive has held, when Knapdaar is written on the death notice. THE DSAB WAS TERMINATED AFTER VOLUME V IN 1987, five years before this was written, so on the published record that typescript is the only form the entry has ever taken.

A preview is not a document, and the same four pages carried more Taken back

found MSB 751, the letter of 23 August 1830 from the London tailor to his son, had been written up from a preview. Read again at full resolution from the downloaded PDFs, the same four pages gave DR PHILIP IN LONDON, clothes sent out for “John”, a year of newspapers, and five named friends. AND THE CATALOGUE IS WRONG ABOUT ITS OWN DOCUMENT: it calls this a letter written on the son's ordination, and the page reports him “fully accepted by the [L.M.S.] as one of their Missionaries”, which is the acceptance and not the ordination. The timeline had been carrying the catalogue's wording since it was first entered and now carries the letter's.

Sibree's register, found free, and Mr Miles turns out to be the man who accepted him Found

found James Sibree's A Register of Missionaries (LMS, 1923) was located complete and free. It gives Kolbe's whole mission life in one entry and settles a question this archive had left open: MR MILES WAS THE OFFICER WHO ACCEPTED HIM, not a messenger carrying somebody else's decision. Four of his own journals were catalogued the same day at SOAS — CWM/LMS/05/05/100, /102, /106 and /108, the first being the tour north-east of Philippolis with Melvill in November 1828 — with the 1836–37 incoming correspondence in Box 15.

Seventeen people had a page saying they are “not yet discussed on any page” Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found Among them GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE, the 1820 Settler, named 155 times in the built site; JOHN BARRY, 158; GEORGE MOUNTJOY, 140; PETRUS JACOBUS BOOYSEN, 110; JOHANNA CATHARINA MOUNTJOY, 89. THE DATA WAS FINE AND THE BUILD THREW IT AWAY. dossiers.py dropped any name that was a strict prefix of a longer person’s name — a rule written to stop “John Barry” swallowing “John Barry Booyzen”, which instead silenced the shorter man entirely. The fix keeps the shorter name and fences it with a negative lookahead, so it matches everywhere except where the longer name begins. 2,428 mentions came back. NOTHING REFUSED THE BUILD WHILE THIS WAS TRUE, so a gate now does: checkregisters.py fails when a person the dossier calls undiscussed is named in the built pages. Found because the estate asked this archive to look for a fault the Mazza archive had just had. →

WO 12/1430 is the muster book to read for James Mountjoy Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found It is the 20TH AND 21ST DRAGOONS FOR 1867–1868 — fifty years after he was discharged, and the re-raised regiment rather than the one that garrisoned the Cape. The 21st Light Dragoons has a continuous WO 12 run of its own and the piece that covers his discharge is WO 12/1450, 1816–1817. THE WRONG REFERENCE HAD BEEN WRITTEN INTO A LETTER TO KEW; the letter was still unsent and now names the right piece and says an earlier version had it wrong. →

The 21st Light Dragoons left the Cape in 1816 Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found September 1817. An extract of a letter from the Cape dated 1 and 10 September 1817, printed in the Sun, the Star, the Public Ledger, the Morning Herald and the Hampshire Chronicle that November: “the 21st Light Dragoons have embarked for India”. The 1816 figure was written on 15 September with no source attached and stood in three files. IT MATTERS BECAUSE HE MARRIED IN MARCH 1817 — under 1816 he was already a civilian when he married, and under 1817 he had six months to choose between a wife at Graaff-Reinet and a transport to Madras. →

The Burgersdorp sweep of images 605–818 found five new people Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found Three. Johanna Catharina Mountjoy, born 28 January 1860, was already held in full — a daughter of George Mountjoy who married William Henry Keys — and the sweep only confirmed her and gave her a reference. Frederick Fortunatus Werdmuller was already held from a 1907 petition and a 1953 estate; what the sweep added was his birth and his mother, which is a real gain and not a new person. THE DUPLICATE PERSON RECORDS WERE CAUGHT BY THE BUILD'S OWN NAME-COLLISION CHECK for the first and by reading the register for the second, before either reached a page. The rule it costs: a sweep that returns a name is checked against the archive before it is called a find. →

Johan Gottlieb Kolbe was buried at the German church of the Savoy, entry 55, grave 7 Taken back

did A claim taken from the family tree and repeated before it was tested.

found Taken from a family tree and repeated here. The Westminster Burials register, held by the City of Westminster Archives Centre, has him DIED 18 NOVEMBER 1845 AND BURIED 26 NOVEMBER 1845 AT ST JOHN THE BAPTIST, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET, page 7. The date matches to the day and the seven matches; the church does not. The register also gives a death date and a birth year of 1764, neither of which this archive had. →

Johan Gottlieb Kolbe had one wife, called Mary Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found He had two, and both were called Mary — which is why one of them could never be made to fit a run of baptisms from 1792 to 1819. The first died 2 August 1814 aged 46; the second died 15 August 1824 aged 36. Both are in the German Lutheran Church register, TNA RG 4/4631. →

R_177176049779 is this archive's reference for Petrus Jacobus Booysen's 1812 birth Taken back

did A fact derived from a reference, written into the record, and then cited back as evidence.

found It was recorded once, from a FindMyPast search run without a subscription, and never opened. Opened twice on a live full subscription, FindMyPast's own transcript page returns a 500 error. THE REFERENCE DOES NOT RESOLVE. It stays on the page as a struck citation rather than being quietly deleted. →

The German Savoy registers are RG 4/4625, 4626, 4628 and 4631 for burials Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found RG 4/4630 belongs on that list too. The 1807 burial of Charles Samuel Kolbe is entered in both 4631 and 4630, with the same death date and the same age to the day — a register and its duplicate. The archive's own note named five volumes and missed one. →

Three Booyzens listed together as deaths in concentration camps Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found ONLY TWO OF THE THREE DIED IN A CAMP. Read on the University of Cape Town database's own pages rather than through two intermediaries: Gert Jacobus (Johannesburg RC, aged 2, farm Rietvallei, district Marico) and Gertruida Magdalena (Vereeniging RC, aged 19, farm Rietvlei, district Heidelberg) are each recorded “died in camp: YES”. JAN GERHARDUS LODEWICUS, AGED 2, IS RECORDED “DIED IN CAMP: NO”, with no camp and no farm attached at all. Listing the three together was this archive's compression, not the database's — and it is the same failure as reading an index line as though it were the record. Gertruida's entry also carries the note “or Irene RC”, so even her camp is uncertain. →

The National Archives' catalogue given as “national.archives.gov.za/naairs.htm” Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found THE LIVE DOMAIN HAS NO DOT IN IT — nationalarchives.gov.za. The host as published has no address record and no mail record at all. It appeared in the note of 13 September that ends “written down because the wrong address cost this archive a day”, which is the row that exists to stop exactly this. Found by a tool written to check whether the sources this site cites are still there; it looks for hosts named in PROSE as well as in links, because this archive writes its sources in sentences. →

“WILLEM HERMANUS PIETERZEN — Anna Catharina Slier's FIRST husband” Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found HE IS THE SON. De Villiers's volume 3 gives “HERMANUS PIETERSEN, namen van ouders onbekend, gehuwd 5 April 1807 met ANNA CATHARINA SLIER”, and their children as “1 Willem Hermanus, gedoopt 12 Maart 1809; 2 Johan Christiaan, gedoopt 28 April 1810”. THIS ARCHIVE BUILT ONE MAN OUT OF TWO DOCUMENTS THAT SPELL HIM DIFFERENTLY — the 1817 marriage register's HARMANUS PIETERZE and the 1840 death notice's WILLIAM PIETERSEN — and a long name looked like a way to reconcile them. The husband is Hermanus; Willem Hermanus is the boy baptised in 1809. This archive half knew, because its own note already called the 1851 godfather “his son”. THE NAMING CLAIM SURVIVES AND IMPROVES: Willem Hermanus is Willem for his mother's father, Willem Slier of Hamburg, and Hermanus for his own father. A SECOND HALF-BROTHER, JOHAN CHRISTIAAN, WAS INVISIBLE FOR AS LONG AS THE TWO MEN WERE ONE. →

“LUUS with BOOYZEN returns NOTHING” — published against the five unplaced Silverton children Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found IT RETURNS A MARRIAGE. The Marriage Transcription Database on gendatabase.com: “1928 · CORNELIUS ABRAHAM LUUS × SUSANNA FREDERIK ALETTHA BOOYZEN”. The negative was TRUE OF NAAIRS, which is the only index this archive had asked, and it was published as though it were true of the record. A MARRIAGE REGISTER IS NOT AN ESTATE INDEX. A sentence that says “returns nothing” has to name what was asked, and this one did not. Whether this Susanna is the “Ousie” of the Silverton pillar is a separate question and is not being assumed. →

Leeuwberg pinned at FAURESMITH, on a 1903 land file naming a “LEEUWBERG NO 465, DIST. FAURISMITH” Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found IT IS A DIFFERENT FARM OF THE SAME NAME. The Friend of the Free State of 13 January 1870 advertises “the farm, WILDEBEESTKOOI, ADJOINING THE FARM LEEUBERG, THE PROPERTY OF THE LATE J.G.E. KOLBE, ABOUT TWO HOURS RIDE FROM THE TOWN OF BLOEMFONTEIN”. Fifteen or twenty kilometres, not a hundred and thirty. The pin stood for two days, and it was published with its own objection printed beside it — that Fauresmith is 130 km from Kaalspruit while the obituary says he died at one and lies at the other. THE OBJECTION WAS THE RIGHT ONE AND IT HAS ANSWERED AGAINST THE PIN. Moved to Bloemfontein, still approximate. The two-farm contradiction this archive could not reconcile was never a contradiction: Leeuberg and Kaalspruit are neighbours. →

“1898 — JGL Booyzen of Kwaggafontein, district Marico, IN THE FIELD-CORNET'S PAPERS” Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found THE PAPERS ARE THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT'S. The atlas has carried that line under Marico since the entry was built. The three documents behind it are TAB source OD — the school files of the South African Republic — and they are a subsidy application, book orders and quarterly returns for a farm school. A field-cornet does appear in the bundle, exactly once, valuing the teacher's dwelling in May 1898, and that is a different document sent by a different man. The line was written from a memory of the record rather than from the record. CORRECTED IN PLACE, and the record is now eight documents instead of three. →

Margaret Downing “c. 1804, London” — and, for a day, a death date thrown into doubt by a newspaper Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found THE STONE HAD BOTH ANSWERS AND THIS ARCHIVE HAD THE STONE. The Burgersdorp monument has been on the Kolbe page for weeks, photographed and captioned; the caption quoted it as far as “ALSO HIS RELICT MARGARET DOWNING…” AND STOPPED. The next two lines read “BORN IN LONDON 23 FEBRUARY 1803 AND DIED AT BURGHERSDORP 2_ NOVEMBER 1867.” Her birth moves from a guessed year to a date. AND THE DEATH WAS NEVER IN DOUBT: yesterday's Grahamstown Journal obituary said she died “about three months since” — January 1868 — and this archive published the discrepancy rather than resolving it. It was nearly five months, and a journalist rounding is a journalist rounding. THE FAULT IS THE CAPTION: a transcription that stops before the end of an inscription is not a transcription, and this one hid two facts in plain sight for weeks. →

Pretoria answered, and a forum closed the oldest question Found

found Two replies in one morning. The National Archives in Pretoria, silent since the letter of 12 September, answered: ALL SIX ESTATE FILES ARE BOUND, and bound files cannot be scanned and emailed. Not a refusal — a physical fact about the record, and one that explains a great deal about what has and has not been filmed. Ms Mavis Xaba put a private researcher who specialises in estate files on copy; engaging her is the user's call. She did not say any of the six references was wrong, including the one this archive could not find on microfilm at all. And on WikiTree, Riël Smit answered the question this archive most wanted answered, in nine words: de Villiers & Pama (1981) STILL place Petrus Jacobus under Jan. Pieter van Zyl had already searched for a marriage between a Gerhardus Lodewicus and a Magdalena de Beer and found none, and remembered — correctly — that a CHILD of Petrus Jacobus carried the name. He is on line 12 of the same sheet: Jan Gerthardus Lodewikus Booijsen. The name in the parents' box is the back half of a son's name, and the half that was dropped is the father's. BOTH LETTERS WENT OUT THE SAME MORNING: a short thanks to Ms Xaba asking only whether MHG 52653 is a valid reference, and a first approach to the private researcher — what she charges and how, her view on whether the work is worth doing at all, and an offer to start with one file. It is the first paid-research approach this project has made; everything before it has been a request to an institution.

“148 rows read of 184 — THIRTY-SIX DOCUMENTS WERE NOT REACHED, and this archive is not going to call 148 a complete enumeration” Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found The caution was right in spirit and wrong in fact, and the fact is worse. ALL TEN PAGES HAD BEEN WALKED. The thirty-six were not unreached — THEY WERE THROWN AWAY BY THIS ARCHIVE'S OWN ROW FILTER, which required a description field longer than three characters and so silently dropped every row whose description column the index leaves short or blank. Re-run without that condition the same query returns 194 rows, 184 of them unique: THE EXACT COUNT. This archive published a scope caveat that blamed the source for a hole it had dug itself — which is the same failure as the blank Name column, one layer up: A FILTER THAT DROPS WHAT IT DOES NOT RECOGNISE LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE AN ARCHIVE THAT DOES NOT HOLD IT. The thirty-six turn out to include SEVEN ANGLO-BOER WAR COMPENSATION CLAIMS BY BOOYZENS IN THE MARICO DISTRICT. →

Martha Angeline Kolbe, sixty days old, was “BURIED AT VOLKSRUST”, and Volksrust held a concentration camp Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found Both halves withdrawn, six hours after publishing. HER STONE IS IN WAKKERSTROOM MAIN CEMETERY. The index this archive read gives the burial as “Volksrust, Eastvaal District Council, Mpumalanga” — and that is a DISTRICT MUNICIPALITY, not a town; Wakkerstroom lies inside it. This archive read a modern administrative area as a place of burial, which is a failure of reading and not of the source. WITH THE TOWN GOES THE CAMP. The stone reads “TER GEDACHTENIS VAN ONS GELIEFDE KLEINE”, in Dutch, and the mason's town is cut across its base: NEWCASTLE, twenty-five miles away in Natal. A family stone in a town churchyard, cut by a monumental mason in another colony, is not a camp burial. The care taken in the original entry — “records the burial place without claiming the camp” — was not enough, because naming the camp at all in an entry about a child who died in December 1901 makes the claim whatever the sentence says. →

The 1902 prisoner of war could not be assigned to either George Augustus Kolbe of Wakkerstroom Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found Now it can, and the withdrawal of the morning is replaced by an answer rather than a shrug. BOTH MEN ARE BURIED IN THE SAME CEMETERY and both stones are read. The younger: “GEORGE AUGUSTUS — GEB. 29 JULIE 1863 — OORL. 28 SEPT. 1954”, which is the Colesberg font date to the day. The elder: “GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE — GEB. 2 OKTOBER 1861 — OORL. 8 NOVEMBER 1934”. THE POW RECORD SAYS AGE 40, EVENT 1902. A man born 2 October 1861 was forty from October 1901 to October 1902; a man born 29 July 1863 was thirty-nine for the whole of 1902. THE PRISONER IS THE ELDER MAN. This is recorded as a correction rather than quietly fixed, because the archive published a claim, withdrew it, and then reversed the withdrawal, all in one day, and a reader is owed the whole of that. →

George Augustus Kolbe of Wakkerstroom, born Colesberg 1863, was a prisoner of war in 1902 — “the fourth man of this family taken in that war” Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found Withdrawn within the hour, and by the same record that produced it. The POW entry — WO 108/368, the master list of Boer prisoners numbers 1 to 32561 — gives RESIDENCE WAKKERSTROOM, which is what the claim was built on, and this archive stopped reading there. It also gives AGE 40, NATIONALITY TRANSVAALER, PRISON NATAL. The man baptised at Colesberg on 11 October 1863 was THIRTY-NINE in 1902. A SECOND GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE, born at Burgersdorp in 1861 and dead at Standerton in 1934, was forty or forty-one that year — and his own marriage entry to Susanna Margaretha Swart gives his residence as Wakkerstroom too. Two men of one name in one town, which this archive had itself written down as a warning in the same hour, in the same run of searches, and then walked straight past. THE PRISONER IS MORE PROBABLY THE OLDER MAN. Nothing decides it but the age, and an index age is a weak thing; so the claim is withdrawn rather than reassigned. →

The Wonderboom deeds register showed a transfer from M. J. Booyzen, widow, to David Schalk Booyzen on 9 April 1907 Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found The transferor is right and the date is not. Her gravestone at Rebecca Street, Pretoria, reads “MAGDALENA JOHANNA BOOYZEN (GEB. BEZUIDENHOUT), GEB. 8 MEI 1870, OORL. 29 JAN 1955” — so the ledger's “8/5/1870” beside her name is HER BIRTH DATE, which identifies her beyond doubt. But her husband PETRUS JACOBUS BOOYZEN died on 25 MARCH 1947, so she was not a widow in 1907 and cannot have transferred anything as one that year. The 9 April 1907 read off that row belongs to a different row: the ledger's columns were mis-aligned in the reading. What survives is the identification; what is withdrawn is the date, and with it the suggestion that David Schalk Booysen could be carried to 1907. →

Both testable POW ages run one to two years high against this archive's dates Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found That described the De List, not the record. The fuller register gives Stefanus Francois as 26 — exact against a birth of about October 1874 — and David Schalk as 53, within weeks of his fifty-third birthday on 9 June 1848. The De List's 28 and 54 are the outliers. The caveat was published on the strength of the weaker of two documents before the stronger had been found. →

The De List's prisoner numbers are a separate series and do not locate these men in the fuller register Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found They are the same series and they locate them exactly. The claim came from misreading a leading digit: image 139 of item 1 begins at 19431, not 18431, which the batch title on image 136 states outright — “Nos. 19,431 to 20,705”. The de Beer entries read as 18463–18465 were 19463–19465. In the correct batch, image 126, numbers 18463, 18464 and 18465 are STEFANUS FRANCOIS, PETRUS JACOBUS and DAVID SCHALK BOOYSEN. →

Catherine Maria Sophia is a Barry name Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found It is a KOLBE name. The 1848 Graaff-Reinet baptism register, entry 603, names the godmother in full as CATHARINE SOPHIA MARIA KOLBER — eleven years before her sister named the daughter this archive had been treating as the head of the chain. The namesakes page called it “a Barry name that outlives the Barry surname by eighty years”; it outlives the Kolbe surname instead, and the archive already held the woman, filed as plain “Catharine Kolbe”, without noticing she carried the name first. →

A relationship search had found one name the Barry notices never gave Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found It found none. HENRY JAONAS BARRY is JAMES HENRY BARRY, who was already in this archive — the same baptism indexed twice, once as Henry Jaonas with the year read as 1868 and once as HENNERY JAMES BERRY with it read as 1848. Same birth date, same parents, and FamilySearch attaches both to one tree person. The register itself decides: “Graaff-Reinet. Baptism Records 1846–1851” cannot hold an 1868 entry. So the “baptised at twenty years old” that made him interesting was a mis-transcribed year, and “Jaonas” was a mis-read “James” — which is what the archive's own register search implied when it found JONAS nowhere among the Barrys or Kolbes. The eleven-against-nine gap is unchanged: TWO children are still missing, not one. →

Magdelena Elisabeth de Beer was carried here under WikiTree's codes, b6c2 and b6c6 Taken back

did A claim taken from the family tree and repeated before it was tested.

found The codes are b5c2 and b5c6. de Villiers 1893 page 34 puts ZACCHARIAS DE BEER — her father — as the FIFTH child of Matthijs Andries de Beer, not the sixth, and Pieter van Zyl said so on G2G before the book was opened; reading page 34 confirmed it. The b6 is WikiTree's, and this archive repeated it for a day without checking it in print. It matters more than a digit: a de Villiers code is an address, and quoting the wrong one sends the next reader to the wrong family. Where this archive QUOTES the WikiTree profile it still says b6, because that is what the profile says — the error being reported is not the same as the error being made. →

The two Magdalena de Beers were two different women, and the tree had merged them Taken back

did A conclusion that does not follow — the documents read correctly and the inference drawn wrongly, or a control that tested the wrong thing.

found They are one woman. de Villiers 1893, page 34, marks ONLY the second — Magdalena baptised 16 October 1754 — with “zie Booijsen”, and 1754 is the birth year this archive has always carried for its own Magdelena Elisabeth. The argument published here for a day ran the other way: that Jan Booysen's wife was dead by December 1793 while ours died in 1843, so they could not be the same. The 1843 death date is the weak link, not the identity — this archive's own page said both her dates came off the family tree with no source stated. What actually followed from reading the book is the opposite of what was published: she married JAN, and generation seven is now in question rather than confirmed. →

Gravestones, a camp, and the wrong country's newspapers Found

found The Genealogical Society's gravestone data, reached through NAAIRS, gave two things. A KOLBE of thirty-five dead in the CONCENTRATION CAMP CEMETERY AT VOLKSRUST between 1899 and 1901 — the first camp death to touch any surname in this archive, against a question that had been answered “searched, and not found” on a different name. And MARGARET DOWNING KOLBE, born 1899, buried in Natal in 1979: George Augustus Kolbe married Margaret Downing at Shoreditch in 1819, and eighty years later a girl was christened with the whole of it. Then eGGSA corrected something published this morning. Searching the British press for this family returned almost nothing and that was written down as a limit of the medium. It is a limit of the COUNTRY. eGGSA holds transcribed CAPE COLONIAL papers — the Eastern Province Herald, the Fort Beaufort Advocate, the Queenstown Free Press — with Booysen entries from the 1860s on, free and unread.

Tolosberg, and a policeman who was at Talana Found

found The place name was in no gazetteer, no battle list and no war diary — and then it was in a medal-roll database, attached to this man by his prisoner number. Tolosberg is in the Waterval Valley, Eastern Transvaal; forty-two Boers were taken there on 25 April 1901 with two guns and much stock; and Stephanus Francois Booysen, PoW 18463, was sent to India. He was a ZARP, one of the ZAR's police, who had been at Talana in the first week of the war, wounded in the right leg at Wagon Hill, and present at Spion Kop and at Dalmanutha. This archive has quoted the family's war testimony for the whole project with nothing to test it against. It has something now.

A better register found, and a number that does not travel Method

found The De List is item 3 of nine on the Staff Officer for Prisoners of War film. Item 1 is the register worth having: home address, town, FIELD CORNETCY OR COMMANDO, where captured and date of capture, for every man. Bisected it by prisoner number to the right pages and found that the numbers do not carry across — 18463 to 18465 there are three men called de Beer, so the De List numbering is its own series. Checked the B surnames in the batch whose captures match our men's sailing date: five Booysens, none of them ours. The route to their commando and their farm is now mapped and not yet walked.

Three Booyzens on a prisoner-of-war transport Found

found The family fought. A printed POW transport list in the Pretoria government archives carries three consecutive entries — 18463 Stephanus Francois Booyzen, 28; 18464 Petrus Jacobus Booyzen, 29; 18465 David Schalk Booyzen, 54 — all three shipped on the CITY OF CAMBRIDGE on 3 June 1901, all three from Pretoria. Consecutive numbers on one transport means taken together. This archive has spent months establishing that no Booysen is on a CAPE REBEL roll, which was the right answer to the wrong question: these men were Transvaal burghers, and nobody here had thought to look for them as prisoners rather than as rebels.

The folios followed, into a Pretoria transfer register Method

found The land-index folios led to RAK 2384, a deeds transfer register for Wonderboom South — Pretoria, the district where David Schalk Booysen was living when he remarried in 1905. Three rows on one page carry the name, and the household reads Petrus Jacobus, David Schalk, Magdalena Johanna: this archive's direct line, name for name. One row transfers land to a DAVID SCHALK BOOYZEN on 9 April 1907, which would be seventeen months later than anything else held for the man of that name. It is not proved and nothing has been adopted — the transferor is a widow born Bezuidenhout and this archive's David Schalk married a widow born Stols. A name cluster is a reason to order the deed, not a reason to believe it.

Full-text search, and a land register nobody here had opened Found

found Tried FamilySearch's full-text search — which reads the images themselves rather than a volunteer index — hoping it would reach the two missing Barry children. It does not: South African full-text coverage excludes the church registers, which closes that route for good. But it covers four collections this archive has never searched, two of them land records. In RAK 2508, an 1895 land-register index, the Booyzen block runs to four entries with folio numbers, and one of the names is Jacobus Nicolaas — the eldest of the 1863 eight, who this archive knows only as a man who ended in the Transvaal with an estate number. Evaton is in the Transvaal. Nothing adopted; a surname in a land index is not an identification.

The book found, measured, and not read Method

found Having shown the index cannot reach the two missing Barry children, the next question is which book can. It is one volume: Burgersdorp Baptism Records 1852–1866, 534 images, covering the whole 1854–1858 gap. It was located, its scale measured by two landmarks — 1853 at image 54, 1866 at image 528 — and checked for a name index at the back, which it does not have. Then it was left unread. A hundred and fifty images is a sequential browse rather than a search, and saying so with the film number and the page arithmetic written down is more useful than half-doing it.

The index cannot find four children it is known to have Method

found Swept the Barry baptisms under every spelling the index gives the mother — Kolbe, Kolber, Kolbee, Colbe, Colby, Colbee — and it returns the same seven children and nothing new. That is not the finding. The finding is that Hendrik Nicholaas, Richard Peter, Margaret Mary and Kathleen Mary are all named on their parents' own death notices and NONE of the four appears in the index at all. An index that cannot produce four children known to exist will not produce the two that are unknown. The route is closed for a demonstrable reason, and what remains is the registers themselves, read across the gaps.

Two fonts, a year apart, and every witness a Kolbe Found

found Having read one Barry baptism, the one before it was worth reading too. At the 1847 font the witnesses are John Kolbe, Margaret Kolbe and Augusta Kolbe; at the 1848 font, Catharine Sophia Maria Kolbe. Two children, two years, and not a Barry witness between them. That is the same conclusion the namesake correction reached from one entry, arrived at a second time from another — the names this archive has called Barry names belong to the people who stood at the fonts, and they were all Kolbes. The Olivier daughters, asked for the same way, returned thirty strangers: the method works where the names are rare, and Olivier is not.

A godmother's full name, and a chain that started in the wrong family Found

found The image flagged unread an hour earlier was read, and the entry gave up more than the date it was fetched for. Entry 603 of the Graaff-Reinet register writes the child as HENRY JAMES, settles the year at 1848 in the clerk's hand, and names the godmother in full: CATHARINE SOPHIA MARIA KOLBER. This archive already held her — as “Catharine Kolbe”, a line in a Burgersdorp entry five years later — without noticing she carried CATHERINE MARIA SOPHIA eleven years before the Barry daughter who has been standing at the head of that namesake chain since the page was written. It is not a Barry name. It never was.

The tenth Barry child was the ninth all along Method

found Yesterday's one new name is withdrawn. Henry Jaonas Barry is James Henry Barry — one baptism indexed twice, the year read as 1868 on one entry and 1848 on the other, and the register's own title, Graaff-Reinet Baptism Records 1846–1851, rules out 1868 without needing the image. What survives is better than what was lost: an exact birth and baptism date for a man this archive carried as “about 1847”, the correct parish, and confirmation of the birth-spacing argument made against him. Two Barry children are still missing.

Nine grandchildren, and the one record that would settle it is not indexed Found

found FamilySearch came back and the queued queries ran. The decisive one failed in an informative way: the 1788 baptism that names Petrus Jacobus's father does not surface, because the date filters are ignored and the 18th-century Cape registers are not name-indexed — a negative about the index, not the register. Two other entries independently confirmed de Villiers on two of Jan Booijsen's sons, which strengthens the book against the death notice. And the relationship search on the father, queued as Question 13, returned a household: John Augustus Barry II had a wife and nine children this archive had never seen, including the Kolbe name carried into a fourth generation.

The book was read, and it contradicted the death notice Found

found A G2G answer named de Villiers 1893 as downloadable, so it was downloaded and read rather than taken on trust — which is the whole point of this archive, and it cut against yesterday's conclusion. Page 34 makes the two Magdalena de Beers one woman, withdrawing what was published here for a day. Page 78 then makes Petrus Jacobus (1788) the seventh child of JAN Booijsen, agreeing with this archive on his baptism date, his wife and his son's baptism, and disagreeing only on his father. Generation seven now rests on a single line of an 1876 death notice against a genealogy built from the registers. Nothing rewritten; the question has changed shape.

A relationship search had turned up two Barry children on neither parent's death notice Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found It turned up one. WILLIAM FREDERICK THOMAS BARRY, baptised 29 September 1861, was already recorded on William Barry's own page — put there the day the Burgersdorp doopregister was read, with the doubt stated in the same sentence. The search re-surfaced him and this archive wrote him up as a find for about an hour. Only HENRY JAONAS BARRY is new. The section now says which is which, and the header no longer counts him. →

Hendrik Stephanus Nicolaas Booyen was buried at Johannesburg Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found He was buried at ROODEPOORT–MARAISBURG, twenty kilometres west, in the Central Cemetery there — section I D.R., entry 96. The FamilySearch collection is titled “Johannesburg Cemetery Records” and the index repeats that label for every register inside it, including those of other municipalities. The collection title is not the place. →

Anna J. Mary Booyzen and George Downing Daschner were stillborn or died the same day Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found Both lived. She was SIX MONTHS old and he was THREE MONTHS AND FIVE DAYS. The Brixton register keeps Years, Months and Days in three separate columns and FamilySearch's index collapses them into one field, so a child with the Years column blank comes out as “0 days”. This archive printed the index reading for an afternoon without opening the page. →

Only a family tree puts Anna Maria van der Merwe in this family Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found A Dutch Reformed baptism does. Her son DAVID SCHALK BOOIJZEN was born 12 December 1806 and christened on 4 January 1807, with PIETER JACOBUS BOOIJZEN and ANNA MARIA VAN DER MERWE named as his parents — and he is first of the eight on the 1876 Sterfkennis. The wall on the ancestor chart said the wrong thing for a day and has been rewritten. →

No Booyzen filed a war-losses compensation claim Taken back

did A negative built from a list mistaken for a population — the archive searched what it happened to have and reported the answer as though it had searched everything.

found One did. This archive searched the War Losses Compensation Commission, found nothing, and published the zero while noting it was weak because the Commission's records are catalogued by sub-commissioner and not by claimant. David Schalk Booijzen's answer to question ten of his wife's 1900 death notice is “none. Compensation claim filed.” The claim exists; it was the finding aid that could not reach it. →

Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier was on this site twice Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found One woman, two records: a stub written from the 1908 death notice — “His first wife, named as pre-deceased” — and a full record written from her own 1891 Sterfkennis hours later. The shared-name page gathered them as though they were two people. Merged. The build now warns on every shared name so a human checks each one reads as two lives and not one. →

Charlotta Elizabetha Dormehl died before 1908 Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found She died on 6 February 1902, at Driefontein in Groot Marico, and her own Death Notice 844 says so. It also gives her father as Jacob Dormehl, her mother as unknown, her age as 60 years 4 months, her estate as one wagon and her furniture, and THREE husbands where this archive had one — Jacob van Staden, Matthys Roos, then Booysen. →

Anna Johanna Booijzen, born Alberts, died at Boekfontein and is not this family Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found Every clause of that was wrong. She is Anna Catharina Johanna OLIVIER, she died at BRAKFONTEIN — the family's own farm, where the archive's oldest document was written — and she is the first wife of Hendrik Stefanus Booijsen. The maiden name reads Oliefier and contains no b, r, t or s; her son gives OLIVIER on the 1908 notice. Two misreadings on one page kept a documented wife, seven children and a whole Olivier line off this site for a week. →

Hendrik Stefanus Booysen had four children Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found He had at least seven. His first wife's 1891 Sterfkennis lists them all, of age: Petrus Jacobus, Ocken Johannes, Anna Johanna Maria, Elesabettha Maria Cornelya, Alettha Catrina Johanna, Magdalena Johanna and Hendrick Stefanus Nicolaas. The 1908 notice names four because by 1908 only four were left. →

Hendrik Stefanus Booysen's four children were his second wife's Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found They were his first wife's. The Zeerust marriage register, entry 13, dates the second marriage to 14 April 1892 and gives the bride's age as fifty-one and her condition as widow. By 1908 all four children were adults, two of them married women. The archive put them under the marriage it could name rather than the marriage that could have produced them. →

Margarietha Wilhelmina Elizabeth Barry was John Augustus Barry I’s daughter Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found She was his granddaughter. The 1915 death notice names eight children and she is not among them; her father is Hendrik Nicholaas Barry, whose other children were baptised at Dordrecht and Slang River between 1888 and 1900. Moved down a generation — which is where the cousin marriage of 1924 needs her to be, and the archive had her in the wrong place while asserting it. →

The 1915 notice named eight children and the archive listed nine Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found Two men on that list — John Augustus Barry II and George Augustus Barry — had no page at all, while a ninth name stood in their place. All three fixed together; the build now refuses to publish a household naming somebody who does not exist. →

The ancestor chart, every wife one generation too high Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found The chart put each man's wife in his mother's box. Kathleen Barry stood as Willem Hermanus Booyzen's mother when she was his wife; Johanna Catharina Mountjoy stood as Petrus Jacobus Booysen's mother when she was his; and the woman at the root had no mother drawn at all. Four slots, all shifted by one. Rebuilt, and the genuinely empty slot — the mother of the 1812 man — is now a wall. →

He died in the Transvaal at about thirty Taken back

did A fact derived from a reference, written into the record, and then cited back as evidence.

found Estate O/2899 belongs to his uncle, born 1818. The death date had no source but the file number: the archive read a year off a reference, wrote it in as a fact, and cited the fact back. →

Isabella Frederika Coetsee died in 1943 Taken back

did A fact derived from a reference, written into the record, and then cited back as evidence.

found 31 March 1930. 1943 is the year her husband finally filed — thirteen years late. The same mistake as O/2899, made in the same way, and found the same afternoon by opening the document instead of trusting the reference. →

John Augustus Barry was born at sea Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found Born in IRELAND. The 1903 registration of his death, made by the son who was present, enters him as “Irishman born in Ireland”. The 1915 notice this archive had been using was sworn by another son twelve years later and says “at sea, exact whereabouts unknown”. The archive had the weaker document and had not looked for a better one. →

He died on 3 August 1903 Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found 25 August 1903, as the family tree said all along. The 1915 notice gives the 3rd; the statutory registration, signed by a son present at the death, gives the 25th. For once the tree was right and the document this archive preferred was wrong. →

Dorothea Regina Barry was a daughter of John Barry Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found She is not on the 1915 death notice. This archive said she was “named on” it, having quoted four lines from the top of the page without reading the children's list at the bottom. The only Dorothea Regina in the registers is a granddaughter, baptised at Slang River in 1892. →

Ruben Jacobus Josuah Barry was a son of John Barry Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found Also not on the notice. A Ruben Jacobus Hosea was baptised at Dordrecht in 1888 — a grandson. The Schoeman name Ruben does come into this family, one generation later than this archive said. →

Two questions asked in public, one message stopped at the door Method

found G2G questions 2082757 and 2082786 are live — the MHG 10/57 sterfkennis, and which of two Magdalena de Beers married the Booysen, with two printed page references to be checked against a death notice. The private message to the profile manager who has seen the 1957 file is composed in the form and unsent: WikiTree ends that form with an anti-spam question, and answering it is the one thing this archive will not do on the user's behalf. The forum had no such check.

The tree was wrong, and it showed its working Found

found Two more WikiTree profiles turned a flat contradiction into an explanation. Jan Booysen remarried on 15 December 1793, so his de Beer wife was dead by then and ours died in 1843 — fifty years apart, exactly the objection this archive raised when it set the 1793 will aside. The will is now positively his. And the tree's own de Beer profile carries two Cape codes, two baptisms nine years apart, and a sibling list holding both a Magdalena and a Magdalena Elizabeth: two women merged into one, which is what put the wrong father over our Petrus Jacobus. Out of it, for the first time, a candidate for Magdelena Elisabeth de Beer's own parents.

A question asked in public for the first time Method

found Every enquiry this archive has made so far has gone to an institution and waited. This one went to a forum of people who own the same books. G2G question 2082757 asks whether anyone has seen the sterfkennis in Transvaal estate MHG 10/57 — the file on the FamilySearch films that refuse images, and the one a WikiTree profile cites as a source. It arrives carrying the Johannesburg cemetery entry rather than only asking. Posted, then edited within the minute: the double-bracket profile syntax does not work in a G2G body and published as visible brackets.

WikiTree, which this project had never once opened Method

found Asked whether it had ever been looked at, the honest answer was no — the word appeared nowhere in the project, though eleven MyHeritage trees, Geni and the FamilySearch tree were all listed. Thirteen Booyzen profiles read. Five are this family. It is a user tree and stays a lead rather than a source, but it cites documents, and one citation is the thing Question 0 has wanted since the beginning: a PAGE NUMBER into the published Suid-Afrikaanse Geslagsregisters. It also gives Petrus Jacobus a different father — Jan Booysen, the same man as the 1793 will this archive declined to adopt — against line 3 of an 1876 death notice this archive has read. Nothing was changed. The disagreement was written down.

Three closed routes, and two names the notices never gave Method

found Elizabetha van der Merwe was put to the index three ways — her daughter, her children as a class, and her son's own baptism — and came back empty all three times, which leaves her where she started: one document, the 1908 death notice of her son. Then the same method that failed her worked on the Barrys. Asked for every Barry child of a Kolbe mother rather than for any particular person, the index returned two names on neither parent's death notice — and an hour later, checking this archive's own files, one of them turned out to have been recorded here all along. That is logged as a correction. The one new name is Henry Jaonas Barry, born 13 July 1848, which is where a next child belongs after a brother born in March 1847. Index-only, ambiguous, and FamilySearch blocked the follow-up before the image could be reached. Written down as a lead and not as a child.

Withdrawn — “he died in the Transvaal at about thirty” Taken back

found This archive gave estate TAB MHG O/2899 to Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus Booysen, born 4 December 1855, the seventh child on the 1863 death notice, and wrote a death date of 1885 into his life on that basis. The date had no source except the file number. The Transvaal probate index names the estate's deceased in full: Jan Gerardus Lodewicus Booijzen, aged 67, born district Graaff-Reinet, died 25 May 1885 at Vaalbank, district Lichtenburg — born about 1818, which is his UNCLE, fifth on the 1876 Sterfkennis. The nephew's death date is withdrawn and nothing is known about what became of him. The particular error is worth naming: the archive read a year off a reference number, wrote it in as a fact, and then cited the fact back.

Lichtenburg joins the line Found

found The same correction does the opposite favour. Vaalbank, in the district of Lichtenburg, is where the 1876 man's son died in 1885 — and this archive had already read a 1920 Sterfkennis from that farm for Magdalena Susanna Maria van den Berg, born Booyzen about 1860, father entered as Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus Booyzen, filed under “NOT PROVED”. She is his daughter. Two deaths on one farm thirty-five years apart, which is settlement rather than passage. Read west along the atlas: Rustenburg 1876, Lichtenburg 1885 and 1920, Marico 1903. Three neighbouring districts, and this archive spent months insisting the third of them was somebody else's family.

The last six Transvaal estates are blocked, not missing Method

found Six estates have sat on the Sources page as “Located” for weeks, on the assumption that they were simply not name-indexed and would yield to film browsing. They will not. The collection runs on 762 films; every film up to 007830062 serves its images and every film from 007830063 onward returns 403 — twenty-eight tested, twenty-eight refused — and those are precisely the films carrying 1946 and later. Five of the six are behind that line. The sixth, 52653 of 1923, is in the open half but is not name-indexed, and the films are not ordered by estate number: image 100 of three films in the same numeric neighbourhood gave a 1920 Sterfkennis, a 1938 death notice, and a Chinese clan genealogy. There is nothing to interpolate along. The queue moves off the screen and onto a letter to Pretoria. One trap recorded on the way: q.filmNumber works as a search term alone and is silently ignored the moment a surname is added, returning a whole-collection result that looks like a film result.

A third letter, to Pretoria Method

found Sent to enquiries2@dsac.gov.za, the research address on the National Archives Repository's own contact page, copied to the Head of Client Services. Six estate files — MHG 1095/48, 3734/46, 769/52, 5155/51, 10/57 and 52653 — with the death notice asked for ahead of the will and the account in each, because six death notices are worth more to this archive than one complete file. Their own page states that records older than twenty years carry a public right of access free of charge. Whether it was DELIVERED is a separate question from whether it was sent, and this archive will not use the second word until it has checked for the first.

A dead child's name, given again — watched happening Found

found Worked out of the register rather than off a new document. Hercules Johannes Mountjoy and Maria Sophia van Niekerk baptised a daughter at Dordrecht on 6 September 1896 and called her CAROLINA ISABELLA MARGARETHA ALETTA, her grandmother's four names entire. She died at Wodehouse on 25 October 1897, aged fourteen months. On 8 November 1901 they had another daughter and gave her the whole name again; she married Hendrik Stefanus Palm, and a granddaughter born in 1920 carries it still. Replacement naming is well attested in these congregations and is exactly how a records-matcher invents one person out of two. The dates here make it unmistakable, and this archive keeps the two apart. Five of the eight children of that marriage are named for a parent or a grandparent — the same habit as the Barry names crossing into the Daschners, seen from the other direction and in another family.

Johanna Catharina Booysen gets her dates Found

found Second on the 1863 death notice and until now nothing but a position in a list. The Dutch Reformed index gives her born 15 May 1844 and baptised at BRAK RIVIER on 4 August 1844 — the farm her father was still on nineteen years later when her mother died there. A small thing, and the kind the register was built to hand over.

Withdrawn — Isabella Frederika Coetsee died in 1943 Taken back

found She died on 31 MARCH 1930, at Church Street, Middelburg. 1943 is when her husband finally filed. This archive had taken the year off the estate reference and written it in as a death date — the same error it corrected on O/2899 three days ago, sitting undetected in the next record along. Two instances in one week of one habit: trusting a file number to tell you when somebody died. The notice also names her parents, three children, and a son this archive had been carrying as living who was already dead.

The oldest Booyzen death notice in the Cape — and why it is dangerous Found

found Death notice 6167, filed Cape Town 21 June 1843, under Section 9 of Ordinance 104 — a generation older in form than anything else here. JOHANNA BOOYZEN, born in the Colony about 20 March 1754, died 16 June 1843 at 28 Roze Street, widow of Charles du Plessis, one daughter married to Benjamin Solomon, and “no property whatever except a Bond amounting per balance to £15”. Line 3 reads “both dead” — the seventh failure of that question in this archive and the earliest. She is NOT this family. She is recorded because the only two dates this archive holds for Magdelena Elisabeth de Beer are born 1754 and died 1843, both off the family tree with no source, and here is a Booyzen woman who matches both to the year and is demonstrably somebody else. That is exactly the material a bad merge is made of, and it is better to have met it deliberately than to meet it by accident.

The post, checked Method

found Three enquiries out, none answered. Western Cape Archives (sent 9 Sep, four days): silence. SANDF Documentation Centre (9 Sep): one of the two addresses bounced within seconds — 550 5.7.1, relay access denied — and the other has said nothing in four days. National Archives, Pretoria (12 Sep): no bounce, too early for anything else. Recorded with the date because silence and inaction are indistinguishable on a page that does not say which it is, and this archive has already had to correct itself once for calling a half-delivered letter sent.

The Cape compensation series, named — and then shown to be unsearchable by name Method

found Open question 11 has asked for “Cape Colony compensation claims” for weeks without knowing what they were called. They are the WAR LOSSES COMPENSATION COMMISSION, 1902 — KAB, source NA, volume 564, reference A1068. The Cape depot holds 454 documents mentioning compensation and war, and 679 mentioning losses. BOOYZEN appears in none of them. That would ordinarily be worth something, and here it is worth very little: SMIT, SCHOEMAN and BARRY also return nothing, and the two BOTHA hits are a 1935 locust and arsenical-poisoning stock claim from a magistrate's series. The Commission is catalogued by sub-commissioner and volume, not by claimant. A name search cannot reach these files, so a name search failing to reach them proves nothing. The question stays open and the way in is the Reading Room. Two working notes recorded with it: the NAAIRS asterisk wildcard returns ZERO rather than expanding — BOOY* gives 0 in a depot where BOOYZEN gives 39 — and the bare hostname national.archsrch.gov.za no longer resolves at all, though www.national.archsrch.gov.za does.

Not one Barry of this family is in the Master's index — and the reason is a habit Found

found Film 007844477 is the Cape Master's own INDEX OF ESTATES 1834–1912: every estate reported in the Colony for seventy-eight years, alphabetically, with the death-notice number beside each name. Barry runs across pages 232 to 234 and this family is on none of them. No Richard Peter — which was the point of going, since a Richard Peter Barry of Jerpoint is on the Cape Rebel roll and the estate would have identified him. No Frederick Fortunatus, no Dorothea Regina, no Hendrik Nicholaas, no Kathleen Mary. AND NO JOHN AUGUSTUS, who died in August 1903 in the middle of the index's range, and no Margaretha, who died in 1912 as it closed. Then the reason arrives and it is not an absence: this archive has read both their death notices and both are dated 29 MARCH 1915, sworn by their sons. The index stops in 1912. John Augustus Barry died and nobody reported his estate for TWELVE YEARS. It is the third instance of the same habit here — Isabella Coetzee died in 1930 and was reported in 1943, Maria Kumm died in 1934 and was reported in 1938 with “death not reported” typed on the form. Three families, three decades, and twice a husband's and a wife's estate filed on the same day by a son. Any search that assumes an estate was reported in the year of the death will miss all of them, and two of this archive's own corrections are exactly that mistake.

A Mountjoy at Indwe, and a Barry who carries two families in one name Found

found Items 5, 10 and 11 of the standing list. The Indwe lidmaten register, page 336: JOHANNA CATHARINA MOUNTJOY joined the congregation on 23 JULY 1907, arriving FROM BARKLY OOST — six weeks after Willem Hermanus Booijzen was confirmed in the same church — and the last column records her dead at Indwe in June 1911. A Mountjoy and a Booyzen in one small colliery congregation, twenty-two years after the two families stood at the same font at Barkly Oost. Ranking a whole-surname search by place then produced the Barkly East Barrys: James Henry, who swore his father's 1915 notice, dated at last (c.1847 – 23 June 1939); Harriet Louisa of MANOROWEN, dead at eighteen in 1912; Cornelia Herculena Petronella of CHERRYVILLE, a third named Barry farm after Manorowen and Jerpoint; and RICHARD PIETER KOLBE BARRY, born 1899, who carries the forename of the man on the Cape Rebel roll and the surname of the 1820 Settler family in one name. It does not prove the identification. It does show that whoever named that child was standing inside the family this archive is describing. And a second reason why no Barry is in the Cape Master's index: John Barry's 1915 estate was administered at GRAHAMSTOWN, not Cape Town.

Willem Hermanus Booyzen of Indwe stops in 1910 Method

found Item 5 was to read the Indwe registers forward from 1910 for the miner. The Dutch Reformed index holds nothing further: no third baptism, no marriage after 1908, no death. He is confirmed at 21 in 1907, married at 22 in 1908, has two children by two Roodt women in 1908 and 1909, and after his daughter's baptism on 22 September 1910 he is twenty-four years old and gone from the record this archive can reach. Recorded as a scoped negative rather than left as an open thread: the index has been asked and has nothing.

“Irishman born in Ireland” — open question 5, answered Found

found Entry 74, district Barkly East, 28 October 1903: the statutory registration of John Barry's death, made by his son RICHARD BARRY, “son present at death”, of Manor Owen. Question 5, Race: “IRISHMAN BORN IN IRELAND”. Also: aged eighty-four years two months, so born about June 1819; a CARPENTER, which is the first trade this archive has for him; resident and dead at MANOR OWEN Ward IV, which turns out to have been his own house and not merely his son's; dead on 25 AUGUST 1903; and the footnote that asks for the number of his children answers ELEVEN, where this archive has named nine. The 1915 death notice this archive had been arguing from — “at sea, exact whereabouts unknown, British” — was sworn by a different son twelve years after the fact. Where the two disagree the archive now follows 1903, and that includes the date of death, where the family tree turns out to have been right and the document the archive preferred wrong.

Irishman, then Dutch, on the same form nine years apart Found

found Harriet Louisa Barry died of typhoid at Cherryville on 7 September 1912, aged eighteen years five months and three days, and was buried at Manorowen. Her father Hendrik Nicholaas Barry signed the registration — “Father present when died” — and question 5 enters her as “DUTCH, BORN IN THE DISTRICT OF BARKLY EAST”. Nine years earlier the same printed question, at the same farm, called her grandfather an Irishman born in Ireland. The family testimony says exactly this in its least-examined line — “as his son and grandson were married to Dutch girls their activity during the Boer War would be interesting” — and here it is on a government form, taking two generations and nine years.

A mother nobody had, and a marriage at Zeerust Found

found Transvaal estate 14380. HENDRIK STEPHANUS BOOYSEN, who signed his father's Sterfkennis at Brakfontein in September 1876, died on 11 May 1908 at Koedoesfontein in the district of Rustenburg, in the house of his son-in-law, aged seventy-nine years eleven months. His own notice names his mother: ELIZABETHA BOOYSEN, BORN VAN DER MERWE. That resolves the oldest “Serious” contradiction on the disputed page — Anna Maria van der Merwe died before March 1825 and this son was born about June 1828 — and it was never a contradiction, only a missing row: two van der Merwe wives, one after the other. It also repairs the warning printed on the 1876 household, which had to draw eight children under one marriage because no other was recorded. AND THE PLACE OF HIS LAST MARRIAGE IS ZEERUST — the principal town of the district of MARICO. This archive spent weeks saying of the Marico Booyzens that they are not this family, and has spent three days walking it back through Rustenburg and Lichtenburg. Here is a son of the 1876 man married in the third district. It still links nobody to the seven compensation claims, and the atlas still says unresolved. The withdrawn sentence was wronger than it knew.

The marriages, the errands, and a register that refused eight surnames Method

found The last three items of the standing list. THE MARRIAGES: eighteen, in order, with the place in the column that matters — three at Graaff-Reinet and Cradock before 1850, fifty years in the north-eastern Cape, then Vereeniging and Johannesburg once and finally. Two are hinges: Cradock 1838 joins Booysen to Mountjoy, Mayfair 1949 is where this archive stops. ERRANDS: four doors, twenty things that could be settled behind them, every reference written out — Pretoria for six blocked estates, Roeland Street for two Mountjoy wills and the War Losses Commission registers that no name search can reach, Grahamstown for a depot discovered today and never searched, and Barkly East for four farms and three churches that exist here only as film. THE REGISTER: refreshed, and it grew by the reconstructed people rather than by harvest. Eight in-law surnames were pulled and all eight rejected — Keys 1,199, Grobelaar 726, Dormehl 1,841, Palm 3,818, Siebert 3,613, Buitendag 7,686, Roodt 12,916 and OLIVIER 81,327. Four hundred of eighty-one thousand chosen by a search engine's idea of relevance is not a sample of anything, and the page says so beside the counts.

The 1915 notice, read past the fourth line Taken back

found This archive has shown the top of John Barry's 1915 death notice for weeks and quoted four lines from it — the birthplace, the mother's maiden name, the signature. The children's list is further down the page and had never been read. It names EIGHT: John Augustus, James Henry, GEORGE AUGUSTUS (new), Henry Nicholas, Frederick Fortunatus, Richard Peter, Margaret Mary Bedford and KATHLEEN MARY BOYSON, born Barry, married in community of property to William Boyson — the only Booyzen marriage on the list, spelled Boyson by an English clerk. DOROTHEA REGINA AND RUBEN JACOBUS JOSUAH ARE NOT ON IT, and this archive had both as children “named on the 1915 death notice”. They are grandchildren: a Dorothea Regina baptised at Slang River in 1892 and a Ruben Jacobus Hosea at Dordrecht in 1888, both to Henry Nicholas Barry and Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman. The page also gives Margaretha Kolbe's death as 2 AUGUST 1912, where this archive had only the year. And it says the marriage took place at “Burghersdorp (probably)” — a son of the house, writing in English with a solicitor's help, who did not know where his parents married and put it in brackets.

Eight is not eleven Found

found The 1903 registration answers the printed question “the total number of children deceased has had” with ELEVEN. The 1915 death notice names EIGHT. Three children of John Barry and Margaretha Kolbe died before 1915 and this archive cannot name one of them. It is the first hard count of that generation it has ever had, and it is three short.

The ancestor chart had every wife one generation too high Taken back

found The tree page has been drawing each man's WIFE in his MOTHER's box since it was built — four slots, all shifted by one, and the woman at the root of the whole chart had no mother drawn at all. Rebuilt. The slot that is genuinely empty, the mother of the 1812 man, is now a fifth wall marked Disputed: a family tree supplies Anna Maria van der Merwe and no document does.

A drift checker, and the three things it found in its first run Method

found tools/drift.py now runs in build.sh beside tools/links.py and fails the build when a narrative page contradicts the data. Its first real run found the pedigree missing two documented wives, the direct line showing one wife where kin.js has two, and two men named in a household who had no page at all. A family history that only shows its conclusions is asking to be believed on trust; a build that will not publish a contradiction is cheaper than another month of reading by eye.

1892 — the Zeerust marriage, and four children move mother Found

found The 1908 death notice said the last marriage was at Zeerust and nothing more. The register gives entry 13 on 14 April 1892: Hendrik Stefanus Booijzen, 63, weduwnaar of Brakfontein in Rustenburg, and Charlotta Elizabeth Roos born Dormehl, 51, weduwe of Driefontein in Marico, BOTH BORN AT GRAAFF-REINET. Three things follow. His birthplace is now a town and not a colony, and it is the same town as three other men of this line. He was still at Brakfontein sixteen years after he signed his father's Sterfkennis there. And his four children cannot be hers: she was fifty-one at the wedding and they were adults by 1908, so they belong to the first wife, Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier. The clerk writes him Booijzen; he signs himself Booysen.

Brakfontein, 1891 — a wife, a son, and two of this archive's own misreadings Found

found A week ago this site found a woman it called ANNA JOHANNA BOOIJZEN, BORN ALBERTS, who died in 1891 at BOEKFONTEIN in the district of Rustenburg, and filed her under NOT PROVED TO BE KIN. Read at full resolution the farm is BRAKFONTEIN — the farm where the oldest document on this site was written in 1876 and where Hendrik Stefanus still lived in 1892 — and the maiden name is OLIEFIER, which has no b, no r, no t and no s in it. Her son gives OLIVIER on the 1908 notice. She is Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier, the first wife, and her death notice lists SEVEN children where the 1908 notice named four. Two of them were new. So was her son Hendrick Stefanus Nicolaas, twenty-nine, unmarried, dead on the same farm five days after her. So were her parents, Ocken Johannes Oliefier and Anna Johanna Botha — which is at last where OCKERT JOHANNES came into this family. Every one of those facts was on a page this archive had already found.

The Rustenburg register confirms Olivier from a third direction Found

found An hour after reading OLIEFIER off a death notice and arguing it was Olivier, the Netherdutch Reformed Church register of Rustenburg said so outright. A baptism of 25 December 1862 gives a boy born 31 JANUARY 1862 to Hendrik Stephanus Booijsen and ANNA JOHANNA OLIVIER — and 31 January 1862 is a date this archive did not have but had CALCULATED, from 29 jaar 3 maanden en 14 dagen on a torn 1891 notice. They agree to the day. The same register admits two brothers to membership on one Sunday in April 1869, Petrus Jacobus born 20 April 1851 and Ockert Johannes Stephanus born 15 September 1852, and baptises a nephew in 1882 named for the uncle who would die at Brakfontein. Ockert himself died at Klerksdorp on 16 January 1921, aged sixty-nine. Every one of these entries is INDEX ONLY — FamilySearch has no image for any of them — and they are published on their own page for that reason.

The second Willem Hermanus, followed to the end Found

found He was a name with a beginning and no end: a lidmaat at Indwe in 1907, a MIJNWERKER on two baptisms, a marriage known only from an index, and nothing after 1910. The Indwe register page has now been read — entry 13, 21 September 1908, he twenty-two and a mijnwerker, she SIXTEEN and marrying with her parents' consent, both of Dugmore Mijn, and their son already four months old and not baptised until December. And the end of him: a WILLIAM HERMAN BOOYZEN, 47, born Cape Province, married, EX MINER UNDERGROUND, of 62 Langford Street in BOOYSENS, dead at Johannesburg Hospital on 29 July 1932 of a perforated duodenal ulcer after about one day, buried at BRIXTON on the 31st. His father died of a stomach ulcer at Indwe in 1905. FamilySearch indexes the age as 44; the form says 47 and the burial register agrees with the form. Read the image, not the index — the third time today.

Grave 9760 Found

found A direct-line ancestor has had two bare years on this site since it was built: Catherine Maria Sophia “Kathleen” Barry, 1859–1940. The City of Johannesburg burial register gives the rest — buried 6 SEPTEMBER 1940 at the New Cemetery (Brixton), aged 82, section D.R., GRAVE 9760. It is the first grave number this archive has for anybody, and it is one a family could walk to.

Charlotta's own notice, and the same answer from the other side Found

found This morning the 1892 Zeerust register made it impossible for Hendrik Stefanus Booysen's four children to be his second wife's: she was FIFTY-ONE at the wedding. Her own death notice now says it outright. DEATH NOTICE 844, filed September 1902: Charlotta Elizabetta Booysen, born Dormehl, dead at Driefontein in Groot Marico on 6 February 1902, aged 60 years 4 months — THREE husbands, Jacob van Staden then Matthys Roos then Booysen, and SIX children, two van Stadens and four Rooses, and NOT ONE BOOYSEN. Her father was Jacob Dormehl; her mother is entered UNKNOWN, by a husband of ten years, which makes seven death notices in this archive that fail to name a parent. She had one wagon and her furniture, worth £51 8s 0d, and she left a will.

Looking for Ockert's estate and finding his son's Found

found Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen died at Klerksdorp on 16 January 1921 and HAS NO ESTATE FILE OF HIS OWN in the indexed Transvaal probate records. Searched under Ockert, Okkert, Ocker and Ocken against Booysen, Booyzen and Booijsen: six hits, every one of them him as somebody else's relative — four duplicate copies of a 1935 Sterfkennis where he is the father, and two of his own father's 1908 notice where he is entered Child. But the 1935 one is worth the search. STERFKENNIS 87882, the first Afrikaans document in this archive: DIEDERIK ARNOLDUS BOOYSEN, KARWEIER of Zwartruggens, dead at Voorbedacht No. 401 in the district of Rustenburg on 1 March 1935 — and line 3 names both parents, OCKERT JOHANNES STEPHANUS BOOYSEN and ELIZABETH JOHANNA SOPHIA gebore MYBURGH. That couple came into this archive this morning off a Rustenburg baptism index with NO IMAGE, published with a warning saying so. Here they are on a page that can be read. And their grandson, born 23 October 1927, is the fourth generation to carry a name that came in from the district of Cradock with one marriage.

Grave 6889 closes the second Willem Hermanus Found

found The 1932 identification was built on circumstance — ex miner underground, born Cape Province, married, forty-seven, Brixton. The Johannesburg grave register settles it. GRAVE 6889 holds “Boysen, William”, folio 49, and beneath him SUSANNA ADRIANA BOOYZEN, buried 29 AUGUST 1968. Susanna Adriana Roodt is the sixteen-year-old he married at Indwe on 21 September 1908. Husband and wife in one grave, thirty-six years apart. And the clerk spells him BOYSEN — the same spelling an English clerk used for a different man of this family on John Barry's 1915 death notice.

The Olivier line, and a marriage that moves the whole family twenty-six years Found

found Yesterday Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier did not exist on this site. This morning she was recovered from a death notice the archive had misread twice. This afternoon there are two more documents. HER BAPTISM: Cradock, 4 October 1824, born 10 September, father OCKERT JOHANNES STEPHANUS OLIVIER — all three names, exactly what her son was called — and mother ANNA CATHARINA BOTHA; with a sister Aletta Catharina baptised in the same church eleven months before, which is where her own daughter's name comes from. AND HER MARRIAGE: Potchefstroom, 3 July 1850, entry 206, Hendrik Stephanus Booijzen 23 and Anna Johanna Olivier 25 — her maiden name written plainly by a clerk who could write, forty-one years before the scrawl this archive read as Alberts. The marriage is the thing. This site began by saying the family went north by railway in the twentieth century; the 1876 Sterfkennis moved that to Rustenburg in 1876; this moves it to POTCHEFSTROOM IN 1850, two years before the Sand River Convention. A Booijzen was standing in a Transvaal church before there was a Transvaal.

Ten index entries, one death notice, and the direct line's own brother Found

found A run of ten entries under BOOIJZEN in the Transvaal probate index carried no dates, no places and nothing to identify them. They are all one document: DEATH NOTICE 4795, for ELIZABETHA MARGARETHA BOOIJZEN BORN MARAIS, who died on 1 JUNE 1900 in a zinc building in MARKET STREET, PRETORIA — four days before Lord Roberts entered the town — and whose husband did not file it until March 1904. Her husband is DAVID SCHALK BOOIJZEN, born 9 June 1848: fourth on the 1863 death notice of Johanna Catharina Mountjoy, where Willem Hermanus of the direct line is sixth. HIS BROTHER. They married at LADY GREY near Aliwal North, the same small Cape church where Willem Hermanus married Kathleen Barry in 1879. Eight children, one squeezed in between the lines with DIED MINOR against her. Nothing movable, and a COMPENSATION CLAIM FILED — which takes back a negative this archive published about the War Losses Compensation Commission. And it unsettles an inference: the notice names a STEPHANUS FRANCOIS BOOIJZEN as their son, and this site has a Stephanus Francois Booyzen of 1874 placed under a different father on his birth date alone.

The burial registers, swept — and Black October Found

found Grave 9760 took twenty minutes, so the whole Johannesburg cemetery collection was read: 298 entries under six surnames. Ten are this family, and each turns a year the archive was carrying into a day. HENRY JAMES BOOYZEN had been a name on estate MHG 10/57 with no birth and no death; he died 8 December 1956 aged 69. Joseph Heinrich Daschner was buried at West Park on 21 April 1942. Hendrik Stephanus Nicolaas Booyen, found this morning as a Rustenburg baptism and a Kempton Park death, was buried at Johannesburg on 12 October 1959. And two infants at Brixton the archive did not have at all. THEN OCTOBER 1918. RICHARD PETER BOOYZEN, twenty-four, buried at Brixton on the 27th — the centre of Black October. This archive has no Richard Peter Booyzen and it should: Richard Peter Barry is Kathleen's own brother, and a boy born about 1894 falls exactly in the gap between her daughter of 1891 and her son of 1901. Added as a ninth child, marked INFERRED, because a burial register names no parents. Two more Booysens went into the same ground within eight weeks and neither can be shown to be kin.

Estate 1291, and a ninth Barry child Found

found This archive looked for Margaretha Kolbe's estate on the films either side of 925, her husband's, and did not find it. It is 1291, and it is indexed under CAPE, KIMBERLEY, PROBATE RECORDS OF THE SUPREME COURT while the probate itself was granted at GRAHAMSTOWN. A collection label and a place that disagree is exactly how a record hides. DEATH NOTICE 1291: Margaret Louisa Elizabeth Barry born Kolbe, 84, AFRIKANDER OF EUROPEAN EXTRACTION, dead on 2 August 1912 in the house of her son R. P. Barry at Manorowen, leaving no movable property, no immovable property, estate Nil and no will. And question ten names NINE CHILDREN where her husband's notice names eight. The ninth is WILLIAM, who is on nothing else in this archive. “Eight is not eleven” becomes “nine is not eleven”. Two other things: her son puts his father's death in AUGUST 1904 when the registration says 25 August 1903, and where his parents were married he writes UNKNOWN — three months before writing “Burghersdorp (probably)” on his father's. Two documents by one man in one year, and he cannot place his own parents' wedding on either.

Eight Mountjoy children, the Keys question closed, and four honest noes Found

found George Mountjoy and Maria Sophia Botha married at Cradock in 1848 and had THIRTEEN children; this archive could name ONE. The baptism registers name eight, and the places track the family across the border — Graaff-Reinet 1858, Burgersdorp 1860, Smithfield in the Orange Free State 1862 and 1864. One of the eight answers an open question: JOHANNA CATHARINA MOUNTJOY, baptised at Burgersdorp on 29 FEBRUARY 1860, a leap day, is the woman who married William Henry Keys and put Mountjoy forenames into a third surname. A Petronella Christina Aletta baptised at Swellendam in 1871 carries both parents' names and is NOT adopted: Swellendam is six hundred miles west of anywhere else this family stood. And four questions answered NO: Elizabetha van der Merwe's marriage is not in any index, so the eight children of 1876 stay under their warning; the five remaining 1876 children have no document of their own; Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen has no estate file; and the three untraced daughters of 1891 stay untraced — this archive will NOT decide that the Anna Catharina Grobelaar of 1908 is the Anna Johanna Maria of 1891, because the forenames do not agree and guessing that they do is the exact mistake it spent today undoing.

Marico: the initials still fail, and the reason for dismissing them is gone Taken back

found In September this archive set aside seven TAB CJC compensation claims from MARICO with the sentence “that is NOT this family, who were Cape”, and could not test the initials because it could not name a single grandson. It can name them now, and the test STILL FAILS — of JPJ, PJ, GL, JPJ, L, JC and HE only PJ fits, and Petrus Jacobus is the commonest name this family has. But the sentence is false twice over. HENDRIK STEFANUS BOOIJZEN MARRIED AT ZEERUST, the principal town of Marico, on 14 April 1892; and his wife died at DRIEFONTEIN, GROOT MARICO on 6 February 1902, during the war, in the district the claims come from. The claims are still not tied to a named man. What has gone is the excuse for not looking.

A page that says what moved Method

found This archive is rewritten most days and a reader who saw it last week had no way of knowing what changed. /changes/ is that record: every finding and every withdrawal, grouped by the day it happened, newest first. It is BUILT FROM log.json AND corrections.json at build time and contains no hand-written text, so it cannot go stale the way a “latest news” box always does. If a finding is not on it, it is not in the log.

The post, chased — and the SANDF address is not the problem Method

found Three letters out, no replies and no new bounces. PRETORIA (sent today, six Transvaal estate files): delivered, no bounce, too early for anything else. WESTERN CAPE ARCHIVES (two letters, 9 September — the Mountjoy wills and the Lerena death notice): delivered, four days, silent. SANDF (9 September): the mweb address bounced with “Relay access denied” and archive@dod.mil.za delivered. RE-CHECKED TODAY: the Stellenbosch library guide, updated 1 SEPTEMBER 2026, no longer lists the mweb address at all — it gives archive@dod.mil.za and nothing else. So there is no better address to switch to; the one that bounced is a dead address that third-party sites keep republishing. The same guide shows the Centre HAS MOVED, from the Schweikert Building at 20 Visagie Street to 42 SATURNUS ROAD, IRENE — the National Archives directory still has the old one. And it names two officers for PAIA requests, which carries a statutory duty to answer. If archive@dod.mil.za is still silent on 7 October, that is the next step, and not another general enquiry.

A marriage register that cites an estate number Found

found This archive lost the direct ancestor's brother in March 1904, signing his wife's death notice at Pretoria. He turns up nineteen months later in the same city, marrying again: entry 105, 27 NOVEMBER 1905, DAVID SCHALK BOOYZEN, 56, WIDOWER, BORN CRADOCK, of Goede Hoop, Pretoria, to JOHANNA ELENA LOWIES BORN STOLS, 51, a widow of Skinners Court. The Remarks column reads “Remarriage Certificate from Master Supreme Court NO. 4795 dated 4/11/05” — and 4795 is the estate number of the death notice this archive read an hour earlier, for Elizabetha Margaretha Booijzen born Marais, dead in a zinc building in Market Street in 1900. The Master would not let a widower remarry until the first estate was in order, and the marriage clerk wrote the estate number down. The two documents cite each other. IT IS ALSO A METHOD: the Remarks column of a Transvaal civil marriage register carries the Master's estate number whenever a widow or widower remarries, which indexes marriages to estate files in the direction this archive usually cannot go — from somebody alive to a file about somebody dead. And it gives him a birthplace: CRADOCK. His death is still not found.

William, found — and the two Kolbe sisters on one page Found

found This morning WILLIAM BARRY existed on one line of his mother's 1915 death notice and nowhere else. The Burgersdorp doopregister has his baptism: WILLIAM FREDRIK, entry 2187, born 23 AUGUST 1853, christened 23 October, father JOHN BARRY, mother MARGARETH KOLBE — with godparents JOHN KOLBE, ANNA VAN DER MERWE and GEORGE KOLBE, two of whom are his mother's brothers and none of whom this archive had. AND THE ENTRY TWO LINES ABOVE IT IS THE OTHER THING. 2186, the same afternoon: AUGUSTUS KOLBE, father GEORGE FREDK ENSLIN, mother MARY ELIZABETH KOLBE. This site carried a contradiction marked Serious — Margaretha Kolbe appearing to marry Enslin while married to John Barry — and resolved it from Margaret Downing's 1867 death notice, which named a daughter Mary Elizabeth married to George F. Enslin. Here are the two sisters, baptising a son each, two entries apart, on one page. Six more baptisms from the same registers give exact birth dates to five Barry children, including the direct ancestor: CATHERINA MARY SOPHIA BARRY, BORN 4 AUGUST 1859, who has been “1859” on this site since it was built.

Three graves read off the register, and one of them is the direct line Found

found GRAVE 2171, Dutch Reformed section, WEST PARK — George Downing Mountjoy Booyzen, 46, buried 14 December 1947. This archive has had “buried West Park 14 Dec” since it was built and never the number. And a DOUBLE PLOT: Joseph Heinrich Daschner, 58, buried 21 April 1942 in GRAVE 50 of a pair 50/51 he bought himself, with a memorial by L. Canata & Son — and the consecutive grave-number register braces 50 and 51 together, DASCHNER JOSEPH H. and DASCHNER CATHERINE M.S. She is Catharina Maria Sophia Booysen, born 22 April 1891 at Barkly Oost, George's own sister, whose estate MHG 3734/46 is one of the six files in the letter to Pretoria. Four years after he was buried in the first grave she went into the second. The family lies in three graves across two cemeteries: Kathleen Barry at Brixton in 9760, her son Willem Hermanus and his wife at Brixton in 6889, her son George at West Park in 2171, and her daughter and son-in-law at West Park in 50 and 51.

A drift check for the atlas, and three shared names verified by eye Method

found Six farms and towns were written into /documents/ today before places.json had heard of any of them — Potchefstroom, Zeerust, Driefontein, Zwartruggens, Voorbedacht No. 401, Klerksdorp and Market Street. All six are now in the atlas, and tools/drift.py FAILS THE BUILD if a place named in a timeline event is not in places.json. Tested against a deliberate miss before it was trusted. Separately, the shared-name warning was worked through by eye and all three are genuinely two or three people: GEORGE MOUNTJOY the saddler of 1823 and the child baptised at Barkly Oost in 1889; THREE Petrus Jacobus Booysens of 1788, 1812 and 1839, father to son to grandson; and two WILLEM HERMANUS PIETERZENS, the one dead before 1817 who was Anna Catharina Sleer's first husband, and his son who stood godfather at the 1851 font. None is one person entered twice.

A good theory, killed by its own document Taken back

found Richard Peter Booyzen came into this archive at lunchtime off a burial register as an inferred ninth child. His death registration makes the identification firmer AND destroys the best idea this archive had about his mother. FIRMER: 18 Anderson Street, Turffontein; twenty-four; BORN AT THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, which is the migration every one of Kathleen Barry's children made; dead of INFLUENZA AND PNEUMONIA after eleven days on 25 October 1918. DESTROYED: this site has been asking for months why Kathleen Barry was a MILITARY PENSIONER at her death, and saying that no son of hers is among the First World War dead. A son dead in October 1918 looked like the answer — huge numbers of South African servicemen died in that epidemic and their dependants were pensioned. He was NOT A SOLDIER. Occupation: sawyer. Condition: MARRIED, so there is a widow, and a married son's death does not pension his mother anyway. The theory is rejected and the open question is now better specified: the pension belongs to a son who SERVED AND SURVIVED, which is exactly what the letter already at the SANDF Documentation Centre asks about. Three other Johannesburg Booyzens were tested and NONE is claimed — Petrus Jacobus of 1882 (a name and a gap and no document), Petrus Jacobus VAN BLERK Booyzen (no Van Blerk in this family), and Jan Gerhardus Lodewikus buried in 1943 (right name, no age, too common). John Zacharia Booysen of the same influenza weeks is REJECTED outright: Zacharia reaches nothing here.

Two questions worked hard and not closed Method

found Both were predicted to fail before they were started. ONE DID. Stephanus Francois Booyzen's marriage register at Mosselbaai — 5 September 1905, certificate 1318 — has a column for WOONPLAATS and none for WAAR GEBOREN, and no column for parents at all, so it cannot decide whose son he was. But it tilts: he is THIRTY, a JONKMAN, a METSELAAR, and HIS RESIDENCE IS PRETORIA — and eleven weeks later David Schalk Booijzen of Goede Hoop, Pretoria, whose 1900 notice names an unmarried major son called Stephanus François, married again in that same city. Still marked Serious. This archive is not going to decide a father on a city. THE OTHER MOVED FURTHER THAN EXPECTED. Ockert Johannes Stephanus Olivier and Anna Catharina Botha MARRIED AT GRAAFF-REINET ON 8 DECEMBER 1816 — index only, no image — and have four children baptised at Cradock between 1820 and 1826: Gert Cornelis, Aletta Catharina, Anna Johanna and an Ockert Johannes Stephanus the younger. GRAAFF-REINET is the Booysens' own town. The two families were in the same place at the same time and their children married each other six hundred miles north at Potchefstroom in 1850. What is still NOT done is the thing that was asked: this archive still cannot tell this Ockert Johannes Stephanus Olivier from the Ockert Johannis Fredrik Lodewyk, the Okker Petrus Jacobus and the Ockert Johannes Frederik baptising at Cradock in the same decade. Her line still stops with her parents.

The other number on the same line Found

found The Pretoria marriage register of 27 November 1905 cites TWO remarriage certificates from the Master, one per party. 4795 was the groom's and led back to his first wife's death notice. 7081 is the bride's, and it is CHARLES PETRUS BAREND LOWIES — born in the DISTRICT OF CRADOCK about 1849, dead at PRETORIA on 5 JUNE 1905, parents Jan Lowies and Elisabetha Maria Lubbe, TWELVE children. Read the two men together: David Schalk Booijzen born Cradock 9 June 1848 and widowed at Pretoria in 1900; Charles Petrus Barend Lowies born district Cradock about 1849 and dead at Pretoria in 1905. Two men born a year apart in one Karoo district, both ending in Pretoria — and five months and twenty-two days after the second died, the first married his widow. The Master cleared both estates within four days: 4795 on 4 November, 7081 on the 7th, the wedding on the 27th. Between them those two certificates protect EIGHT Booijzen children and TWELVE Lowies children. Two estate numbers on one line of one register have now produced two death notices, two households and four generations, and this archive has been reading marriage registers for names and dates and skipping the last column. NOT READ: the 7081 file itself. FamilySearch began refusing record-page requests part-way through — Access Denied, Error 15 — so this is index-level and says so.

Eleven children, and a third point in the Stephanus Francois argument Found

found His 1940 estate names ELEVEN children and this site had NONE of them: David Schalk, Susanna Fredrika Aletta (Luus), Elizabeth Magrieta (Bekker), Beatrix Magdalena Catharina (Vermeulen), Johanna Catharina (Du Plessis), Ewert Philippus, Stephanus Francois, Willem Hendrik, Petrus Jacobus, Johan Abraham Frederik and Hendrik Rudolph Philippus. TWO OF THEM SETTLE HOW THIS COUPLE NAMED: Ewert Philippus and Susanna Fredrika Aletta are called straight after his wife's parents, EVERT PHILIP BOSHOFF and SUSANNA FREDERIKA ALETTA MEYER, named on her 1890 baptism at Mossel Bay. So they did name children after grandparents — which makes the ELDEST son worth looking at. He is called DAVID SCHALK. If Stephanus Francois is David Schalk Booijzen's son, as the 1900 Pretoria death notice says, that boy carries his grandfather's name outright; under the parentage this archive published instead, he carries a great-uncle's. A third point for the new reading, and still not proof. Added to the disputed row, which stays Serious. Also: Beatrix Magdalena Catharina Boshoff was born 16 June 1889 and baptised at Mossel Bay on 16 February 1890 — she was SIXTEEN when she married.

Anna Maria van der Merwe stops being a rumour Found

found The ancestor chart was rebuilt this morning with a fifth wall against her, marked Disputed, and the reason printed beside it was “only a family tree puts her here”. THAT IS NO LONGER TRUE. A Dutch Reformed baptism names DAVID SCHALK BOOIJZEN, born 12 DECEMBER 1806 and christened 4 January 1807, as the son of PIETER JACOBUS BOOIJZEN and ANNA MARIA VAN DER MERWE — with an explicit Couple relationship between the parents, not two names near each other on a page. And David Schalk is FIRST OF THE EIGHT on the 1876 Sterfkennis, which this archive has never had a date for. A son born in December 1806 to a father baptised in September 1788 is a man of eighteen becoming a father, which is exactly what this site has always said. IT ALSO RESOLVES A DISPUTE MARKED SERIOUS since the first week: the tree marries them in 1805 and FamilySearch carries a 1825 Cape Town marriage of the same two names, and the archive refused to guess which was right. A child born in 1806 settles it — they were married by then, so the 1825 record is a different couple. WHAT IS STILL NOT PROVED is that she is the mother of the 1812 man in the direct line, so the wall stays; only its reason has changed. Also found: PETRUS JACOBUS BOOIJSEN, born 29 May 1873 and baptised at LADY GREY, son of David Schalk Booijsen and Elizabeth Margaritha Marais — the eldest of the eight on the 1900 Pretoria notice, now with a date, in the same church where his uncle married six years later.

The last six graves, and three things this archive had wrong Found

found FamilySearch answered again, so the six register images left unread were read. ALL TEN of this family's Johannesburg burials now have a grave number or a section: Anna J. Mary 2472, John Barry 2951, Richard Peter 1119, George Downing Daschner 4410, Henry James 7110/1, Kathleen Barry 9760, Willem Hermanus and Susanna Adriana 6889, George Downing Mountjoy 2171, Joseph Heinrich Daschner 50 and Catharina Maria Sophia 51. AND THREE CORRECTIONS. ANNA J. MARY BOOYZEN LIVED SIX MONTHS and GEORGE DOWNING DASCHNER THREE MONTHS AND FIVE DAYS — the index says “0 days” for both because the register keeps Years, Months and Days in three columns and collapses them into one field, and this archive printed the index reading this afternoon without opening the page. Neither child was stillborn, and hers was a bought grave. HENDRIK STEPHANUS NICOLAAS BOOYSEN WAS BURIED AT ROODEPOORT, not Johannesburg — the collection is titled Johannesburg Cemetery Records and the index repeats that label for every register inside it, including other municipalities'. The collection title is not the place. AND HENRY JAMES BOOYZEN, who had no birth and no death this morning, now has everything: dead 8 December 1956 at the FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE NURSING HOME of coronary pulmonary sclerosis, aged 69, of 3 15TH AVENUE, MAYFAIR — the suburb where his mother died in 1940 and his great-niece married in 1949, and which this archive has never had as an address.

Estate 7081 read, and the address is the point Found

found This archive published estate 7081 from the index a few hours ago and said at the time that the image had not been opened. It is opened now, and it is not the document that was expected. CHARLES PETRUS BAREND LOWIES, A HAWKER, OF GOEDEHOOP, PRETORIA — dead on 5 JUNE 1905 in the LUNATIC ASYLUM at Pretoria, aged 56 years and 8 months, Dutch, born in the district of Cradock, leaving twelve children of whom SIX WERE STILL MINORS, movables but no land, and a will. GOEDEHOOP IS THE WHOLE POINT. It is the exact address David Schalk Booyzen gave on the marriage register three weeks later — this archive read that register first and wrote down “a widower of Goede Hoop, Pretoria” without knowing what it meant. The two men lived in the same place, and were born in the same Cape district within four months of each other. David Schalk did not marry a widow from across the town; he married the widow of a man from his own address. She signed the notice on 27 October and married him on 27 November. The index gave the name, the district, the parents and the twelve children; it did not give Goedehoop, the asylum, the trade or the eight months on his age.

Two more honest noes, once FamilySearch answered again Method

found DAVID SCHALK BOOYSEN, born 9 June 1848, is alive and fifty-six at GOEDEHOOP, PRETORIA on 27 November 1905 and this archive loses him there. No estate file in the indexed Transvaal probate records — the only David Schalk Booyzen in them is a CHILD on the 1940 Stephanus Francois estate. No civil death that can be him: a Cradock man born 1870, a Rustenburg man born 1859, a Pretoria man born 1907, a Clayville man born 1889. The nearest is eleven years out and is NOT adopted. AND THE 1876 EIGHT STAY AT ONE. Searched by mother and by father across 1806 to 1830 in every South African collection: exactly one child of Petrus Jacobus Booysen and Anna Maria van der Merwe is indexed, and it is David Schalk of December 1806. The other seven exist on the 1876 Sterfkennis and nowhere else.

The twelve Lowies children, and the last uncaptioned image Method

found Estate 7081 named TWELVE children and this site had none of them: Jan Jacobus, Johanna Elena, Gabriel Jacobus, Carl Petrus Barend, Willem Jacobus, Gideon Daniel Rudolph and Elizabetha Maria as majors; Matthys Andries, Radolph Lodewyk, Abel Hermanus Gerhardus, Lourens Daniel Albertus and Johannes Jacobus as MINORS. Three carry the grandparents' names straight through and one her mother's. NONE of them is a Booysen and none is kin — they are here because David Schalk Booysen became their stepfather a month after their mother signed that page, and because six of them under age are the reason the Master made her wait for a remarriage certificate. The same was done this morning for Charlotta Dormehl's six Roos and van Staden step-children. AND THE LAST UNPLACED IMAGE IS PLACED: detail-1843-age-89.jpg has been sitting in the gallery without a caption or a page since it was cut. It belongs on the 1843 Johanna Booyzen notice, against the age given to the day — 89 years, 2 months and 26 days — which is the reading that puts her birth at about 20 March 1754 and is exactly why that notice is dangerous: 1754 and 1843 are the only two dates this archive has for Magdelena Elisabeth de Beer, and they came off a tree with no source. EVERY IMAGE ON THE SITE NOW HAS A CAPTION AND A PAGE.

The last route to David Schalk's death, closed Method

found A widow's death notice names her pre-deceased husband, so JOHANNA ELENA STOLS — who married David Schalk Booysen at Pretoria in November 1905 — was the last way to date his death. Searched under BOOYZEN, BOOYSEN and LOWIES for any death between 1906 and 1945. NOTHING that can be her. The route is CLOSED rather than untried: neither David Schalk Booysen nor his second wife has a findable death, and the direct ancestor's brother disappears at GOEDEHOOP, PRETORIA, aged fifty-six, in November 1905. It has been added to the Pretoria errand — not as another file request, because the letter is already sent, but as an INDEX SEARCH: the Master's own estate index at Pretoria would settle it in a minute, and that office certainly knew the pair, having handled estates 4795 and 7081 for them within four days of each other.

A way into the documents page Method

found /documents/ is now THIRTY-FOUR documents and 354 kilobytes of HTML, eighteen of them added today, and a reader arriving at it had no way in and no idea what was there. Worse, the sections sat in the order they were written — 1906, then 1942, then 1876, then 1937 — which is the order this archive happened to read them and of no use to anybody else. There is now a contents table at the top, IN THE ORDER THE EVENTS HAPPENED, and it is READ OUT OF THE PAGE'S OWN SOURCE AT BUILD TIME: the h2 headings are matched, the year is pulled off the front of each, and they are sorted. A section cannot be added without appearing in the contents, for the same reason the gallery is built from the pages rather than written by hand — anything maintained separately goes stale, and this archive has spent the day proving it. Three headings that had no year were given one, and the only two entries left undated are the two that genuinely have no date: what was searched and not found, and the two questions worked hard and not closed.

The SANDF enquiry was sent Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found It was sent, and one of the two addresses bounced at the server. Sent and delivered are not the same word and this archive used the wrong one. →

The 1905 clerk's Booysen proves the family used an s Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found It proves nothing. Seven Attorney-General files spell one Middelburg constable both ways, twice inside 1905. Only the son's signature still carries weight. →

The archives hold 39 Booyzen documents Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found They hold 184. Every search in the project had been run against the Cape depot alone, one repository out of nine, for weeks. →

Maggie Booyzen was born 1 October 1926 Taken back

did A claim taken from the family tree and repeated before it was tested.

found 14 October. Her father wrote it on her mother's death notice three months before he was widowed. →

1944 is the one time the form worked Taken back

did A negative built from a list mistaken for a population — the archive searched what it happened to have and reported the answer as though it had searched everything.

found The very next document opened named both parents too. The claim was a count of documents read, dressed as a count of documents that exist. →

The Marico Booyzens are not this family Taken back

did A negative built from a list mistaken for a population — the archive searched what it happened to have and reported the answer as though it had searched everything.

found The direct ancestor died in district Rustenburg in 1876, twenty-five years before the war. The reason for holding the two clusters apart has gone; the atlas now says unresolved. →

Not one miner among them Taken back

did A negative built from a list mistaken for a population — the archive searched what it happened to have and reported the answer as though it had searched everything.

found There is one. A son was a MIJNWERKER of Dugmore Mijn at Indwe in 1908. The negative was built out of six occupations the archive happened to have read, and it had not read his because it did not know the man existed. →

CORRECTED — the SANDF request was only half delivered Taken back

found Reported here as sent. It was sent, and one of the two addresses bounced: sandfdoc@mweb.co.za refused it at the server, 550 relay access denied. That is the address published almost everywhere for the Documentation Centre. The enquiry did reach archive@dod.mil.za, which has not replied. “Sent” and “delivered” are not the same word and this archive used the wrong one.

Three documents identified that may break the oldest wall Found

found James Mountjoy's wills of 1818 and 1827, joint with Anna Catharina Slier, and an 1834 Colonial Office memorial from his widow. None digitised. A request went to the Western Cape Archives on 10 September 2026 — and unlike the last letter, delivery was checked.

NARROWED — the 1905 sheet proves less than this archive said Taken back

found Seven Attorney-General files about one police constable at Middelburg, 1904–07, spell him BOOYSEN four times and BOOYZEN three — twice both ways inside 1905. So the clerk's Booysen on the 1905 death form is not an older spelling being displaced; it is what a Cape clerk might write on any day. What survives is the half that was always stronger: the son SIGNED, and chose the z.

CORRECTED — the whole project searched one province out of nine Taken back

found Every NAAIRS search in this archive was run against the Cape depot. This family left the Cape about 1907 and the entire last generation died in Johannesburg, so their estates are in the Transvaal — and NAAIRS offers an “All Archives Repositories” database on the same selection page I used every time. BOOYZEN returns 39 in the Cape and 184 across all repositories. One hundred and forty-five documents unseen, including the estate files of nearly everyone in the last three generations.

The Johannesburg generation's estates, found Found

found Anna Pretorius (1944), George Downing Mountjoy Booyzen (1947), John Barry Booyzen (1952), Henry James Booyzen (1956) — and Catharina Maria Sophia, the daughter baptised at Barkly Oost in 1891, who married a Daschner and died in 1946. Also two of the eight children on the 1863 death notice, and both sons of the second marriage.

The 1820 voyage confirmed — and a second lie found under it Found

found Every date the tree carried for the Nautilus is right. The settler roll adds an occupation nobody had — CHEMIST — and two ages: “KOLBE, George Augustus 20. w Margaret 19.” They were sixteen and sixteen. With the 1819 marriage allegation, where both swore twenty-one at sixteen and fifteen, that is two age overstatements in one year on two official documents.

Two claims answered by absence Found

found No estate file for Willem Hermanus Booyzen in any repository in South Africa — he died at Indwe in 1905 leaving nothing to administer, as his father had in 1884. And nothing supports the mines: no Booyzen mining record anywhere in the index, and every occupation actually read for these men points elsewhere — mason, tree nurseryman, railway clerk.

A fourth death notice fails at the same line Found

found Stephanus Francois Booyzen's 1940 Sterfkennis was fetched for one reason — he was a son of the second marriage, so his mother should be on line 3. His widow wrote “oorlede” for both parents. Four death notices in this family now ask who the parents were, and four fail. He was a MESSELAAR, a mason, like his half-brother Willem Hermanus at Indwe.

The second wife, named — Johanna Margaritha Pretorius Found

found The oldest open question in the archive, answered by a christening rather than a death. Every attempt had gone at death notices, which either do not ask for a wife's name or got “oorlede” for an answer. A baptism names both parents: Gert Jacobus, born 19 January 1870 — the exact date on the 1884 death notice — baptised 19 June 1870, “Oud: Petrus Jacobus Booyzen en Johanna Margaritha Pretorius.” Read from the register image, not the index. And two children of the first marriage stood godparent to the first child of the second.

The one death notice where line 3 works Found

found TAB MHG 2945/44, read at full resolution off the film. Anna Johanna Maria Booyzen, born Pretorius, died Forest Hill 26 February 1944, aged 37. The parents line — blank or evasive on all four earlier notices in this archive — is filled in completely: Petrus Jacobus Pretorius and Margareth Wilhelmina Elizabeth Pretorius, both at 96 James Street, Germiston. The form did not change. The person filling it in did. Her husband signed it, and her parents were alive and reachable.

Withdrawn — Maggie born 1 October 1926 Taken back

found This archive carried Margaretha Wilhelmina Elizabeth “Maggie” Booyzen’s birth as 1 October 1926, taken from the family tree. Her mother’s 1944 death notice, written and signed by her father three months before he lost her, gives 14 October 1926. Every other child’s date on that list matches what the archive already held, which is what makes the one mismatch worth taking seriously. Corrected to 14 October.

A marriage place, and eleven cousins Found

found TAB MHG 1928/42 — Joseph Heinrich Daschner's death notice, opened only to put a document behind a marriage the family tree asserted. It gave the marriage (“CATHERINE MARY SOPHIA DASCHNER (born Booyzen)”), the place (“Indwe, Cape Colony” — the same village where her father died in 1905), his birthplace and parents, and eleven children by name. Five of the eleven carry Booyzen and Barry forenames: Catherine Mary Sophia, Margaret Wilhelmina Elizabeth, William Herman, Richard Peter, Henry James. The surname leaves in one generation; the names do not.

Withdrawn — “the one time the form worked” Taken back

found Published this morning, about the 1944 Sterfkennis: the one death notice in this archive whose question three names both parents. The very next document opened, the 1942 Daschner notice, names both parents too. The claim was a count, and the count was of documents read rather than documents that exist — the oldest mistake in this project. What replaced it is better: question three fails when the informant is remembering the nineteenth-century Cape interior, and works when a twentieth-century spouse is writing down in-laws they had actually met. 1840, 1884, 1915 and 1940 fail; 1942 and 1944 work.

The oldest document in this archive — and the two names above the line Found

found Sterfkennis No. 678, written at the farm Brakfontein, district Rustenburg, on 14 September 1876. Petrus Jacobus Booijsen, born Graaffreinet, aged 88, landbouwer, widower, died 1 September 1876. Line 3: “Gerthardus Lödewikus Booijsen — Magdalena de Beer.” Generation seven has stood at the head of the direct line since this archive began with the flattest entry on the site — no dates, no parents, no document. He has a document now. It does not name his own parents, so the oldest open question stays open; it moves him and his wife out of the family tree and into the record, and it retires a 1793 Cape will that had made the Booysen–de Beer pairing look unsafe. The notice also lists eight children, seven of them previously unknown here, and reports the whole estate as “Niets nagelaten. Niets bekend.”

Withdrawn — “they are not this family” Taken back

found The atlas said of the Marico Booyzens: “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 false and the first was resting on it. The direct ancestor died in district Rustenburg in 1876 — twenty-five years before the war, a generation before the railway. Rustenburg is not Marico and no document links this family to any of the seven compensation claims; but the reason for holding the two clusters apart has gone. The map now says unresolved. This is the fifteenth thing this archive has had to take back, and the pattern is consistent: every one of them was a confident negative built on an assumption nobody had tested.

A whole estate, from the death to the last shilling Found

found KAB MOOC 6/9/5047, estates 58379 and 58380 — on the Sources page as “Located, not yet read” for months. Read now, and not only the death notices: the liquidation account and the distribution account too, which is the first time this archive has seen a life in this family added up. James John Mountjoy, retired builder of Barkly East, died 22 December 1937 aged 83 years 6 months, leaving £664 11s 8d in the Post Office Savings Bank, a house on Lot 380 let at £2 10s a month, and £400 out on note at six per cent. Ten children and two grandchildren took £21. 4. 5. each. His wife’s death, three and a half years earlier, is recorded on his form in four words: “death not reported.” Her age gives the only birth date this archive has for her. And the file contradicts itself — his death notice answers question 14 “Joint Will with predeceased wife”, and the executors’ account four months later opens “The deceased died intestate.” Recorded, not resolved.

The false positive, opened Found

found Hercules Johannes Mountjoy has no estate file — a negative this archive has stated for months on the strength of a name search. Reading the entire indexed MOUNTJOY surname in the Cape probate collection at once, 61 personas, produced exactly one hit for him, and it is his mother-in-law’s 1902 death notice from Dordrecht: his name appears on it because he is written into her list of eleven children. The negative holds, and now it is understood rather than merely asserted. It also documents the van Niekerks: Maria Sophia van Niekerk’s parents, her ten siblings, and a mother born in the district of Cradock.

The register — 7,397 entries, and most of them are not this family Method

found Built to match the sibling archives, which have carried one for a while: every named individual this archive has found, one row for every source that names them. Fourteen spellings pulled whole out of FamilySearch's South African collections — BOOYZEN complete at 1,350, MOUNTJOY at 575, PIETERZEN at 236, DASCHNER at 46. Two were deliberately left alone: BOOYSEN returns 40,592 people in this country and BARRY 7,198, and a name that common fills a page without telling anyone anything. Three of the counts are findings in their own right. BOOYZEN 1,350 against BOOYSEN 40,592 is the scale behind everything this archive says about the name. And SCHLEHER — the family tree's spelling of Anna Catharina's surname — returns NOTHING AT ALL, against 851 for Slier and 7 for Sleer.

Every person page now draws its family, and says whose word it is on Method

found Brought into line with the sibling archives. 110 of the 119 person pages now open with a lineage chart — parents, the person and their spouses, the children of each marriage, and the siblings — and every box is colour-coded by how it is known: the direct line, a record this archive has read, an inference from a record, or the family tree unverified. Each chart ends with a count: “15 of the 18 relationships shown are written in a record this archive has read. 3 come from the family tree and are unverified.” The nine pages with no chart say so in words, because a witness at a font with no recorded kin is a statement about the sources rather than about the person. Twenty-eight households, sourced one at a time in site/src/data/kin.js. Drawn in plain boxes and rules, deliberately not in SVG — this archive once injected auto-links into an SVG tree and silently erased half the names in it.

MIJNWERKER — an eighth child, and the last line of the testimony Found

found Four documents from the Dutch Reformed congregation at Indwe, found by typing “Indwe” into the register that was built yesterday. A Willem Hermanus BOOIJZEN, aged 21, is confirmed there on 31 May 1907, in a class that also holds Catharina Maria Elizabeth Roodt, 17, and Susanna Adriana Roodt, 15. On 21 September 1908 he marries Susanna Adriana Roodt, sixteen, at Indwe — certificate 13, her parents consenting — and under Rang of Beroep the register writes MIJNWERKER, of DUGMORE MIJN. Two children are baptised at Indwe, both entered ONECHT: Willem Hermanus, born 31 May 1908 to Susanna Adriana, and Catharina Willemina Levina, born 8 February 1909 to Catharina Maria Elizabeth — eight months and eight days apart, so the second name cannot be a slip for the first. At the first font, the third godparent is CATHARINA MARIA SOPHIA BARRY. This archive holds one woman of that name: Kathleen, widowed at Indwe in 1905. So the miner is her son, and this archive had no idea he existed.

Withdrawn — “Not one miner among them” Taken back

found Open question 10 said the mines claim was unsupported and that the occupations pointed away from it: saddler, farmer, mason, tree nurseryman, railway clerk, mason. “Not one miner among them.” There is one, and the reason the archive missed him is worth stating plainly: the negative was built out of the occupations it happened to have read, and it had not read his because it did not know the man existed. A list of six is not a population. What replaces it is better than a simple yes — the boys did go onto the mines, and the first one this archive can name did it on CAPE COAL at Indwe in 1908, years before the family reached Johannesburg and while his widowed mother was still living in the same town. The testimony compressed a slow migration into one train.

Two Barry sisters married Booysens Taken back

did A claim taken from the family tree and repeated before it was tested.

found One did. The 1915 death notice lists the siblings and there is no second. →

The farm was called Armadale Taken back

did A claim taken from the family tree and repeated before it was tested.

found No document anywhere names a family farm. The name came off the tree and had nothing behind it. →

Orphaned at seventeen Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found Eighteen. Her father died in December 1947 and she was born in March 1929. →

Anna Pretorius born 1905 Taken back

did A claim taken from the family tree and repeated before it was tested.

found 1906. A baptism register and her own death form agree against the tree, and the tree had mistranscribed one digit. →

The Farm List returns nothing, so the farm was not burned Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found The negative was VOID. The register searched turns out to be an Orange Free State land roll that does not cover the Cape at all. →

The tree contradicts itself on 1827 and 1840 Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found It does not. 1827 is when James Montjoy died and 1840 is when the notice was filed. The contradiction was the archive's. →

The z was this family's invention Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found The 1851 Graaff-Reinet register writes a neighbouring family's name with a z in the same hand and ink. The z was Cape Dutch orthography before it was anybody's statement. →

Willem Hermanus is a Booyzen name Taken back

did A document read wrongly, or a conclusion drawn past what the document says.

found It is a Pieterzen name. It came in through a step-relation with no blood tie to this family at all, and four generations have carried it. →

A distribution chart with nine provinces Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found Five of the nine had been filled in by the archive itself. The source reports four. The chart now draws four, and a dash where nothing was reported. →

The family tree renders correctly Taken back

did A mistake in the archive's own working — a bug, a bad build, or a word used loosely.

found It did not. Auto-linking injected HTML anchors into an SVG and silently erased half the names in it. It did not look broken; it looked plausible. →

MOUNTJOY returned 42 documents, all read Taken back

did A search run over part of the ground and written up as though it covered all of it.

found All twenty-two dated 1930 or later were read. The twenty before 1930 were not, and they held James Mountjoy's wills of 1818 and 1827 and an 1834 Colonial Office memorial. A filter applied for convenience was written up as the whole search. →

The tree, read Method

found A MyHeritage tree of 15,643 people, with the Booyzen line already seven generations deep and much of it citing Dutch Reformed registers and Cape probate. The job was never to find the family — it was to test what had been assembled, because a tree that good will be believed.

Thirty-five documents transcribed Method

found Civil registrations, church registers, wills, a marriage allegation, a burial register and a gravestone — most of them images that had hung on the family tree for years without anyone reading them.

The man was not shot by the British Found

found Willem Hermanus Booyzen died at Indwe on 13 September 1905 of an ulcer of the stomach, after fourteen months' illness, under a doctor's care. The testimony's central death is disproved for both candidates.

The name caught changing on one sheet Found

found On the same 1905 form the registering clerk writes Booysen and the dead man's son signs Booyzen, four lines apart.

WITHDRAWN — “two Barry sisters married Booysens” Taken back

found Asserted from a tree reading. John Barry's 1915 death notice lists only one, and the arithmetic closed exactly: eight surviving, two predeceased, one duplicate. Retracted on the page rather than quietly deleted.

WITHDRAWN — the farm called “Armadale” Taken back

found An 1901 register was read as Armadale and a small argument about Scottish farm names was built on it. At full magnification on the original the word is ambiguous. The argument survives on Caerlaverock and Manorowen, which are certain; Armadale is gone.

CORRECTED — “orphaned at seventeen” Taken back

found Written in four places, from a death date the archive had already corrected without propagating the change. Catherine was eighteen.

CORRECTED — Anna Pretorius born 1906, not 1905 Taken back

found Three documents beat the tree: the baptism register, her death form's age, and her marriage register's age with parental consent. A derived claim built on the wrong year was withdrawn with it.

The 1820 Settler his family forgot Found

found George Augustus Kolbe — the Nautilus, Owen's party, Algoa Bay 1820 — whose grandson wrote “Father: Kolbe, thinks James was christian name. Mother: Unknown” with the man's carved headstone standing forty miles away.

The Cape Rebel rolls searched, and the wrong surname noticed Method

found Twenty-six Booysens on the roll, every one Northern Cape. But the man in whose house the family married in July 1901 — D. W. Schoeman of Caerlaverock — was tried the month before. A note was written to search BARRY, and not acted on for some time.

The Farm List result is VOID Taken back

found A negative result was recorded against Caerlaverock and Manorowen before checking what the register was. It is an Orange Free State land roll and was never going to hold a Cape farm. A control search on “Dordrecht” — 670 rebels, 0 farms — caught it.

CORRECTED — my contradiction, not the tree's Taken back

found The archive flagged a conflict between the tree's 1827 death for James Montjoy and the 1840 date on his file. Both are right: he died in 1827 and the notice was filed thirteen years later. The error was mine.

“Names of the Parents of the Deceased. Not Known.” Found

found Found by interpolating reference numbers across 2,223 images of an unindexed film. The oldest document in the archive, and it answers the question it was fetched to answer by refusing it.

WITHDRAWN — the z as a family invention Taken back

found The archive had leaned on an 1879 signature. Then the 1851 register showed the clerk writing the godparents PIETERZEN in the same hand, and the Cape archives showed 39 documents under BOOYZEN with the earliest in 1779. The spelling was never invented. What survives is that this family switched between two spellings that both already existed.

CORRECTED — Willem Hermanus is not a Booyzen name Taken back

found The archive had called it “a Booysen name crossing into the Mountjoys”. It is neither: it enters through Anna Catharina Slier's FIRST marriage, to a Pieterzen, and four generations carried a step-relation's name.

The family is on the Cape Rebel roll — under Barry Found

found Acting at last on the note above. Fred J. Barry of Ivanhoe, Barkly East / Wodehouse, tried June 1901 — the same month as Schoeman; and Richard Peter Barry of Jerpoint, which is Kathleen Barry's brother's name. Identity unproven, district not.

CORRECTED — a chart with five invented rows Taken back

found The first province chart drew nine provinces. The source reports four; I had filled in the rest to make the picture look complete. It now draws four, and a province the source does not report is a gap with a dash rather than a zero bar.

A bug that removed exactly the names the archive knows best Taken back

found The ancestor chart rendered with names missing from half its boxes. The auto-linker was injecting HTML anchors into the SVG, where they do not render — so every person in the link index vanished from the chart while their dates stayed. It did not look broken; it looked plausible.

CORRECTED — a search I reported as complete was not Taken back

found The archive stated that MOUNTJOY returned 42 documents in the Cape archives and that all 22 dated 1930 or later had been read. Twenty documents before 1930 were never opened. They include JAMES MOUNTJOY'S OWN WILLS of 1818 and 1827, and an 1834 Colonial Office memorial from his widow. A filter applied for convenience was reported as if it were the whole search.

No death notice for Magdelena Elisabeth de Beer — twice over Found

found The Master's Office own index of death notices 1834–1912 was read on film at the “Beer, de” pages. She is not in it, which confirms the NAAIRS result from a second and older source.