The documents

What is on this page

124 documents, in the order the events happened rather than the order they were read. Every one of them has been read from the image unless the entry says otherwise.

1905 · The death registration that settles the biggest question

Cape Colony, Form of Information of a Death, Act No. 7 of 1894. Entry 299, sub-district Indwe, district Wodehouse. Registered 14 September 1905.

The name changing, on one sheet of paper

The registering clerk writes the deceased's surname. Four lines below, his son signs his own. They are not the same word.

The father is registered under the old spelling. The son signs the new one. Both are on the same page, in September 1905 — three years after the Anglo-Boer War ended.

The informant is John Barry Booyzen (b. 1884), the eldest son, then twenty-one, recorded as present at the death. This is as close to a photograph of the surname changing as the archive is ever likely to find. The name →

1879 · The marriage register — and one ambiguous letter

Duplicaat Origineel Register, in Dutch. Entry 15, 22 December 1879. Married in the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk at Barkly, after banns, by David Ross, consulent.

Witnesses: J. Sutherland and P. Schoeman. Set that beside Anna Johanna Maria Schoemann marrying Hendrik Nicholaas Barry in 1877, the 1901 Pretorius–Barry wedding held at the home of D. Schoeman, "Caerlaverock", Barkly East, and a Commandant D. Schoeman leading Cape Rebels at Labuschagne's Nek in 1900. The Schoemans are braided through this family across three generations. The rebels →

The most consequential letter in the archive

1915 · John Barry's death notice — typewritten, and therefore unarguable

Prepared by solicitors at Barkly East, stamped 18 April 1915, No. 925. Signed by James H. Barry, "Son (second)". This is the very document the family's earlier research note describes — it can now be quoted rather than paraphrased.

1947 · George's death notice corrects his own death date

Signed by G. Booyzen at Johannesburg on 21 February 1948 under the Administration of Estates Act 1913.

He died on 11 December 1947 — not 21 February 1947.
21 February is the date the notice was signed, and it was signed in 1948. A transcriber conflated the two and lost ten months.

This also dissolves an anomaly this archive had itself flagged: a burial at West Park recorded on 14 December 1947 looked like a ten-month delay. It was not. He died on the 11th and was buried on the 14th — three days later, exactly as one would expect.

The photographs

Three uncaptioned photographs

Attached to George's profile with no caption, no date and no tagging. The identifications below are Inferred — reasoning is given so it can be overturned.

1819 · A sworn falsehood in Shoreditch

A marriage allegation of the London Diocese, 20 January 1819 — the sworn statement required before a marriage licence could be issued. Fee, 2/6.

"Appeared personally George Kolbe and made Oath, that he is of the Parish of Saint Leonard Shoreditch in the County of Middlesex, a Bachelor of the age of Twenty-one Years and upwards, and intendeth to marry with Margaret Downing of the same Parish, a Spinster of the age of Twenty-one Years and upwards…"

This archive's 1820 Settler married at sixteen, by lying under oath about his age, and sailed for Africa eleven months later. The Kolbes →

1844 · The estate the archive had a reference for but had never read

The Cape Archives reference KAB MOOC 6/9/35: 7698 (1845) was already noted here as "not yet ordered". It was in the family tree all along — the estate number 7698 is written at the head of the page.

1867 · Margaret's death notice solves a problem this archive had raised

"64 years 9 months & 2 days" on 25 November 1867 computes to a birth of 23 February 1803 — exactly what the tree says and exactly what the gravestone says. A three-way agreement, which in this archive is rare enough to be worth stating.

One thing it does not give: her parents, entered only as "Both dead". The tree's John Paul Downing and Mary P King are therefore not corroborated here.

The grave at Burgersdorp

SACRED / TO THE MEMORY OF / GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE, / BORN IN LONDON 7 DECEMBER 1802, / AND DIED AT HIS FARM WURTHEMBURG, / DIVISION OF ALBERT, 1 DECEMBER 1844. / ALSO HIS RELICT / MARGARET DOWNING, / BORN IN LONDON 23 FEBRUARY 1803, / AND DIED AT BURGHERSDORP / 25 NOVEMBER 1867.

The portraits — and one that cannot be who it says

1842 · The will of a Bond Street tailor

A Prerogative Court of Canterbury register copy, from the Public Record Office. Signed 25 May 1842; proved at London 23 February 1846.

George Augustus Kolbe died on 1 December 1844. His father died on 18 November 1845 — a year later. Under that clause, George's share passed to his own children — to Margaret Downing's family at Burgersdorp, and so to Margaretha Kolbe, who married John Augustus Barry.

Inferred There is, on paper, a line of money from a Bond Street tailor's estate to the Barkly East family. A later clause names "my said children or grandchildren" explicitly. Whether a shilling of it ever reached the Cape is unknown and untested — it would show in the PCC estate papers and in the Cape estate files. Open questions →

1845 · Two documents correct the tree twice over

Correction 1 — he did not die in Lamb's Conduit Street

The tree records "34 Lamb's Conduit Street". Three independent documents say otherwise.

Conduit Street runs between Regent Street and New Bond Street, in Mayfair. Lamb's Conduit Street is in Bloomsbury, over a mile away and in the Holborn registration district — a death there could not have been registered at May Fair.

The consequence

The photograph in the tree captioned "34 Lamb's Conduit Street" is a picture of the wrong building, in the wrong part of London. Someone went and photographed a real 34 — just not his.

He lived and died above his own shop, in Mayfair.

Correction 2 — he was not buried in Warwickshire

The tree records "St John the Baptist, Leamington, Warwickshire."

The neighbouring entries in the register are almost all German — Wüst, Nitsch, Wuleko, Stürcke, Kollmann, Schnitzlein, Grubusch, Wettig. A German congregation in London, burying its own.

1901 · A wedding in a rebel's house, under martial law

The archive knew from a note in the tree that this marriage was held "at the home of D Schoeman". The original register gives the man a signature.

"Getrouwd in woonhuis D. Schoeman te Caerlaverock voormeld, na huwelijksgeboden, door mij: J. G. van der Walt, Pred. Geref. Kerk."

c. 1909 · Anna Pretorius, aged about four

Left: a boy of about seven in a pleated tunic and wide collar — Dirk Jacobus Pretorius (b. 8 June 1902).
Centre: Petrus Jacobus Pretorius (1878–1941), the stock farmer.
Right: Margarietha Wilhelmina Elizabeth Barry (1880–1961), in a high-necked blouse with her hair dressed in a pompadour.
Front: a small girl of about four — Anna Johanna Maria Pretorius (b. 3 Oct 1905).

Inferred The hairstyle and blouse date the picture to about 1908–1912; the children's ages narrow it to roughly 1909.

This is David Defranceski's great-grandmother as a small child — the woman who would die at thirty-eight of an ectopic pregnancy at Forest Hill, leaving Catherine orphaned at eighteen. It appears to be the only photograph of her parents together, eight years after they married in D. W. Schoeman's house.

1940 · Kathleen Barry's death certificate, and one unexpected word

Name	Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen — "(Born Barry.)"
Age · birthplace · condition	82 · Cape Province · Widow
Occupation	Home Duties
Pensioner	MILITARY PENSIONER
Place of death	No. 1, Fifteenth Avenue, Mayfair, Johannesburg
Intended place of burial	Brixton Cemetery, Johannesburg
Causes of death	Carcinoma of the Uterus; Senility — one year one month
Informant	M. v. Rensburg, "Causing Burial", of 20 Commercial Road, Fordsburg

Two smaller gains. The archive had only "Mayfair" for her death; it now has No. 1, Fifteenth Avenue. And the tree records no burial place for her at all — she is at Brixton Cemetery. Johannesburg →

1912–1915 · "Father: Kolbe, thinks James was christian name"

Of everything read in these four days, this is the line that most justifies the archive existing.

She died on 2 August 1912; her son completed the notice on 13 May 1915, nearly three years later. That gap matters — and it is the same gap as the 1840 Montjoy notice, written thirteen years after that death, which answers the same question with "Not Known." In both cases the delay is part of the reason the answer is empty.

This notice also supplies a third date for John Barry's death — "August 1904" — against the 3 August 1903 of his own 1915 death notice and the 25 August 1903 in the tree. Both notices were made in 1915, by two different sons, and they contradict each other. Disputed →

1923 · The Schoemans get a name

The archive has been chasing a "D. Schoeman" of Caerlaverock since the beginning. This document does not name him — but it plants his family.

1803 · The London end of the line, closed

A baptism register index from St Anne's, Soho — birth date at the left, day of baptism at the right. A note on the same page records that the register holds "410 Baptisms for the Year 1802."

1906 · A one-digit slip, caught by two documents

A Gereformeerde Kerk baptism register. Entry 29, under Gedoopt 11 Nov. 1906:

1961 · Margarietha Barry, and a pension that is only ordinary

One small human detail. The informant here, P. Gouws of 9 Jack Street, Germiston, gives the same address as the informant on Anna's 1944 form seventeen years earlier. Almost certainly an undertaker's premises rather than a relative — a reminder that "informant" on these forms often means the funeral director, not family.

Two corrections to this archive's own work

Both were found by reading the last four documents. Both were mine, not the tree's.

1851 · The baptism that settles an age, and names a godfather

The register's place column reads achter Sneeuwberg — the family was farming behind the Sneeuberg, not living in Cradock town.

Resolved — by a better scan, and not in the direction expected

1946 and 1947 · The two Gertrudes — a contradiction resolved

This archive flagged as Serious: two daughters recorded born on 11 May a year apart, both named Gertrude Elizabeth. Either two children given the same name and the same birthday — or one record duplicated a year out.

Both certificates exist, and they are irreconcilably different documents.

Two hospitals. Two cemeteries. Two doctors. Two registration entries a year apart. Four days, and six hours. There were two children. Resolved

And the coincidence the archive doubted is real. Both were born on 11 May, exactly a year apart, and both were badly premature — the first at about thirty weeks, the second at seven and a half months. The first lived four days. The second lived six hours. They are not buried together.

Three smaller corrections. The first Gertrude did not die at 85 Rheeden Street — the certificate gives Queen Victoria Hospital and names the street only as the mother's residence. The second child is registered simply "Gertrude", not Gertrude Elizabeth. And the street appears as Rheeder, Rheeders and Rheeden across three documents.

1819 · The marriage entry — and a bride who could not sign her name

The allegation was sworn that morning. This is the register entry itself, St Leonard's Shoreditch, No. 858.

The portrait is a painting — as it had to be

This archive had cautioned that any likeness of a man who died in 1844 — when photography was five years old and almost unknown in the Cape interior — would have to be a painted portrait, not a photograph from life.

Resolved It is. A young man with reddish-brown curling hair, clean-shaven, in a high white stock and a tan coat with wide lapels — dress of the 1820s and 30s, which fits a man born in 1802.

A third file in the same set is a left-facing profile so heavily processed — posterised, speckled, colour-fringed — that it is either a separate image or a modern "restoration" that has invented a great deal. Not relied on here for likeness.

1924 · A tree nurseryman marries at Vereeniging

1947 · The death registration, and a garbled memory vindicated

1889 · Two grandparents at a font, and a name on the facing page

The godparents are the child's own maternal grandparents — John Augustus Barry I, the Irishman born at sea, and Margaretha Kolbe, the 1820 Settler's daughter, standing together at a font in Barkly East in September 1889.

Her surname is written "Kolby" — a phonetic variant, twenty-six years before her own son would tell a magistrate he thought his grandfather's name was James. The Kolbes →

And on the facing page, entirely by accident

1863 · The death notice that adds a generation

Found by searching a spelling nobody had tried: Montjoy.

The National Archives index had been searched for MOUNTJOY — forty-two documents, none of them the one wanted. Searched for MONTJOY it returns four, and two of them are the junction between the two families:

The form, as completed

1. Name of the Deceased	Johanna Catharina Montjoy
2. Birth-place	Graaff Reinet
3. Names of the Parents	James Montjoy and Anna Catharina Sleer
4. Age	44 years & 19 days
5. Condition in life	farmer's wife
6. Married or unmarried	Married to Petrus Jacobus Booysen
7. Day of decease	19th May 1863
8. At what House	Zevenfontein, Brak River
10. Property	Moveable property

Eight children, and one of them is the direct line

Jacobus Nicholas · Johanna Catharina · Petrus Jacobus · David Schalk · Willem Hermanus · Magdalena Johanna · Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus · Jacoba Catharina.

Seven of the eight are matched to baptisms in the Graaff-Reinet registers. An eighth child, Anna Catharina, baptised 21 September 1842, is not on the list — she died before her mother, and the notice is silent about her, as these forms are.

The signature

Not established The surname ends in an angular letter with a descender — the form is more consistent with z than s, and the clerk who filled in the body of the form wrote Booysen at line 6. But the archive has just finished demonstrating, on the 1851 register above, that this letterform proves nothing on its own. It is recorded here and claimed for nothing.

1840 · The oldest document in this archive — and it answers by refusing

KAB MOOC 6/9/21, reference 4393. Named on the previous page as the most valuable unread document here. It has now been read.

The form, as completed

1. Name of the Deceased	James Montjoy
2. Birth-place	Europe
3. Names of the Parents	Not Known
4. Age	About 45 years
5. Condition in life	Saddler
6. Married or unmarried	Married to Catharina Sl[i/e]er, widow of William Pietersen
7. Day of decease	September 1827
8. At what House	In the village of Cradock
9. Children	James, George, Johanna, Jacoba — all minors
10. Property	A house and erf at Cradock, of the value of £90
Signed	Colesberg, 25 June 1840, by a Montjoy

Line 3

A trade, passed down

Documented James Montjoy was a saddler at Cradock. His son George Mountjoy — four years old when his father died — is recorded at his own 1848 marriage as a saddle maker, in the same town.

The archive had George's trade already and treated it as the first recorded for a Mountjoy. It was the second. The boy learned his dead father's trade.

The Pietersen marriage, confirmed

Documented "Married to Catharina Sl[i/e]er, widow of William Pietersen." The archive had inferred, from a godparent at an 1851 font, that Johanna Catharina's half-brothers were Pieterzens by her mother's first marriage.

Here is the first marriage, named, in a document eleven years older than the baptism. The inference was right. The women →

Four children, and a date this archive had flagged as a contradiction

The archive had raised this as an open contradiction: our tree has Johanna Catharina's father dying in 1827, but the archival file is dated 1840. Resolved Both are right. He died in September 1827; the notice was filed thirteen years afterwards, and the file carries the filing year. The tree was correct and the contradiction was mine.

The four children fix the family at September 1827 exactly. Johanna Catharina was eight — her own 1863 death notice puts her birth at 30 April 1819. Jacoba was seven, George four, James one. And Thomas Jacobus, born 1818, is not on the list — which independently supports the correction that he died in 1827 rather than in infancy in 1818.

A correction the tree needs Our tree records James Mountjoy as born and died in 1826. He is listed here alive, as a minor, at his father's death in September 1827. The infant-death date is wrong.

1884 · A farmer who died owning his clothes — and a third "not known"

The tree had carried this image for years under its own citation. Nobody had opened it.

The form, as completed

1. Name	Petrus Jacobus Booysen, Senior
2. Birth-place	Graaff Reinet District
3. Parents	Petrus Jacobus Booÿsen — mother's name, not known
4. Age	72 years
5. Condition in life	Farmer
6. Married or unmarried	Married
7. Day of decease	30 March 1884
8. At what house	Zevenfontein, District Middelburg
9. Children	Gerrit Jacobus Booÿsen, geboren 19 Januarij 1870
10. Property	Moveables only, such as wearing apparel &c

Age 72 in 1884 puts his birth at about 1812, which matches the register exactly. Zevenfontein is the farm where his first wife had died twenty-one years before.

It happens a third time

The second wife, confirmed but still not named

Documented He is recorded as Married at his death in 1884 — twenty-one years after Johanna Catharina died. That settles the open question: there was a second wife. And the single child entered here, Gerrit Jacobus, born 19 January 1870, is new to this archive and can only be hers.

With Izak (1864) and Stephanus Francois (1875), that is now three children born to this man after 1863 — the ones the tree had wrongly attached to his first wife. Still open The form never asks her name, and so it does not give it. The marriage itself, at Cradock or Middelburg between 1863 and 1870, is the document that would. Open questions →

"Moveables only"

1817 · The marriage register — where the blank actually begins

Two index entries existed for this marriage and neither carried an image. A third indexing, under the spelling Montyoy, did.

And a name in this family turns out not to be a family name

1891 · The same font, two years on — and the name that runs three generations

One of the last unread images on the tree, and it turns out to be the same register as the 1889 page, at pages 262–263.

New to this archive Catharina Maria Sophia Booysen, born 22 April 1891, is a daughter of Willem Hermanus and Kathleen that the archive did not have. She was fourteen when her father died at Indwe in 1905.

1940 · A fourth time the form asks for the parents, and a fourth time it fails

Found only after this archive noticed it had spent its whole life searching one province out of nine. TAB MHG 2428/40

The form, as completed

1. Naam	Stephanus Francois Booyzen
2. Geboorteplek	Kaap Provinsie — nasionaliteit Afrikaner
3. Ouers	Vader: oorlede. Moeder: oorlede.
4. Ouderdom	65 jaar 7 maande — so born about October 1874
5. Beroep	Messelaar — mason
6. Woonplek	East Lynne, Pk. Silverton, dist. Pretoria
7. Getroud	Beatrix Magdalena Catharina, geb. Boshoff, in gemeenskap; last married at Mosselbaai, K.P.
8. Sterfdag	14 Mei 1940
10. Kinders	eleven, the youngest born 18 August 1930
11–14	moveable and immovable property; estate over £300; a will

Line 3

And a second mason

Messelaar is a mason. His half-brother Willem Hermanus Booyzen is entered as a mason on his own death registration at Indwe in 1905.

He also left immovable property and a will, and an estate over £300 — which is more than his father managed in 1884, and more than his half-brother, who left no estate at all.

1870 · The second wife, named at last

The oldest open question in this archive, and it was answered by a christening rather than a death.

Open question 7, answered Johanna Margaritha Pretorius is the second wife of Petrus Jacobus Booysen, mother of Gert Jacobus (1870), and — with the tree's other misattributions now corrected — of Izak (1864) and Stephanus Francois (1874), the mason who died at Pretoria in 1940.

One thing not to jump at Pretorius is also the surname of Anna Johanna Maria Pretorius, who married George Downing Mountjoy Booyzen in 1924 — and this archive has already shown that marriage to be between cousins, through her Barry mother. A second Pretorius connection fifty-four years earlier is not evidence of anything: Pretorius is among the commonest surnames in the Cape. It is noted here so that nobody later mistakes a coincidence for a link. The cousin marriage →

Read from the register image, not the index — this archive has been caught once already trusting a volunteer transcription, on the Pieterzen witnesses of 1851. The father is written Booyzen and the two witnesses Booijzen, in the same hand, in 1870.

1944 · The parents line, filled in

Anna Pretorius's Sterfkennis. TAB MHG 2945/44 — the second of the nine Transvaal estates, and the first in this archive where question three gets a real answer.

The form, as completed

1. Naam	Anna Johanna Maria Booyzen (geb. Pretorius)
2. Geboorteplek	Barkly Oos, Kaap Provinsie
3. Ouers	Vader: Petrus Jacobus Pretorius — 96 James Street, Germiston Moeder: Margareth Wilhelmina Elizabeth Pretorius — 96 James Street, Germiston
4. Ouderdom	37
6. Woonplek	Rheeder Straat 85, Forest Hill, J'hburg
8. Sterfdag	26 Februarie 1944
10. Kinders	six, alle minderjarig

Line 3, filled in

Six children, all minors

A correction This archive has carried Maggie's birthday as 1 October 1926. Her mother's death notice, written by her father, gives 14 October. The document wins.

Every other date matches what the archive already held. And the bracket at the foot of the list — "Alle Minderjarig" — is the whole of it: six children under nineteen, the youngest ten, and three years and ten months later their father would be dead too. The line →

1942 · A daughter married at Indwe, and eleven cousins

Joseph Heinrich Daschner's death notice. TAB MHG 1928/42 — opened to check a marriage, and it returned a branch.

The form, as completed

1. Deceased	Joseph Heinrich Daschner
2. Birthplace	Stutterheim, Cape Province · South African
3. Parents	Joseph Daschner, deceased Sophia Daschner (Stoter), deceased
4. Age	58 years 5 months — born about November 1883
5. Occupation	Pensioner (Electrician)
6. Residence	132 Sheffield Street, Kenilworth, Johannesburg
7a. Spouse	Catherine Mary Sophia Daschner (born Booyzen) — married in community of property
7b. Earlier wife	"Not previously married."
7c. Married at	Indwe, Cape Colony
8. Died	19 April 1942
11–14	Movables yes · immovables yes · over £300 yes · a will yes

Signed C. M. S. Daschner, "Surviving Spouse — Saw body after death."

Two words that close a marriage

Eleven children

And what question three actually depends on

1876 · The oldest man in this archive, and the two names above him

Sterfkennis No. 678, written at the farm Brakfontein on 14 September 1876 under the Transvaal Republic's Wet op de Weeskamer. It is the document this archive has been looking for since the first page was written.

The form, as completed

1. Naam	Petrus Jacobus Booijsen
2. Geboorteplaats	Graaffreinet
3. Ouders	Gerthardus Lödewikus Booijsen Magdalena de Beer
4. Ouderdom	88 jaar
5. Beroep	Landbouwer
6. Staat	Gehuwd — weduwenaar
7. Overleden	1 September 1876
8. Waar	Destrikt Rustenburg
9. Testament	Neen
10. Goederen	Niets nagelaten
11. Boven £25	Niets bekend
12. Kinderen	eight, all mondig

The top of the line, in someone's handwriting

Eight children, and three names that come back

The name is on this page twice — and a stranger saw it first

"Niets nagelaten"

1937–38 · A whole estate, from the death to the last shilling

Estates 58379 and 58380, KAB MOOC 6/9/5047 — on this archive's Sources page as "Located, not yet read" for months. Read now, and not just the death notices: the liquidation account and the distribution account too. It is the only complete estate in this archive, and the only place where a life in this family is added up.

The two notices, written the same afternoon

Both were dated at Barkly East on 19 February 1938, in the same typewriter, and both were signed G. Mountjoy — son, present at place of death. She had been dead for three years and seven months.

And question three, twice more

Asked for the names and addresses of the parents of a man born in the Cape in 1854, his son typed the fact that they were dead and stopped. Her form says the same. That is a fifth and a sixth failure of the line this archive keeps returning to, and it fits the pattern exactly: the deceased were born in the nineteenth-century Cape, and the informant was a generation removed. Where it works →

The account

What he had

Cash in the house	£6. 4. 2.
Post Office Savings Bank, joint with his late wife	£664. 11. 8.
Promissory note, E. W. Diesel, at 6%	£400
Rent, Lot No. 380, to W. Bendeman	£2. 10. 0. a month

Brought into this account as £300. 3. 1. capital and £13. 10. 6. income — the savings-bank deposit belonged half to his wife's estate.

"The deceased died intestate"

The two Diesel grandchildren take their dead mother's tenth between them: Louisa Elizabeth Diesel, born Mountjoy, who had married Evelyn Wilfred Diesel and died on 11 June 1923. She is on her mother's notice and not on her father's, because his was typed first and ran out of page.

1902 · A wrong name in the index, and a right family behind it

Searching the Cape probate index for Hercules Johannes Mountjoy returns exactly one hit. It is not his.

Why it comes up

Because his name is written on it. Fifth in her list of eleven children:

"5. Maria Sophia van Niekerk, getrouwd met Hercules Johannes Mountjoy."

The FamilySearch index keys every name on the page, so a search hit is not a statement about whose document it is. Hercules Johannes still has no estate file, and this archive's finding on that stands. What has changed is that the one false positive has been opened and turns out to be his mother-in-law.

1907–1910 · An eighth child, and the word MIJNWERKER

Four documents from the Dutch Reformed congregation at Indwe, found the day the register was built by typing Indwe into it. Between them they add a son this archive did not have, and they answer the last line of the family testimony — not in the way it was told, and not in the way this archive said it could not be answered.

First, the confirmation class of 1907

Five names off one page

8	Booijzen, Willem Hermanus	21
25	Roodt, Catharina Maria Elizabeth	17
26	Roodt, Susanna Adriana	15
27	Roodt, Maria Catha Cornelia	16
28	Roodt, James Johannes	17
29	Roodt, Cornelis de Klerk	21

Everyone who matters to the next three years is on this one page, on one afternoon, in one room.

Twenty-one in May 1907 means born about 1886. This archive's list of the children of Willem Hermanus Booyzen and Kathleen Barry ran John Barry (c. 1884), then Johanna Catharina (1889). There was a gap and nobody had noticed it.

Then a marriage, and one word in it

21 September 1908

Groom	William Hermanus Booyzen, 22, jonkman
Bride	Susanna Adriana Roodt, 16, jongedochter
Beroep	MIJNWERKER
Woonplaats	Dugmore Mijn — both of them
Toestemming	Ouders — she was sixteen, so her parents had to consent
Married by	J. J. Krige, predikant der Ned. Geref. Kerk

And his mother was standing at the font

Entry 15

Kind	Willem Hermanus Booyzen
Geboren	31 May 1908
Gedoopt	6 December 1908
Ouders	Willem Hermanus Booyzen Susanna Adriana Roodt
Getuigen	Cornelis Philippus Roodt Catharina Wilhelmina Levina Buitendag Catharina Maria Sophia Barry
Aanmerkingen	onecht

And then a second child, by a second Roodt

Entry 12

Kind	Catharina Willemina Levina Booyzen
Geboren	8 February 1909
Gedoopt	22 September 1910
Vader	Willem Hermanus Booyzen
Moeder	Catharina Maria Elizabeth Roodt
Getuigen	Cornelis Philippus Roodt Catharina Willemina Levina Buitendag
Aanmerkingen	onecht · gratis

1885 · The estate this archive gave to the wrong man

No image, no transcription, no new document read. Just an index line, set against two that have been read — and a correction that moves a whole branch of this family onto the map.

What this section is not. The estate file itself has not been read. FamilySearch offers no image for it — the record page says "Check Image Availability" where the others say "View original document" — so what is above rests on an index entry, checked against two documents that have been read. The file is at the Transvaal Archives in Pretoria and this archive has not seen it. Sources →

1930, filed 1943 · A death notice thirteen years late

Death notice 84992, Cape Town. This archive went looking for it because the Master's own index files it under BOOYZEN, with a z. It found that, and a correction of exactly the kind it had just finished making about somebody else.

The form, as completed

1. Name	Isabella Fredrika Booyzen (born Coetzee)
2. Birthplace	Middelburg · European
3. Parents	Pieter Coetzee, deceased Isabella Fredrika Coetzee, deceased
4. Age	55 years 11 months — born about May 1874
7a. Husband	Gert Jacobus Booyzen, in community of property
7c. Married at	Middelburg, Cape
8. Died	31 March 1930
9. Where	Church Street, Middelburg
10. Children	Isabella Fredrika du Plessis · Pieter Jacobus Booyzen (deceased) · Gerhardus Jacobus Booyzen — all majors

And the spelling. Every occurrence on this form is BOOYZEN — in the Master's file number, in her name, in her husband's, in her sons', and in the signature. A Cape official document of 1943, thirty-eight years after the Indwe clerk wrote Booysen on her father-in-law's death form. The name →

1843 · The oldest Booyzen death notice in the Cape — and a warning

Death notice 6167, filed at Cape Town on 21 June 1843. It is not this family. It is put here because of what it nearly is.

The form

1. Name	Johanna Booyzen
2. Birth-place	This Colony
3. Parents	"both dead"
4. Age	89 years, 2 months & 26 days — born about 20 March 1754
6. Condition	Widow of Charles du Plessis, Dls son
7. Died	16 June 1843
8. Where	No. 28 Roze Street, Cape Town
9. Children	Johanna Petronella du Plessis, married to Benjamin Solomon
10. Property	"no property whatever except a Bond amounting per balance to £15"

1903 · "Irishman born in Ireland"

Entry 74, district Barkly East. The registration of John Barry's death, made by the son who was standing there — and it settles a question this archive has carried since its first week.

The form, as completed

1. Name	John Barry
3. Residence	Manor Owen, Ward IV, Barkly East
4. Age	eighty four years two months — born about June 1819
5. Race	"Irishman born in Ireland"
7. Occupation	Carpenter
8. Died	25th August 1903
11. Causes	Inflammation and Old Age, one month seven days
12. Doctor	Dr Helm
13–15. Informant	Richard Barry — "Son present at death", of Manor Owen
Footnote (b)	"eleven" children

1912 · "Dutch, born in the District of Barkly East"

Nine years later, the same farm, the same registrar's form — and a grandchild of the Irishman is entered under a different nation.

The form

1. Name	Harriet Louisa Barry
3. Residence	Manor Owen, Barkly East District
4. Age	18 years 5 months and 3 days
5. Race	"Dutch, born in the District of Barkly East"
7. Occupation	Farm domestic work
8. Died	7 September 1912
9. Where	Cherry Ville, Barkly East District
10. Burial	Manor Owen
11. Cause	Fever (Typhoid), thirty days
13–15. Informant	H. N. Barry — "Father present when died", of Manorowen

1908 · The son who signed the 1876 notice, found — and a mother nobody had

Estate 14380, Transvaal. Hendrik Stephanus Booysen put his name to his father's Sterfkennis at Brakfontein in September 1876. Thirty-two years later his own was filed, and it resolves a contradiction this archive has carried as Serious since the first week.

The form, as completed

Name	Hendrik Stephanus Booysen
Birthplace	Cape Colony · nationality Dutch
Father	Petrus Jacobus Booysen
Mother	Elizabetha Booysen, born van der Merwe
Age	79 years 11 months — born about June 1828
Condition	Farmer · widower
Wives	1. Anna Catharina Johanna, born Olivier 2. Charlotta Elizabetha, born Dormehl
Married at	ZEERUST, TRANSVAAL
Died	11 May 1908, at the house of Willem Grobelaar, Koedoesfontein, district Rustenburg
Children	Petrus Jacobus (deceased) · Ockert Johannes Stephanus · Anna Catharina Grobelaar · Aletta Catharina Johanna Venter

A mother this archive did not have

And then the place of the marriage

1892 · The marriage the 1908 notice named, found — and it takes four children off one mother

Entry 13 of the Duplicaat Origineel Register, Huwelijks-Bevestiging te Zeerust, Distrikt Marico, 14 April 1892. The 1908 death notice said only Zeerust, Transvaal. Here is the register page, and it answers three questions the notice left open and contradicts one thing this archive published about it.

1891 · Two deaths at Brakfontein in five days, and a woman this archive had thrown away

This site has carried a woman called Anna Johanna Booijzen, born Alberts for a week, under the heading NOT PROVED TO BE KIN, on a farm this site called Boekfontein. Read at full resolution, her death notice says neither of those things. She is the first wife of Hendrik Stefanus Booijsen, she died on Brakfontein — the family farm — and the surname the archive read as Alberts has no b, no r, no t and no s in it.

The form, as completed

1. Naam	Anna Johanna Booijzen, gebooren Oliefier
2. Geboorteplaats	District Cradock, Cap Kolonie
3. Ouders	Ocken Johannes Oliefier en Anna Johanna Botha
4. Ouderdom	67 jaar 8 maanden en 1 dag — born about 8 September 1823
5. Beroep	Landbouwster
6. Staat	gehuwd — not a widow. Her husband outlived her.
7. Overleden	9 Mei 1891
8. Waar	op de plaas BRAKFONTIJN, district Rustenburg
9. Testament	Ja, bekend
10–11. Boedel	roerend en onroerend, boven £25
12. Kinderen	Allen mondig — seven, all of age

First, the farm

Then the name

Seven children, all of age

And five days later, her son

The form, as completed

1. Naam	Hendrick Stefanes Booijsen
2. Geboorteplaats	a farm in district Rustenburg
3. Ouders	Hendrick Stefanus Booijsen en Anna Catrena, gebooren Oliefier
4. Ouderdom	29 jaar 3 maanden en 14 dagen — born about 31 January 1862
5. Beroep	Landbouwer
6. Staat	ongehuwd
7. Overleden	14 Mei 1891
8. Waar	op de plaas BRAKFONTIJN, district Rustenburg
9. Testament	Niet bekend
10–11. Boedel	alleen roerende, niet boven £25

1862–1894 · The Rustenburg register, where an index has to stand in for the page

Five entries from the Netherdutch Reformed Church registers of Rustenburg, held at the Pretoria archive. Not one of them has an image — FamilySearch says Image Unavailable against every one, so what follows is a volunteer's transcription and nothing else. It is set out separately from the read documents for that reason. It also contains the single most useful line this archive found today.

Two brothers, one Sunday

Where a name goes once it is in

Ocken Johannes Oliefier, of the district of Cradock, had a grandson called Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen — who had a nephew called Ockert Johannes Stefanus, baptised at Rustenburg in 1894. Three generations of a forename that came into this family with one marriage, and this archive could not account for any of them a day ago.

1908 & 1932 · The second Willem Hermanus — married at sixteen and twenty-two, dead in Booysens

This archive has had Willem Hermanus Booyzen of Indwe as 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 then nothing at all after 1910. Two things are new here. The marriage register page itself has now been read, and it is worth reading. And the end of him has been found: he died in a Johannesburg hospital on 29 July 1932, an ex-miner, and was buried at Brixton two days later.

Married in the Ned. Geref. Kerk at Indwe. Signed W. H. Booyzen and S. A. Roodt, before D. N. Claase and C. J. Slabbert, and checked against the original register by J. J. Knight.

And twenty-four years later, Johannesburg

The form, as completed

Name	WILLIAM HERMAN BOOYZEN
Age	47 years — born about mid-1885
Birthplace	Cape Province
Condition	Married
Occupation	EX MINER (told) UNDERGROUND
Died	29 July 1932, Johannesburg Hospital
Residence	62 Langford Street, BOOYSENS, Johannesburg
Cause	Perforated duodenal ulcer; general peritonitis; pulmonary tuberculosis
Last illness	about one day in hospital
Informant	an occupier of the Johannesburg Hospital. No relative signed.

Why this is him

Grave 6889 — and the identification closes

1940 · Grave 9760 — where Kathleen Barry actually is

This archive has carried the great-great-grandmother of the line as Catherine Maria Sophia “Kathleen” Barry, 1859–1940 — two years and nothing else. The City of Johannesburg Register of Persons Buried at New Cemetery gives the day, the section and the number of the grave.

1902 · Charlotta’s own death notice — three husbands, six children, and none of them his

Death Notice 844, filed 11 September 1902 and stamped by the Master of the Supreme Court, Transvaal, on 23 September. This archive has carried the second wife as Charlotta Elizabetha Dormehl, died before 1908. Here she is entire, and she proves from a second direction the thing the 1892 marriage register only implied.

The form, as completed

1. Name	Charlotta Elizabetta Booysen (born Dormehl)
2. Birthplace	Graaff-Reinet, C.C.
3. Father	Jacob Dormehl
3. Mother	unknown
4. Age	60 years 4 months — born about October 1841
5. Condition	Farmer’s wife
6. Married	surviving spouse Hendrik Stefanus Booysen
6b. Previous spouses	Jacob van Staden — date unknown Matthys Roos — date unknown
7. Died	6 February 1902
8. Where	Driefontein, Groot Marico, Marico
10. Property	one wagon and household furniture, £51 8s 0d. She left a will.
Signed	H. S. Booysen, at Zeerust, 21 August 1902, in the capacity of Husband

Three husbands, in her own notice

Six children, and the point of them

And one more parent nobody could name

1935 · Looking for Ockert’s estate and finding his son’s

Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen died at Klerksdorp on 16 January 1921. His name appears six times in the Transvaal probate index and not once as the deceased — four of those six are duplicate copies of two documents, and in both he is somebody else’s relative. One of the two, though, is worth the whole search.

The form, as completed

1. Naam	Diederik Arnoldus Booysen
2. Geboorteplek	Zwartruggens · Europeaan
3. Vader	Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen — oorlede
3. Moeder	Elizabeth Johanna Sophia Booysen, gebore MYBURGH — oorlede
4. Ouderdom	47 jare 7 maande — born about August 1887
5. Beroep	KARWEIER — a transport rider
6. Woonplaas	Zwartruggens
7. Getroud	in gemeenskap van goedere met Elizabeth Anna Booysen, gebore BRONKHORST
8. Sterfdatum	1 Maart 1935
9. Sterfplek	Voorbedacht No. 401, distrik Rustenburg
11–14	losse goedere ja · boedel meer as £300 · testament ja

The line that matters

Two families on one form, and a pencil correction

1824 & 1850 · The Olivier line, and the marriage that puts this family north of the Vaal in 1850

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 at Cradock in 1824 and her marriage at Potchefstroom in 1850 — and the second of them moves the whole family’s history twenty-six years.

Cradock, 4 October 1824

Potchefstroom, 3 July 1850

1806 · Anna Maria van der Merwe stops being a rumour

The ancestor chart carries a wall against her marked Disputed, and the reason printed beside it is “Only a family tree puts her here.” That is no longer true.

Dutch Reformed Church Registers (Cape Town Archives). The index carries an explicit Couple relationship between the parents and ParentChild to the boy — this is not two names that happen to sit near each other on a page.

And it settles a dispute this archive marked Serious

What the wall becomes

The wall on the chart stays, because the chart is about this descent and the link it needs is still missing. But the reason printed on it was wrong and has been rewritten. The chart →

A second baptism, at Lady Grey

1900 · A zinc building in Market Street, Pretoria — and the direct line’s own brother

A run of ten index entries under Booijzen in the Transvaal probate records carried no dates, no places and nothing to identify them. They all belong to one death notice, and it opens a household this archive did not have: the family of David Schalk Booysen, born 9 June 1848 — the brother of the direct ancestor.

The form, as completed

1. Name	Elizabetha Margaretha Booijzen (born Marais)
2. Birthplace	District Cradock, Cape Colonial
3. Father	Stephanus François Marais
3. Mother	Elizabetha Margaretha Marais
4. Age	50 years 2 months — born about April 1850
5. Condition	Housewife
6a. Spouse	DAVID SCHALK BOOIJZEN, in community of property
6b. Previous spouses	none
6c. Married at	LADY GREY, near Aliwal North, Cape Colony
7. Died	1 June 1900
8. Where	a zinc building in MARKET STREET, PRETORIA
10. Movables	none — compensation claim filed
11–12	no immovable property; estate under £100
13. Will	Yes — mutual will
Signed	D. S. Booijzen, at Pretoria, 18 March 1904, as Husband

Lady Grey, which this archive already knows

Eight children

Her father was Stephanus François Marais, and her second son is Stephanus François. Her own names were Elizabetha Margaretha, and the daughter who died a minor was Elizabeth Margarietha. The naming runs up the female line again, exactly as it does in the Olivier household. The namesakes →

She died four days before Pretoria fell

South Africa, Transvaal, Probate Records from the Master of the Supreme Court, 1869–1961 · Death Notice 4795 · FamilySearch 1:1:QPLV-G1R4 and nine sibling personas on the same record, film 007897354 image 00802. Read 13 September 2026.

1905 · David Schalk marries again — and the register cites the estate number

This archive lost the direct ancestor’s brother in March 1904, signing his wife’s death notice at Pretoria. Here he is nineteen months later, in the same city, marrying again — and the Remarks column does something this archive has never seen a marriage register do.

1905 · Estate 7081 — the other number, and the same address

The Pretoria marriage register of 27 November 1905 cites two remarriage certificates from the Master, one for each party. 4795 was David Schalk’s and led back to his first wife’s death notice. This is 7081, read entire — and it is not the document this archive expected.

The form, as completed

1. Name	Charles Petrus Barend Lowies, of GOEDEHOOP, PRETORIA
2. Birthplace	Dutch, CRADOCK DISTRICT, Cape Colony
3. Father	Jan Lowies
3. Mother	Elizabetha Maria Lowies, born LUBBE
4. Age	56 years 8 months — born about October 1848
5. Occupation	HAWKER
6a. Spouse	Johanna Elena Lowies, born Stols, in community of property
6b. Previous spouses	“No pre-deceased spouse or spouses”
6c. Married at	Pretoria
7. Died	5 June 1905
8. Where	the LUNATIC ASYLUM, Pretoria
9. Children	TWELVE — six majors, six minors
10–13	movables yes, no immovables, over £100, and he left a will
Signed	J. E. Lowies, at Pretoria, 27 October 1905, as Widow

The address

And where he died

The twelve

Three of the twelve carry the grandparents’ names straight through — Jan Jacobus for Jan Lowies, Elizabetha Maria for Elizabetha Maria born Lubbe, and Carl Petrus Barend for his father. Johanna Elena carries her mother’s. None of the twelve is a Booysen and none of them is kin to this family; they are set down because David Schalk Booysen became their stepfather a month after their mother signed this page.

1914–1963 · The Johannesburg burial registers, swept

Grave 9760 took twenty minutes and gave a direct-line ancestor a place you could walk to. So the whole collection was swept — 298 entries under Booyzen, Booysen, Booijzen, Daschner, Mountjoy and Lerena. Most are other families. These are not, and every one of them turns a year this archive was carrying into a day.

And then October 1918

1942–47 · West Park — graves 2171, 50 and 51

Three more register images read page by page, and three more graves this family could stand at. One of them is the direct line.

And a double plot, bought in 1942

1914–59 · The last six graves — and three things this archive had wrong

Six register images were left unread when FamilySearch stopped answering. They are read now. All ten of this family’s Johannesburg burials have a grave number or a section — and three of the six corrected something published the same afternoon.

Grave 1119, and the page it sits on

Two children who were not stillborn

And one that is not in Johannesburg at all

Henry James, in full

1806–1817 · The regiment James Mountjoy left, tracked through the London papers

Question 12 has been blocking since it was written. A memoirist put James Mountjoy in the 21st Light Dragoons, discharged at the Cape; his own death notice answers not known where his parents are concerned and his marriage register rules a line through the column that should say where he came from. The regiment itself can be followed, day by day, in the British press. Sixty-seven articles, read in order.

What this does not do. It does not name him, and it does not touch his parentage. WO 97 still holds no Mountjoy of that regiment, and the reason still stands: the pre-1855 discharge papers hold only men discharged to a pension, and a man who took his papers at the Cape to marry and make saddles is not one. What has changed is that his discharge now has a deadline, and the muster books — WO 12 at Kew, which list every man by name, quarter by quarter — would show him leaving it. Question 12 →

17 September · The errand is one piece, and the piece this archive had written down was the wrong one

The Kew catalogue was searched again before the letter went. It gives the regiment a continuous run of muster books, and the run ends where the regiment does — disbanded in 1820, with nothing again until the 1860s.

Held at The National Archives, Kew, with no access conditions recorded. Not name-indexed — they have to be read, and a man’s disappearance from a muster dates his discharge.

1868–1914 · Leeuwberg, a commando, and a farmers’ president — the Free State Kolbes in the British press

Commandant John Gerson Eliezar Kolbe, the Settler’s eldest child, died of typhus caught on commando on 3 April 1868, on the farm Leeuwberg, leaving a widow and twelve children — eight sons and four daughters. This archive can put a hand on two of the twelve. The prisoner list and the newspapers between them now put Kolbes back on that farm, in the field, and at the head of the Free State’s farmers.

One limit worth stating. FindMyPast’s newspaper archive is British and Irish. Its own coverage facet lists England, Scotland, Wales, both Irelands, India, Barbados, China, Jamaica, Australia and New Zealand — and no South Africa at all. Everything above is the Cape and the Free State seen from Fleet Street, through Reuter’s wire and a war correspondent. It is not a substitute for the South African papers, and the eGGSA newspaper index remains the only route into those.

23 August 1830 · “Your affectionate father, J G Kolbe”

This archive has held a tailor of Conduit Street and a missionary of Colesberg and not one document showing the two men in contact. A catalogue line said one existed. On 15 September it wrote to the National Library of South Africa; on 18 September Melanie Geustyn, Senior Librarian, sent four pages. This is the first document in this archive that Johan Gottlieb Kolbe wrote himself.

Henry, dying

The longest passage in the letter is about another son.

Henry had wrote to you himself & left his letter at the Mission house to be forwarded to you with the first opportunity… he keeps up pretty well at present, but what effect the winter may have upon him if it should set in very cold, as it did last winter, is perhaps not doubtful, since it must prevent him from taking exercise by walking, & which is a great means of keeping down the Dropsy, of which he bears still the Symptoms… I trust also that you will join your prayers, that he may vouchsafe to prepare him to a fit state of meeting his God… he appears at present to be resigned to the Catastrophe.

This is John Henry Kolbe, baptised at Westminster on 29 July 1800. This archive has his font, his deposition in the Old Bailey in January 1819 (“my father is a tailor, and lives in Church-street, Soho”), his marriage to Matilda Ford three months later, his bankruptcy in 1824, and his burial in the German Lutheran register on 22 April 1832. Now it has his illness, and his father’s grief, twenty months before the end. The trial →

What this cost and what it took. One letter, sent on 15 September to an address checked first against the host table on this site’s own source register. A holding reply the next morning saying the manuscript collections live in off-site vaults. The document itself on the third day, with a second one nobody asked for — a two-page entry written for the Dictionary of South African Biography by Dr Karel Schoeman, with a list of sources, which this archive has not yet read. The Background File holds nothing further on the donation or on Dr Griffiths, so where the original is remains unknown and unpursuable from that end.

It ends: “commending you to God’s holy keeping, & if it should not be his will to see each other again in this world, that I may have the happiness of seeing you shine as a great Star before the throne of God & the Lamb.” They did not see each other again. George Augustus died at Wirtemberg on 1 December 1844; his father died at 34 Conduit Street on 18 November 1845, not knowing it.

Read again, from the file itself — and a preview is not a document

Everything above was read in a mail client’s preview overlay, on a screen eight hundred pixels wide. On 20 September the two PDFs were opened properly. Nothing already published turned out to be wrong. A good deal turned out to be missing, and the list above was written as though it were an inventory. It was a sample. Corrections →

“Whether there is any truth in a Story published in a work called the Mirror”

This archive summarised this as a baboon story he wants fact-checked. It is two pages long, and it is the strangest thing in the letter. A Scottish colonist — “I believe his Name to have been either Williams, or Williamson” — settled close to the Xhosa. Orang-outangs raid his fruit; his servants drive them off and he shoots a young one, which turns out to be a chief’s son. Weeks later Mrs W. is carried off. He suspects a Xhosa chief who had earlier offered oxen and “2 or 3 of his finest caffre women” in exchange for her and been refused, and whose messenger had said, shaking his head, “you will repent of your obstinacy”. He gets a company of soldiers under Capt Johnson and is on the point of war when a man is produced who saw a large orang-outang carrying a woman across the river. The chief then furnishes men of his own to help find her, and after nearly two years she is recovered, living among the animals as their queen, with the son also carried off.

A seventy-year-old tailor in London, reading a cheap weekly, declines to believe a sensational story about Africa and writes to the one person he knows who is actually there to ask whether it is true. There is no better description of what this archive tries to do, and it was in the first document it ever found that he wrote. The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction ran from 1822 and is digitised; the number carrying this is now on the work list. to find

What it still does not say. No street address, as before — the margins of pages two and four carry notes about how to direct the box, naming the Revd Mr Murray and Dr Philip, and they are written across the fold and are partly illegible. They are the only lines in four pages this archive has not been able to read, and they are not guessed at here.

The second attachment — a historian’s draft, and the two things in it that are wrong

Melanie Geustyn sent two files. The first was MSB 751 itself. The second was a two-page Afrikaans typescript headed MSB 751 … for DSAB / VOORLOPIGE TEKS — a draft entry for the Dictionary of South African Biography, initialled and dated 18/2/92. It is a secondary work, and this archive does not take secondary works as evidence. It is something better: a reading list, by somebody who had been to the archives this family has never reached.

The typescript carries no name, only the initials KS and the date 18/2/92. This archive worked out from the inside that it had to be Karel Schoeman — the Bethanie claim in it has one published source, Schoeman’s Die Huis van die Armes (1985), and the paper was typed at the South African Library where Schoeman worked — and then published that as an inference it would not assert.

It did not need to. The Library had already said so, in the email that carried the file. Melanie Geustyn, who had the Background File open in front of her: “I am also sharing with you a two page document that was written for the DSAB (Dictionary of South African Biography) which was in the Background File. The author, KS, would be Dr. Karel Schoeman who worked here at the National Library. He includes a list of Bronne (Sources).” This archive read the two attachments and not the sentence they were attached to. Corrections →

Note her “would be”. It is a librarian’s hedge and it is the right one: the initials are an identification, not a signature, and she is reading them the same way this archive did — only with the institution’s own knowledge behind her. So: written by Karel Schoeman, on the word of the library that holds the file, and still not signed. The Background File, she adds, holds nothing further about the donation or about any other deposit by Dr Griffiths — which closes a question the enquiry asked.

What matters even so is not who wrote it but how it behaves when it is checked, and this archive is in the rare position of being able to check it.

Nine things it says that this archive already knew — by nine other roads

Nine agreements, every one reached from a different direction. It is careful work, and that is what makes the tenth line worth the whole exercise.

The first error — “a German apothecary resident in London”

He was a tailor. Not by inference — by one hundred and twenty-one Westminster rate book entries, the printed roll of 234 master tailors of 1799, the master tailors’ list of April 1834, three London Gazette partnership dissolutions every one of which reads TAILORS, the occupation column of the 1841 census, the Westminster burial register, and his own son’s deposition on oath at the Old Bailey in 1819: “My father is a tailor, and lives in Church-street, Soho.”

The German is right. The London is right. The trade is the son’s, moved one generation up — George Augustus sailed as an apothecary, and the apothecary has been handed to his father.

This is the whole value of the document. The entry is accurate wherever its author had a record in front of him. The single thing he had no record for is the thing he got wrong here — and this archive can only say so because it spent a day in the Westminster rate books. A secondary work is a reading list, not a witness. Church Street South →

The second error — and it is in the source he lists first

“Hy het tien kinders nagelaat, alhoewel sy sterftekennis slegs agt vermeld” — he left ten children, although his death notice records only eight.

The death notice names ten. This archive has read it, photographed the detail and the whole sheet, and published the transcription: KAB MOOC 6/9/35: 7698 (1845), made at Colesberg in January 1845 and signed M. Kolbe by his widow. It is source number one on his own list. The notice →

So the count of thirteen — ten left, eight on the notice, three dead as infants — rests on a miscount and does not stand as published. Ten is what the notice says and ten is what the obituary says. Whether three more died as infants is a separate claim, and this archive has no source for it either way. That the error sits in the one document he cites first, and that this archive could only see it because it had ordered the same document, is the argument of this whole page in a line.

What it settles, and what it corrects

Nine years of his life that this archive did not have

Published here as what the entry says, every line of it untested:

The journal of 1828, run to ground — and the man it is addressed to

The DSAB gives it as “Extract from the journal of Messrs Melvill and Kolbe…”, Transactions of the Missionary Society (1829), and searching under Kolbe found nothing at all. The reason is that the printed version is filed under the other man’s name.

So: the manuscript is at SOAS, in the CWM archive — which is source 4 on the DSAB’s own list, two lines above source 6, and the entry never says they are the same document. And Legassick quotes it: Melvill and Kolbe travelled to the Caledon and met refugee groups with “no other means of subsistence than the wild animals found in these parts” — the first words of George Augustus Kolbe’s that this archive has ever read. They are about famine.

And the journey is printed in full, in English, in a book still in the shops. Karel Schoeman (ed.), Early White Travellers in the Transgariep, 1819–1840 (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2003), page 30: “The journey of John Melvill and G.A. Kolbe from Philippolis to the Caledon (1828)”. An edited collection of the travellers’ own texts. That is the fourth Schoeman title standing behind this one one typescript, and it is the one that would put his own account of the journey on this page. to buy

And there may be a face

This archive holds no likeness of anybody in it born before 1850. The entry ends by naming two:

• A portrait of Kolbe as a young man, in 1992 in the possession of a descendant, C.J. du Plessis of Ruigtevlei, district Bethulie, and reproduced in Burger Olivier, So onthou ons die oewerbewoners van ou “Grootrivier” (Bloemfontein, 1973).
• A watercolour by Charles Bell of a church service at Philippolis in 1834 with Kolbe in the pulpit — Africana Museum, Johannesburg, reproduced in The Journal of Andrew Smith, ed. William F. Lye (Cape Town: Balkema, 1975).

A book of 1973 and a museum catalogue are both reachable. The second would be a picture of this family’s ancestor at work, drawn from life, in the year after he was ordained.

And it is catalogued in Edinburgh, under the wrong denomination

The entry sends the reader to Johannesburg. The picture is also in Scotland. The University of Edinburgh, Centre for the Study of World Christianity, holds CSWC 60 — five photographs, 1834–1840, “photograph copies of sketches by the South African artist C. Bell of African congregations”. Item 3 is “Mr. Kolbe”, “at Philippolis in 1834”.

Edinburgh calls him “a moravian missionary?” — with the question mark, so the catalogue already doubts itself. He was London Missionary Society, and this archive holds two independent documents that say so: the catalogue of MSB 751 at the National Library of South Africa, and his own father’s letter of 23 August 1830, which reports him “fully accepted by the [L.M.S.] as one of their Missionaries”. This archive can correct a university catalogue, and intends to write and do it. The work list →

Edinburgh holds photograph copies; the DSAB puts the original watercolour in the Africana Museum, Johannesburg. Two institutions, one picture, and neither catalogue mentions the other.

Eleven sources, and what happened to each

Two more that are not in the list, because they had not been written or had not been reached: Schoeman’s Griqua Records (VRS II/25), the Philippolis documents, published two years later; and Schoeman’s Die Huis van die Armes (1985), which is the only authority behind the Bethanie claim — so that the entry and the encyclopaedia article that repeats it are one witness, not two.

The story the tailor asked his son to check — found, and it is a novel

Two of the four pages of the letter of 23 August 1830 go on a story its writer had read and did not believe. This archive searched for it on Google Books, on the open web and on the Internet Archive, five ways, and recorded a clean negative. On 21 September it was found by downloading the volumes and reading them.

It is fiction, and by a famous hand. “Mr Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd” is James Hogg — the author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Walter Scott’s friend and rival. The Mirror reprinted his tale as though it were a letter home from a settler, which is exactly how the tailor read it, and exactly why he wrote to the one man he knew who was actually there.

Every detail in the letter is in the story

He was right, and he was right for the right reason. “Here we look upon the Story as a fictious & romance, but it is by some inserted… as a true Story… I should be glad to hear from you, whether that report may be founded in truth, or falsehood.” A seventy-year-old tailor in Soho, reading a cheap weekly, declined to believe a sensational story about Africa and wrote to the one person he knew who could check it. It was by one of the most celebrated authors in Britain, printed as a genuine letter, and he was not taken in. This archive spent a day and five failed searches proving he was right. found

The tailor’s own marriage — searched properly, and it is not there

This archive has said for a fortnight that “her surname before marriage is not known and no marriage has been found”, and separately carried “Mary Larman” off the family tree. On 20 September it corrected a page that had welded the two together. Then it went and looked, with a tool it did not have before.

And the control that makes the nil mean something

A nil return is worth nothing until a control shows the search works — which is this archive’s own rule, written on /method/. The control here is a marriage this archive already knows about: the eldest Kolbe daughter married George Kottlich KOHLBECK at St Anne’s, Soho in 1811.

Which leaves three doors, and one of them is closed by an Act of Parliament

The obvious thought is that a German family buried its dead in the German Lutheran church — this archive has five of them in TNA RG 4/4631 — so perhaps it married there too, outside the Anglican indexes.

So three possibilities remain, and they are not equally likely:

• The marriage is in an English parish FindMyPast does not index. Possible — the London coverage is wide but not complete.
• “Larman” is wrong. The archive’s own person record has always said her surname is not known, and the name comes from the family tree and from nowhere else read here. Today the same tree was caught giving Margaret Downing’s mother two different surnames in two different versions, so it is not a careful witness about maiden names.
• They did not marry in England. He was born in Württemberg in 1765 and his birth county is entered as “FOREIGN” in the 1841 census in his own words. The first child of the house was baptised in London in 1792, when he was twenty-seven. Where he was before that, this archive does not know — and a marriage in a German state would be in a German register, indexed nowhere this archive has looked.

The gain is not a fact, it is a narrowing. Before today “no marriage has been found” was a shrug. It is now a negative with a control behind it and three named doors left, one of which — the German Lutheran register — has been closed by reading the law rather than by searching anything. The next place to look is not another English index. It is Württemberg. narrowed

Looking for a Downing–Pooley marriage — and finding that two trees cannot agree what she was called

The FamilySearch tree gave Margaret Downing’s mother as Mary King Pooley, a name this archive had never held. The obvious thing to do with a new name is look for a marriage under it, so FindMyPast’s whole Life Events collection was swept for one.

What is for it

• The date works, and only just. Margaret Georgina Elizabeth Downing was born 23 February 1803. A marriage on 10 May 1802 is nine months and thirteen days earlier — exactly right for a first child.
• The county is the right one. This archive’s own family tree puts the Downings in Devon: Edward Downing (1700–1792) m. Mary Heard; Thomas Downing (1736–1801) m. Mary Trick; John Trick m. Margaret Hooper. Trick, Heard and Hooper are Devon names, and Welcombe is a North Devon parish on the Cornish border. The tree and the register agree about the county without either knowing about the other.

What is against it

• Margaret was born in London. A couple married in a remote North Devon parish in May 1802 with a child in London nine months later is possible — people move — but it is not what the record says, and nothing here shows them moving.
• John Downing and Mary Pooley are not rare names, and this is a name match and a date. It is what this archive calls a candidate, not a finding.
• No baptism has been found for Margaret Downing in London in 1803. The collection was searched and returns nothing of the kind — which matters, because a baptism naming both parents is the document that would settle this outright, and its absence is why the marriage cannot be tied to her.

The baptism that would settle it — and why its absence proves little

One document ends the Welcombe question: a London baptism for Margaret Georgina Elizabeth Downing in 1803, naming both parents. Her monument at Burgersdorp says she was “BORN IN LONDON 23 FEBRUARY 1803”, so it should exist.

Thirty-seven per cent of Smith baptisms in those seven years are London, Middlesex or Westminster. The coverage is excellent. So the near-absence of London Downings is not the index failing — it is that there were very few Downings in London.

And a check on this archive’s own reasoning, which failed

The Welcombe case rested partly on county: the family tree puts the Downings in Devon through Trick, Heard and Hooper, and Welcombe is a North Devon parish. It was worth asking whether the surname itself is a West Country surname, because if it were, that would strengthen the case considerably.

It is not. A sample of 160 of those 1,131 baptisms, tallied by county: Yorkshire (West Riding) 20, Suffolk 16, Norfolk 16, Cornwall 14, Staffordshire 9, Yorkshire 9, Shropshire 7, Devon 5. Downing is a national name, and the West Country is about an eighth of it, behind Yorkshire.

So the Devon argument stands only on the tree’s own specific ancestry — Edward Downing and Mary Heard, Thomas Downing and Mary Trick — and gains nothing at all from the geography of the surname. This archive tested its own inference and took half of it back.

Withdrawn — they stayed in Devon

The candidate raised this morning, strengthened at lunchtime, is dead by the evening, and it was killed by the simplest question available: did the Welcombe couple stay?

Every Downing record in the parish of Welcombe, in order:

They married at Welcombe in May 1802 and baptised a child at Welcombe in 1803, and more in 1806, 1809 and 1810. Margaret Georgina Elizabeth Downing was born in London on 23 February 1803. The Welcombe couple never went anywhere. The Pooleys are equally rooted there — baptisms in 1792, 1801 and 1813, a burial in 1810. withdrawn

So the other surname was swept too — and a better tool was found

If she may have been a King rather than a Pooley, the same sweep had to be run under King. Searching for “king” as a keyword returns 144 records for 1790–1806 and almost every one of them is King’s Lynn — a surname that is also half a place-name poisons the field completely.

The marriage transcripts carry SpouseFirstName and SpouseLastName, and SpouseLastName turns out to work as a real filter — a nonsense value returns nothing, which is the test this archive insists on before trusting a narrow count. Run properly:

A Mary Downing marrying a King in Norfolk in 1790 is the wrong person in the wrong county in the wrong direction. Under either surname, there is no London marriage for a John Downing in the years this family needs. The Welcombe entry of 1802 remains the only candidate in England.

Her own death notice is still the only document in this archive that was ever asked about her parents, and it answered “Both dead” and gave no names. That remains the position. A Welcombe marriage of 1802 is now on the work list as a candidate to be tested — by the Welcombe register itself, by a London baptism for Margaret in 1803, or by a burial for a Mary Downing at the right date. Nothing has been adopted, and the person record still has no mother. candidate

A collaborative tree names the Commandant’s twelve — and two of its claims are already on this site

This archive does not take family trees as evidence, and it is not about to start. But there is a difference between a tree that is your own work read back to you and a tree compiled by strangers that turns out to agree with documents you hold — and the test for the second is the same as for a historian’s draft: check it where you can, before you believe it anywhere.

Why this is not the same as the last tree

A search on another member of this family returned her parents through MyHeritage, and that was this family’s own tree handed back to it — circular, and worth nothing as corroboration. This is not that. The Commandant’s twelve children have never been in this archive at all; his obituary counts them and names none, and the work list has carried a row for two weeks asking for VAB MHG M777, his widow’s estate, on the ground that it is “the document that would name the twelve”. A stranger’s tree naming them is independent of anything here.

And it agrees with two documents this archive reached by another road

What it would answer, if it holds

• The twelve. The Commandant died on 3 April 1868 leaving eight sons and four daughters, and this archive could put a hand on two. The profile names six siblings and says there are six more — among them a General Willem Johannes Kolbe, which is a rank, and therefore findable in a way a farmer is not.
• The Kolbe–McCabe question, which this archive raised and could not settle. It wrote of the 1890 baptism: “a second Kolbe–McCabe marriage in the same small Free State world, and this archive does not yet know whether that is a coincidence.” If this profile is right, it is not a coincidence: the Commandant’s widow Anna Jacoba van der Merwe married Francis McCabe, Landdrost of Bloemfontein, about April 1871 — and her son married a McCabe. Stepmother and daughter-in-law out of the same family.
• A fourth Frederik Fortunatus. This one is born 1857 at Bloemfontein and dead there in 1930. He is not the Settler’s tenth child (born 1839 at Bethulie, died 1929 at Utrecht), and not Frederick Fortunatus Downing Kolbe (died 1918, TAB MHG 40293). This archive has already had to withdraw a claim once over two men sharing a name in one town, and it is going to be slower this time, not faster.

The document that tests all of it is still the one on the work list. VAB MHG M777 at Bloemfontein — the 1896 estate of Anna Jacoba van der Merwe, filed under her second husband’s name McCabe, which would name her surviving children as of that year. A tree says twelve names; an estate file proves them. What has changed today is that the file now has something to be checked against, which is a better position to order a document from than an empty page. The work list →

The Kolbe–McCabe “coincidence” is a stepbrother marrying a stepsister

This archive raised the question itself and could not answer it. Of a baptism at Bloemfontein it wrote: “a second Kolbe–McCabe marriage in the same small Free State world, and this archive does not yet know whether that is a coincidence.” The answer was already in two of its own files, and it took a stranger’s tree to make them speak to each other.

Read those three together and the four-part name does the work. Maria Petronella Elisabetha Antoinetta is not a name that recurs by chance. Francis McCabe’s first wife was a Raath of that name; a McCabe of that same name married a Kolbe and had a child baptised at Bloemfontein in 1890. She is his daughter, named for her mother entire — which is the naming habit this archive has documented across four families.

Two marriages, not one — and the widow’s own is now dated

The Kolbe–McCabe question was answered above from an estate index and a baptism register, with one link borrowed from a user tree. On 21 September it was searched in the civil and church registers directly, and it turns out to be larger than the thing this archive was arguing about.

And a date this archive had only by inference is now written down. It had the remarriage from McCabe’s obituary, which said he “married his second wife about ten months since” before dying on 23 February 1872 — giving about April 1871. The civil register says 13 JULY 1871. Seven months, not ten. A journalist rounding, again, which is the second time on this site that an obituary’s interval has been out by the same kind of margin. dated

These are index entries from named collections, not images read. The images would give ages, fathers and witnesses, and are the obvious next step.

And the FamilySearch Family Tree, which this archive had never opened

It uses FamilySearch constantly and had never once looked at the tree. Every FamilySearch citation on this site is a record — an indexed register entry with an ark. The Family Tree is a different thing, a single collaborative tree the whole site edits, and /sources/ lists it among the leads. Nobody here had opened it. David did, and sent the link.

Three more hits against documents held here

Two orphan index references in this archive have just acquired people, and a baptism has acquired a death. None of that makes the tree evidence — it makes it a lead list that has now passed the same test three times.

And two places it disagrees, one of which it loses

One genuinely new name, and it is tree-only. FamilySearch gives Margaret Downing’s mother as MARY KING POOLEY, 1768–1834, and her father as John Paul Downing, 1765–1839. Margaret’s own death notice of 1867 says her parents were “Both dead” and gives no names at all, so this archive has never had a mother for her. It still does not. But it now has a name to look for in the London registers, which is not nothing — and a Downing–Pooley marriage in the 1790s would be a document. from a user tree, not adopted

Four journals in his own hand — and the catalogue names every one

This archive has spent the day working a historian’s reading list, and every road on it ended at the same door: the Council for World Mission archive at SOAS. The door turns out to be open, and the catalogue item-level.

Until this afternoon, the sum of George Augustus Kolbe’s own words in this archive was one sentence, quoted at second hand in Legassick. The SOAS catalogue returns sixty-two records on the surname, and among them:

Six years of a man’s life in his own writing, in a building in Russell Square. The first of them is source 6 on Schoeman’s list — the printed extract this archive hunted all morning and could not find — and here is the manuscript behind it, with the days of the journey on it: 13 to 22 November 1828.

And the year of the accusation is a single box

1836 is the year of the adultery charge; 1837 is the year of the dismissal. The Society’s incoming correspondence for southern Africa is filed by year, and 1836–1837 is Box 15. Whatever the Directors were actually told about H. Hendricks’s agitation, about the French missionaries’ inquiry and about the acquittal, it is in that box — and this archive has been repeating a one-sentence summary of it since breakfast.

The letter is written. Seven references, a stated reason for wanting 1836 and 1837, an offer to start with one item, and one question that needs no searching — whether candidate papers survive as a class, since Frederick William Kolbe’s would settle Sibree’s error outright. Drafted, not sent. The letters →

Owen’s party on the Nautilus — and the lie was still running

Source 7 on Schoeman’s list is M.D. Nash, The Settler Handbook. Its entry for Owen’s party is published in full online, and it gives the roll as the Colonial Department had it.

He was sixteen. Born 7 December 1802, he sailed from Gravesend on 3 December 1819 — four days before his seventeenth birthday. She was sixteen, born 23 February 1803. The roll adds about three years to each of them.

Three Cape Archives references, and this archive is already writing to that building. Nash’s sources for the party list are CO 6137/1,4 (the list of settlers under Thomas Owen’s direction), CO 8543 (Special Commissioner Hayward’s notes) and CO 3917 — the Memorial of independent settlers aboard the Nautilus. A memorial is a petition, and a petition is signed. That last one could carry George Augustus Kolbe’s signature at seventeen, which would be the earliest thing of his own hand anywhere. No Agent of Transports’ Return has ever been traced for the Nautilus, so the roll as it stands is the best there is.

The Society’s own register — and it had been free all along

Source 5 on Schoeman’s list is James Sibree, A Register of Missionaries, Deputations, etc., from 1796 to 1923, 4th edition, London Missionary Society, 1923. This archive searched the Internet Archive for it, failed, and wrote it up as not found. It is a free PDF, 225 pages, at missiology.org.uk. The failed search looked in one place and reported a negative about the world.

It settles Mr Miles, and it settles the word “fully”

The letter of 23 August 1830 says “Mr Miles had called at our house & informed me that you had been fully accepted by the [L.M.S.] as one of their Missionaries”. This archive published that identification as an inference two hours ago, on the ground that a Rev. Richard Miles — Acting Superintendent of the LMS at Cape Town from 1825, sent out to stand in for Dr Philip while Philip was in Britain — was the man Kolbe addressed his 1828 journal to.

Where the register and the DSAB draft disagree

Both are printed works and neither is the manuscript. But Sibree is the Society’s own record of its own officers, and Schoeman was working sixty-nine years later. Where they differ this archive gives both and prefers neither in print:

Pellissier is source 9 on Schoeman’s own list — S.H. Pellissier’s life of Jean Pierre Pellissier van Bethulie. Sibree puts Pellissier at the ordination and Schoeman does not.

Friedrich Wilhelm, not Frederick William. A Rhenish missionary of the German form of the name, married at Cape Town in 1849, at Okahandja in present Namibia by April 1850, fled to Otjikango when Jonker Afrikaner attacked the Hereros in August 1850, back in the Colony from 1852 — George, Paarl, Stellenbosch, Cape Town — and the father of Monsignor F.C. Kolbe. He has nothing to do with this family, and Schoeman knew it because the DSAB had already published him.

Indwe and Barkly East past 1910 — and most of what came back was already here

A work-list row has stood since 15 September: “the archive stops where its leads stopped… nobody has read what the register says after that.” It has now been read. The honest result is a small one, and the reason it is small is the interesting part.

A Booysen cluster at Indwe, and it is not claimed. Four Booysen men join that congregation between 1925 and 1931 — David Schalk (2 May 1925), Piet Frederick (14 May 1927), Petrus Jacobus (16 May 1931) and Willem Adriaan — and three couples baptise children there between 1929 and 1932. The forenames are this family’s forenames and the town is the town its miner worked in. But not one of the wives — Rachel Margarita Marais, Aletta Fredrika Jacoina Coetzee, Johanna Catharina Aletta Greyling — is a name this archive holds, and a Booysen at a Cape colliery is not evidence of anything. Written down so that somebody with a reason can come back to it, and claimed by nobody.

A near-miss worth recording, because it nearly went the other way. A first pass matched Rachel Margarita Marais against this archive and reported her as already held. She is not. The match was on the fragment “Rachel Marg” hitting Rachel Margaretha Williamse, a different woman on a 1900 death notice at Pretoria. Had it stood, an unrelated Indwe household would have been welded to this family on three letters of a forename.

8 December 1956 · Phthisis was not what killed him. It was what he was paid for.

This archive carried two causes of death for Henry James Booyzen and had read the document behind neither. A correspondent on G2G reported phthisis; the Johannesburg burial register gave “coronary pulmonary sclerosis”. The note said, in terms, “the two causes are not the same word and this archive has read only one of the two documents.” Here is the other one.

Why this was worth a morning. A cause of death is the kind of fact that gets repeated. It had been repeated twice, from two places, in two different wrong forms, and both were traceable to a single sheet of paper nobody had opened. The rule this archive keeps relearning is that a transcript is not a document — and the day before this was read, a FindMyPast reference carried here for weeks turned out not to resolve at all. The method →

1923 and 1929 · Two estate files at Pietermaritzburg name nine children, and the daughters by their married names

This archive knew that Frederik Fortunatus Kolbe, the Settler’s tenth child, married Elizabeth Johanna du Toit and baptised eight children between Colesberg, Hopetown and Bethulie; and that three of them turned up at Wakkerstroom, four hundred miles north. It had no death for either parent and had followed three of the children nowhere at all. The Natal estate index answers all of it in one search.

And the estates name the children — which is how you follow daughters

A Cape or Natal estate file lists the heirs, and it lists a married daughter under both names. Nine appear across the two files.

Five confirmations, three people followed out of the font at last, and a ninth child. The archive’s own note was careful and said “eight of their children are in the Dutch Reformed registers” — the ninth was not, and he is named for his father.

The town, and what it does to the Wakkerstroom convergence. The estates are at Pietermaritzburg and the deaths are at UTRECHT — on a farm called Saxony — with one at Vryheid. Utrecht and Vryheid sit either side of Wakkerstroom on the Natal–Transvaal border. This is not three children who happened to marry in one town. It is a household that moved from the Orange River to the Natal border and stayed.

And one that reaches across to the other branch. The same index holds “Anna Maria Viljoen Kolbe” with a Natal estate (1:1:QPHZ-23XS) — the woman found this morning in the Burgersdorp baptism register as the mother of the other George Augustus Kolbe, the one born in 1861 and buried at Wakkerstroom. Both Kolbe households ended up in the same corner of Natal. Sixty-four Kolbe entries in that collection and this archive has read none of the files.

17 September · The rest of the Burgersdorp register — 214 images, 2,046 baptisms, and three of the five were already here

The standing errand of this project. Film 008039088, the Burgersdorp Dutch Reformed baptism register, was swept by hand from image 338 to image 604 on 14 September and then stopped — twice — because a FamilySearch session is shorter than a 214-image sweep. It is finished.

Five rows carrying this family — and two of them this archive already had

Written that way round deliberately. The first draft of this section called all five new, and two of them were in the register here already. What the sweep actually did for those two is smaller and is said below.

All five at Burgersdorp, all five with citable references — 6FHW-89ND, 6FW6-WXGS, 6FWF-YVJT, 6FWV-27JX, 6F4H-63P2.