The People

Fifth child.

Fourth child.

b3c4d6 — SISTER of Petrus Jacobus, the man at the head of this archive's documented line, and six years older. De Villiers's volume 1 records her marriage only as “gehuwd met H. A. VILJOEN”; volume 3 gives it in full from the Viljoen side — HERCULES ALBERTUS VILJOEN, baptised 30 March 1777, burgher at Graaff-Reinet, MARRIED 26 FEBRUARY 1797. Seven children, of whom the seventh is ADRIANA CHRISTINA, BAPTISED 19 AUGUST 1810 — the name and the age of the woman her nephew David Schalk married at Cradock in 1828. IF THAT IS THE SAME WOMAN, THIS AUNT IS ALSO A MOTHER-IN-LAW.

RIGHT SURNAME, RIGHT PARISH, RIGHT DECADE, AND A GAP IN THE FAMILY'S OWN BAPTISM RUN EXACTLY THERE. He is not a brother. His father is GEORGE and his mother ELIZABETH, and his register batch is C72301-7 rather than the family's C15051-2 or C06236-1. HE WAS ONE CLICK FROM BEING MADE AN EIGHTH SON, and what stopped it was reading the parents' names on the transcript instead of the name, place and year in the result list. The same check threw out HENRY KOLBE, baptised at Southwark on 2 February 1800 — father Henry, mother Susannah. AND THE REJECTION TURNED OUT NOT TO BE A DEAD END. Morning Advertiser, 31 DECEMBER 1832: “LEFT HIS HOME, MONDAY, DECEMBER 10, FREDERICK KOLBE, ABOUT 16, DARK HAIR AND EYES, WITH AN IMPEDIMENT IN HIS SIGHT. Any information addressed MRS. KOLBE, NO. 18, GERRARD-STREET, SOHO, will be rewarded; if he will return, will…” — and a boy “about 16” in December 1832 is one baptised in December 1816. GERRARD STREET IS TWO STREETS FROM CHURCH STREET. THERE WERE TWO KOLBE HOUSEHOLDS IN SOHO AT ONCE, and every Soho Kolbe record on this site has to be read against that. Whether the two families were related is not known here.

Daughter of David Schalk Booijsen and Adriana Christina Viljoen, and named for her grandmother ANNA MARIA VAN DER MERWE — the second document in this archive to carry that name forward.

THE COMMANDANT'S ELDEST SON, AND HE CARRIES THE SETTLER'S NAME ENTIRE. Baptised at COLESBERG on 8 MARCH 1846, born 30 SEPTEMBER 1845, son of JOHAN GERSON ELIEZER KOLBE and ANNA JACOBA VAN DER MERWE — South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Registers (Cape Town Archives), FamilySearch 1:1:6245-2S2X. THE SAME EVENT IS IN THE INDEX TWICE, as “George Augustus Kolbee”, baptised 15 March 1846 with the identical birth date and the same two parents (1:1:6P21-C67Z) — one font, two transcriptions, a week apart, which is a warning about counting index rows and not a second child. HE WAS BORN TWO AND A HALF YEARS AFTER HIS PARENTS MARRIED on 3 April 1843, and named for the grandfather who had died at Colesberg the year before he was born — the 1820 Settler, whose own death notice was signed in that town in January 1845. WHAT IS PROBABLY HIS AND IS NOT ADOPTED: a George Augustus Kolbe born 1846 married HESTER JACOBA JACOMINA LOUW in the Free State on 15 September 1873, and an estate was filed at Bloemfontein in 1905 for a George Augustus Kolbe born 1846 at Colesburg, died 29 April 1905. The year in both is the BAPTISM year, not the birth year, which is how a register-derived record usually differs from a font — but this archive holds five men of this name and will not join them on a coincidence of year. The estate is not ordered.

BAPTISED AT FIVE WEEKS OLD AND BURIED AT SIXTY-SEVEN, AND THE TWO DOCUMENTS ALMOST CERTAINLY HOLD ONE MAN. The font: born 4 MAY 1852, baptised 7 JUNE 1852, son of JAN GERTZSON ELIEZAR KOLBE and ANNA JACOBA VAN DER MERWE (1:1:6PYD-43CP). The grave end: a PIETER KOLBE, aged 67, died 7 NOVEMBER 1919 at BLOEMFONTEIN, born in the Orange Free State, son of J. KOLBE and A. V. D. MERWE (1:1:DH3F-HWW2). AGE 67 IN NOVEMBER 1919 IS BORN 1852, the parents match to their initials, and a woman does not bear two sons in one year. THIS ARCHIVE JOINS THEM AND SAYS SO RATHER THAN QUIETLY MERGING THEM: the death record gives the parents only as initials and the forename only as Pieter, so the join rests on a year and two letters. A death notice — the Free State estate, not ordered — would carry the full name and end it. He took church membership at Bloemfontein on 5 FEBRUARY 1876, aged twenty-three, and the Free State registers give him a wife, MARGARETHA ELIZABETH LOUW, and children including a Gwendolina and a Jacoba. His elder brother married a Louw too.

THE FIRST DAUGHTER OF THE HOUSE THIS ARCHIVE CAN NAME FROM A FONT. Born 16 FEBRUARY 1854, baptised 2 APRIL 1854, daughter of JOHN GERRON ELIEZAR KOLBE and ANNA JACOBA V. D. MERWE — the fourth spelling of her father's forenames in four documents (1:1:6P19-2Y5T). SHE MARRIED A JOUBERT, on the register's own evidence: the Free State Dutch Reformed records carry Margaretha Elizabeth Kolbe, and Margaret Elizabeth Kolbe, as the mother of ADRIANA, PETRONELLA JOHANNA, HENNING JOHANNES and FRANCIS, by PETRUS JACOBUS JOUBERT. THE MARRIAGE ITSELF HAS NOT BEEN FOUND and the children are index rows read at a glance, so the household is recorded and not drawn. HER MOTHER'S NAME IS NOT IN HERS, which is worth noticing in a family that named a son for the grandfather it had just buried: the Margaretha is the SETTLER'S WIFE, Margaret Downing, dead thirteen years after this child was born and alive when she was christened.

THE TENTH CHILD, FOUND BY READING 267 REGISTER IMAGES — and she has the same name as her sister. Burgersdorp doopregister, image group 008039088, image 427: born 10 JULY 1855, baptised 22 JULY 1855, father JOHN BARRY, mother MARGARET LOUISA KOLBE. FOUR YEARS LATER THE SAME PARENTS BAPTISED ANOTHER CATHARINA MARY SOPHIA at Dordrecht, born 4 August 1859 — the woman who married into the Booyzens and carried the name to Australia. TWO DAUGHTERS, ONE NAME, DIFFERENT BIRTHDAYS FOUR YEARS APART IN DIFFERENT TOWNS. A baptism is not done twice, so the ordinary reading is the ordinary Cape practice: THIS CHILD DIED, AND THE NAME WAS GIVEN AGAIN. This archive has no burial for her and states the death only as “before August 1859”. AND SHE EXPLAINS THE NAME TWICE OVER: the archive has already shown CATHERINE MARIA SOPHIA is a Kolbe name, off the 1848 godmother Catharine Sophia Maria Kolber. It was thought important enough to use, lose, and use again.

AND BY THE AFTERNOON THERE WAS A CANDIDATE FOR THE MISSING NAME. The Queenstown Free Press of 13 February 1884 marries “CHARLES ANDREW WERDMULLER, OF STEYNSBURG, SECOND SON OF THE LATE C.J.O. WERDMULLER, OF BURGHERSDORP” to Charlotte Anne Callaghan. A man born 14 February 1857 was twenty-seven that week. NOT PROVED: no document read here names Charles Andrew’s mother, and his father — or a man of exactly that name — married again at Burgersdorp in 1874. NAMELESS IN THE INDEX, AND THAT IS THE POINT. The same sweep that found the tenth Barry child turned up a second entry with an EMPTY NAME COLUMN: born 14 February 1857, baptised 10 April 1857 at Burgersdorp, mother AUGUSTA LOUISA KOLBE, father COENRAAD JOHANNES OTTO WERDMULLER. She is the Settler's fourth daughter, born at Graaff-Reinet in 1829 — and this is the first of her children this archive has ever seen. THE CHILD'S OWN NAME IS ON THE PAGE AND NOT IN THE INDEX, so no search will ever return it. The register image has not been read; only the index line.

THE FIRST OF THE TWELVE BAPTISED AT BLOEMFONTEIN, WHICH DATES THE HOUSEHOLD'S MOVE. Born 15 AUGUST 1860, baptised 7 OCTOBER 1860 at BLOEMFONTEIN, daughter of J. G. E. KOLBE and A. G. V. D. MERWE — the index reducing both parents to initials, and giving her mother a G where every other document gives a J (1:1:Q2HL-BMPQ). THE PLACE IS THE FINDING. The children before her were christened at Colesberg in 1846 and Fauresmith in 1848 and 1849, and the children after her at Bloemfontein. Somewhere between 1854 and 1860 this family moved to the town the Commandant would sit in the Volksraad for, and the fonts record the move without anybody writing it down. HER ELDEST SISTER WAS MARRIED AT BLOEMFONTEIN TWO DAYS AFTER SHE WAS CHRISTENED — Catharina Wilhelmina on 8 October 1860, if that marriage is this family's, which is not proved. NOTHING ELSE IS KNOWN OF HER: no marriage, no death, no estate.

READ THE YEAR IN HER NAME BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE. There is a real ANNA JACOBA KOLBE in this household, and she is this child — born 3 NOVEMBER 1864, baptised at BLOEMFONTEIN on NEW YEAR'S DAY 1865, daughter of JOHN G. E. KOLBE and ANNA JACOBA VAN DER MERWE (1:1:Q2HL-Y1LG). SHE IS NOT THE WOMAN THIS ARCHIVE INVENTED ON 23 SEPTEMBER. That was her mother, entered in an 1871 marriage index under her first husband's surname as a widow is, and briefly made into a daughter here; the register image says WEDUWE and 46, and this girl was six years old at that wedding. SO THE ERROR WAS NOT AN ABSURD ONE — THE NAME REALLY IS IN THE FAMILY — AND IT WAS STILL AN ERROR, which is the more useful shape of a mistake to keep. She is the last of the twelve to be christened; her father died on the farm Leeuwberg when she was three years and five months old. SHE MARRIED ANDRIES PETRUS SMIT, on the Free State registers' evidence, and they had a Jacobus Erasmus and an Anna Jacoba — a third woman of the name in three generations. The marriage itself is not found and the children are index rows.

THE THIRD OF THE NAME. Eldest child of John Augustus Barry II, and a niece of the Catherine Maria Sophia “Kathleen” Barry who married into this family — born twelve years after her aunt. The index enters her baptism at Graaff-Reinet on one record and Colesberg on another, from the same date. FROM THE INDEX.

Baptised at Rustenburg in 1889, son of Petrus Jacobus Booijsen and Anna Catharina Sofia Benadi. The fifth Petrus Jacobus, and the name has now run five generations without a break.

Baptised at Rustenburg on 4 November 1894, son of Petrus Jakobus Booysen and Anna Catharina Sophia Benadie — named for his uncle, who was named for HIS mother’s father, Ocken Johannes Oliefier of the district of Cradock. Three generations of a name that came into this family with one marriage.

A MINOR IN 1919, AND THE FOURTH GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE IN THIS ARCHIVE. His father’s death notice names him as the only child: “George Augustus Kolbe. Minderjarig, geboren 2 Julie 1914.” He was four when his father died and he carries his grandfather’s name entire, which is what this family does — the same grandfather who outlived the father by thirty-six years. HIS PARENTS’ WILL WAS WRITTEN FIVE WEEKS BEFORE HE WAS BORN, on 30 May 1914, and provides for them dying without a child; by the time it was read in 1919 he was its heir, taking the immovable property in equal shares with his mother, she holding usufruct over his portion for life. NOTHING IS KNOWN OF HIM AFTER 1919. Born more than a century ago and so published in full under the estate’s eighty-year rule; no death, no marriage and no descendants are claimed, because none has been read.

The fourth generation to carry the name that came into this family with Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier, whose father was Ocken Johannes Oliefier of the district of Cradock. Named on his father’s 1935 Sterfkennis as a minor of seven.

AND THE ESTATE INDEX AGREES WITH THE STONE, which is what moves him from inferred to documented: “MHG 7653/66 — BOOYZEN, DAVID SCHALK, 1966”. The stone gives an initial and a year; the estate index gives the name in full and the same year. Two collections that do not speak to each other, found an hour apart. OUBOET ON THE SILVERTON PILLAR, and now a grave: “BOOYZEN DAVID S. 1907–1966 & RACHEL M. 1909–1973”, Zandfontein cemetery, Pretoria. The initial, the forename, the town and a birth two years after his parents’ 1905 marriage all agree, and he is the only David S. Booyzen in the Gauteng collection. IT IS A MATCH ON A NAME AND A DATE, NOT A DOCUMENT, and it is marked inferred for that reason. FROM THE INDEX; no image read. Eldest named on his father's 1940 estate — and a name that matters. If Stephanus Francois is DAVID SCHALK BOOIJZEN's son, as the 1900 death notice suggests, then this boy is called after his grandfather outright. Under the reading this archive published instead, he is called after a great-uncle. It is a point in the argument and not a proof.

HENNA ON THE SILVERTON PILLAR — the match this archive called the weakest of the nine, because Henna can stand for Hendrina as readily as for Johanna. The stone does not settle that, but it does find her: “DU PLESSIS GERHARDUS EBENHAEZER 1911–1988 & JOHANNA CATHARINA BOOYZEN 1913–1982”, Rebecca Street cemetery, Pretoria. The 1940 estate says she married a Du Plessis. A MATCH, NOT A DOCUMENT. FROM THE INDEX; no image read.

The sixth Petrus Jacobus this archive has found in this family.

Named for her mother. The household has moved from Burgersdorp to Dordrecht by this baptism. FROM THE INDEX.

THE KOLBE NAME IN A FOURTH GENERATION — carried by a great-grandson of the 1820 Settler, sixty-two years after the landing, and the furthest down this archive has traced it. FROM THE INDEX.

His wife, married 22 Dec 1879. Recorded at her death as a Military Pensioner. Buried on 6 SEPTEMBER 1940 at the City of Johannesburg NEW CEMETERY — Brixton — aged 82, in the DUTCH REFORMED section, GRAVE 9760. An Irishman’s daughter out of Barkly East, in the Dutch Reformed ground on the Rand.

Entered as Clarence Jongerheld on one record and Clarence Ingerheld on another. FROM THE INDEX.

Of CHERRYVILLE, Barkly East — a third named Barry farm, after Manorowen and Jerpoint. FROM THE INDEX.

Named on the 1915 death notice. A NIECE OF THE SAME NAME was baptised at Slang River on 3 April 1892 — daughter of her brother Hendrik Nicholaas and Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman — so the two have to be kept apart.

Baptised 6 June 1900, daughter of Hendrik Nicholaas Barry and Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman. FROM THE INDEX.

Cape Rebel, plaasboer of Ivanhoe, district Barkly East / Wodehouse, tried June 1901 — the same month as Schoeman of Caerlaverock. Relationship to this family unproven; the middle initial does not match Frederick Fortunatus.

Carries the Kolbe given name Fortunatus.

Named for his uncle George Augustus Barry, who is himself named for George Augustus Kolbe. FROM THE INDEX.

NEW. Named on his father's 1915 death notice and nowhere else this archive has looked. He carries his grandfather George Augustus Kolbe's names entire.

Of MANOROWEN, Barkly East district — the farm where Richard Peter Barry signed his mother’s death notice in 1915. Dead at eighteen. FROM THE INDEX.

Married ANNA JOHANNA MARIA SCHOEMAN. The second Barry–Schoeman link. A BIRTH YEAR ARRIVED ON 28 SEPTEMBER 2026 FROM A 1999 LETTER: Pama gives him 1857, and names him as the child at whom this household moved — the siblings before him were born at BURGERSDORP, he and those after him at DORDRECHT. THE MIGRATION WAS TESTED ON 7 OCTOBER 2026 AND IT FAILS. His elder siblings were baptised at GRAAFF-REINET in 1847, 1848 and 1850 — not Burgersdorp — and the 1847 entry has been read at the image, witnessed by three Kolbes. Burgersdorp runs 1852–1855, Graaff-Reinet returns in 1861, and Dordrecht appears in 1864. So Pama compressed three or four stages into two and put the pivot on the wrong child. AND THE PIVOT IS HIM, which is the circular part: he has no font, so the only evidence for the year that makes him the pivot is the book that makes him the pivot. His 1857 stays inf for that reason and not out of politeness. AND A WARNING ATTACHED TO HIM. The same letter gives him a daughter ANNA JOHANNA MARIA BARRY, born 23 November 1884 — his wife's name entire. This archive holds the WIFE, Anna Johanna Maria Barry née Schoeman, who died in 1923. No daughter is entered on that basis: a compiler confusing a mother with a daughter of the same name is exactly the error this archive made five days ago with a widow, and one letter is not enough to make a person.

NEW, AND HE CARRIES THE WHOLE ARGUMENT IN HIS NAME. “BARRY, HENRY JAMES KOLBE. BORN IN BARKLY EAST, CAPE PROVINCE. UNMARRIED. DECEASED ESTATE”, Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository, MSCE 2183/1958. HENRY JAMES is the Barry forename this archive has followed since 1848; KOLBE is the surname it has spent the project proving is the source of half the family's given names. HERE THEY ARE IN ONE MAN, born in this archive's own town, dying UNMARRIED in Natal in 1958 — so the names stop with him. He is the third Barry found carrying Kolbe as a forename, after Richard Pieter Kolbe Barry and Anton Rector Kolbe Barry. NO PARENTS NAMED; the estate is not read.

His mother's surname given as a forename, which is how this archive knows the spelling mattered to the family even though no two clerks agreed on it. FROM THE INDEX.

SETTLED, 14 September 2026, and it removes a candidate rather than adding one. The HENRY JAONAS BARRY who turned up on 13 September — “baptised at twenty years old” in 1868, and briefly a candidate for a tenth child — IS THIS MAN. The same event is indexed twice: once as Henry Jaonas Barry, baptism 13 Nov 1868, and once as HENNERY JAMES BERRY, baptism 13 Nov 1848. Same birth date of 13 July 1848, same parents, same collection, and FamilySearch attaches BOTH to one tree person, James Henry Barry 1848–1939. The volume decides the year on its own: the register is “GRAAFF-REINET. BAPTISM RECORDS 1846–1851”, and a baptism of 1868 cannot sit in a book that closes in 1851. So he was baptised at four months, not at twenty, AT GRAAFF-REINET — not at Cape Town or Tulbagh, which is what both index entries say for the place. The birth-spacing argument made against him held: his brother John Augustus II was born 13 March 1847 and he was born sixteen months later. THE IMAGE HAS BEEN LOCATED AND NOT READ — identifier apid:TH-909-70517-31299-17. Named on the 1915 death notice, which he swore himself. The index now dates him: born about 1847, dead at Barkly East on 23 June 1939, having outlived his father by thirty-six years. BUT THAT YEAR CANNOT STAND. His brother John Augustus Barry II was born 13 MARCH 1847 off a register, and “about 1847” here is not a date at all — it is an age worked back from the 1939 death. Two brothers cannot share it. A relationship search on his mother's surname turned up a HENRY JAONAS BARRY born 13 July 1848 and baptised at twenty, which is where a next child belongs; whether that is this man under a clerk's ear is UNPROVED and the register is unread.

One profile holding two men — and on 14 September 2026 they came apart. THE YORKSHIRE MAN IS NOW A LIFE: born at WHITBY in 1796; resident at BILSDALE MIDCABLE when he took a licence on 2 October 1838 to marry MARGARET JACKSON of Beadlam at Helmsley; and in the 1851 census a SHIP OWNER at SHIP YARDS, RUSWARP, WHITBY, aged 55, married, head of his household — the ONLY John Barry of that age in the whole Yorkshire census. John Barry deaths are then registered in the WHITBY district in 1858 and in 1860. He outlived the Cape man, who died at de Bruins Poort in 1853, by at least five years. THEY ARE TWO MEN. What this archive still does not have is the Cape one: no birth, no arrival, no burial. And a caution worth keeping — a Whitby SHIP OWNER is exactly the kind of man whose son could be born AT SEA, which is what John Augustus Barry's death notice says of 1819. That coincidence is not evidence, and the censuses say it is not the same man.

Married Elizabeth Johanna Magdalena Botha. FROM THE INDEX.

Named on the 1915 death notice.

Carries her grandmother Margaretha Wilhelmina Elizabeth Kolbe's first two names. FROM THE INDEX.

Her 1961 pension is ordinary, not military — the archive checked.

ONE OF THE TWO MISSING BARRY CHILDREN, FOUND 16 SEPTEMBER 2026 — and open question 13 has been asking for her since this site was written. The 1903 registration of her father's death says ELEVEN children; his own death notice names eight and her mother's names nine. SHE IS IN THE BURGERSDORP REGISTER AND NOT IN ANY NAME SEARCH, BECAUSE THE INDEX GIVES HER NO SURNAME: two separate index passes of the same page read “MARGRITH LOUISA MARIA” and “MARGRETH LOUISA MARY”, and the Name column stops there. It is the blank Name column again, the same failure that hid her sister Catherine Mary Sophia of 1855. Found by asking the index for a RELATIONSHIP — father John Barry, mother a Kolbe — and letting it return whatever the child was called. Her parents are entered as “Margrith Willemina Kolbe + John Barry”. SHE IS ALMOST CERTAINLY THE “MARGARET MARY” NAMED ON HER PARENTS' DEATH NOTICES AND NEVER PLACED: it is her mother's name, and there is no other candidate in the sibling group. ark:/61903/1:1:6VYG-SS94 and 1:1:6F4L-76PK.

The ninth and last, and the only one the index gives no fuller name for. FROM THE INDEX.

A YEAR AND A NAME-ORDER, BOTH FROM A 1999 LETTER AND NEITHER FROM A REGISTER. Pama has him PIETER RICHARD BARRY, b. 1866, where this archive and his mother's death notice have Richard Peter. The notice he signed himself is the better witness to the order, and the year is new. Kathleen's brother. Signed his mother's 1915 death notice as "Son in whose house deceased died", at Manorowen, Barkly East. A Richard Peter Barry, plaasboer of Jerpoint, is on the Cape Rebel roll — same name, right region, identity not proven.

AND THE NAME IS IN A GOVERNMENT FILE, TWICE OVER, IN ONE LINE. SAB, VWR volume 2, reference B645/8/38, 1937: “AANSOEK DEUR PLAASEIENAAR BARKLY-OOS. RPK BARRY. BYWONER RPK BARRY (SEUN).” An application by a farm owner at Barkly East — R.P.K. BARRY — and the bywoner on the place is R.P.K. BARRY, HIS SON. TWO MEN OF THESE INITIALS AT BARKLY EAST IN 1937, one holding the land and one working it as a tenant, and the state file is between them. This archive cannot say which of the two is the man born in 1899 and does not guess. A BYWONER is not a labourer and not an owner; it is the word South Africa used in the 1930s for a white tenant farming another man's ground, and VWR is the Department of Social Welfare. THE FILE HAS NOT BEEN READ. CARRIES BOTH NAMES AT ONCE — Richard Pieter, for the Barry of Manorowen, and Kolbe, for the 1820 Settler family his great-grandmother married out of. Married Maria Magdalena Siebert. FROM THE INDEX; no image read.

Baptised at Dordrecht, 25 November 1888, son of Hendrik Nicholaas Barry and Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman — and named for his uncle Ruben Jacobus Josuah. The Schoeman name Ruben, given twice in two generations. FROM THE INDEX.

WITHDRAWN AS A SON, for the same reason as Dorothea Regina: the 1915 death notice, read entire, does not name him. The register holds a RUBEN JACOBUS HOSEA baptised at Dordrecht in 1888, a grandson. The Schoeman name Ruben does come into this family — one generation later than this archive said.

FROM THE INDEX.

Found twice in one day. He came in on the 1915 death notice of his mother Margaretha Kolbe, estate 1291, which names NINE children where his father's names eight — and then the Burgersdorp doopregister produced his baptism: WILLIAM FREDRIK, born 23 August 1853, christened 23 October, godparents JOHN KOLBE, ANNA VAN DER MERWE and GEORGE KOLBE. Two of the three are his mother's brothers. A SECOND William Frederick Thomas was baptised in 1861 and this archive cannot say whether the first died or a clerk erred — a doubt re-surfaced, and briefly mistaken for a new find, when the index was asked for every Barry child of a Kolbe mother. He is not on his father's notice, not on the Cape Rebel roll, and nowhere else in this archive. His father's 1903 registration said ELEVEN children; with William there are nine named and two still missing.

THE OTHER MISSING BARRY CHILD, AND HE IS INVISIBLE FOR THE OPPOSITE REASON TO HIS SISTER. She has no surname in the index; HE HAS THE SAME NAME AS HIS BROTHER. William Fredrik Barry was born 23 August 1853 and baptised at Burgersdorp; this William Frederick Thomas was born 29 SEPTEMBER 1861 and baptised at GRAAFF-REINET, eight years later, to the same parents — “Margaret Wilhelmina Kolbe + John Barry”. A SEARCH FOR WILLIAM BARRY RETURNS THE 1853 CHILD AND STOPS, and nothing in the result says there is a second. BY THIS FAMILY'S OWN PRACTICE THE FIRST WILLIAM MUST HAVE DIED — a baptism is not done twice, which is exactly what this archive concluded about the two Catherine Mary Sophias. The “WILLIAM who appears on nothing else” on his mother's death notice is one of these two and the notice does not say which. ark:/61903/1:1:623R-9MM9 and 1:1:62GJ-SD8Z.. THE ENTRY WAS READ AT THE PAGE ON 9 OCTOBER 2026 — film 008147497, item 4, Graaff-Reinet. Baptism Records 1861–1866, image 190, entry 79. “GEDOOPT 29 SEPT. 1861”: Willem Frederik Thomas, ouders JOHN BARRY and MARGARET WELHELMINA KOLBE. The date is his BAPTISM and the register gives him no birth date, where the entries either side of him both carry one. AND THE WITNESSES EXPLAIN THE PLACE. Get: PETRUS JACOBUS JOUBERT, CATHARINE MARIA SOPHIA KOLBE, RALPH PETER THOMAS, MARIA MAGDALENA PRETORIUS — the second is his mother's own sister, standing beside a Joubert as a married couple does. So this font is not evidence that the household moved back to Graaff-Reinet; it is evidence that a child was christened where its aunt was. AND THE THIRD WITNESS IS WHERE HIS THIRD NAME COMES FROM: Ralph Peter THOMAS, at the font of William Frederick THOMAS Barry

Born Barry, and on the 1915 notice as married to Tom Bedford. The tree carries a Margaretha Louisa Maria who married Thomas Bedford in 1875; the notice gives her as Margaret Mary, and the archive has not reconciled the two.

Wife of Gerthardus Lodewikus. Her 1754 birth is what dates him at all — and her name, beside his, is what the 1876 notice puts on the record. That matters because a 1793 Cape will names a different “Jan Booysen, married to the late Magdalena de Beer”: the pairing was never unique, and now this line’s version of it is documented.

His wife, named with him on two baptisms at Rustenburg, in 1889 and 1894. Both entries are index-only.

His daughter, and the first person in the western Transvaal this archive can attach to the line rather than merely set beside it. Her 1920 Sterfkennis — estate 44420, stamped Pretoria 16 August 1920 — names her parents as Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus Booyzen and Magdalena Susanna Maria, gives her age as 59 years 9 months, and lists seven children. Her son-in-law B. J. van den Berg signed it.

TAKEN PRISONER IN 1901, AGED 32, AT STERKFONTEIN IN THE BETHULIE DISTRICT, AND RECORDED AS A FREE STATER. TNA WO 108/368 folio 581. Sent to Natal. THE SECOND MAN OF THAT NAME IN THE SAME LIST — the first being GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE OF BURGERSDORP, whom this archive identified from the Wakkerstroom stones. Bethulie is on the Orange River, in the country the Settler preached across. AND THIRTEEN YEARS LATER A G. A. KOLBE OF BETHULIE IS PRESIDENT OF THE ORANGE FREE STATE AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. The British press, 26 June to 22 July 1914: “MR. G. A. KOLBE (BETHULIE)” in the delegate list printed by the Daily Telegraph; “MR G. A. KOLBE, PRESIDENT OF THE ORANGE FREE STATE AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION AND CHAIRMAN OF THE ORANGE FREE STATE DELEGATION” at the Royal Agricultural Society’s show, in the Western Daily Press, Dundee Courier, Cork Free Press and Exeter and Plymouth Gazette of 2 July; and on 22 July the Daily Malta Chronicle has him sending A TELEGRAM OF RESPECTFUL GREETING TO QUEEN WILHELMINA on the delegation’s behalf. SAME INITIALS, SAME DISTRICT, THIRTEEN YEARS APART — from a prisoner’s number to the head of the Free State’s farmers. NO DESCENT FROM THE SETTLER IS CLAIMED HERE.

AND HER ESTATE IS FINDABLE: “MOOC 6/9/4898 · 54123 — BOOYZEN, CATHARINA JOHANNA HELENA, NEE BEYLEVELD. ESTATE PAPERS. 1937”, Cape Town Archives Repository. A file that would name her parents, her husband and her children, and would settle in one page whether she belongs to this family. NOT READ. NOT THIS FAMILY so far as anything here can show, AND RECORDED BECAUSE SHE IS THE FOURTH BOOYZEN STONE IN THAT CEMETERY. “HIER RUS — CATHARINA JOHANNA HELENA BOOYZEN (GEB. BEYLEVELDT) — GEB. 7 JANUARIE 1855 — OORL. 16 MAART 1937.” The Cape Province civil register carries her under a chain of surnames that is its own biography — BOOYZEN BYLEVELD LANGENBOG BOOYZEN — and gives her born 1857 where the stone says 1855. Her Cape probate names her husband as JOHANNES HENDRIK. She died on 16 MARCH 1937, TWELVE WEEKS BEFORE PIETER J. BOOYZEN went into the same ground, and this archive can find no link between them but the surname and the town. SET DOWN SO THAT NOBODY LATER ASSUMES ONE.

THE FOURTH MAN OF THE NAME, AND THE ONE THIS ARCHIVE KEPT MEETING WITHOUT ENTERING. He is the FREDERIK FORTUNA KOLBE who fathered ROSA MAGDALENA, baptised at Bloemfontein on 6 July 1890, and MAGDALENA JACOBA, by MARIA PETRONELLA ELIZABETH ANTOINETTA McCABE — the second of the two Kolbe–McCabe marriages. HIS DEATH IS DOCUMENTED TWICE AND THE TWO DOCUMENTS DISAGREE ABOUT WHEN HE WAS BORN. The civil death registration — National Archives of South Africa, Dewetsdorp death records 1930, image 852 of 2,140, FamilySearch 1:1:81ZN-KW6Z — is a Form of Information of a Death completed at his death and registered the next day by the district registrar J. S. Kruger: age 73, born in the Orange Free State, a BOER, a WEDUWNAAR, died 18 DECEMBER 1930 at Bloemspruit in the district of Bloemfontein, to be buried at Bloemfontein. Cause of death, in the doctor's English inside an Afrikaans form: valvular disease of the heart, bronchial asthma, nephritis and enlarged prostate, attended by Dr J. M. de Kock. His gravestone says something else. BillionGraves photographed it at the Bloemfontein Memoriam Road Cemetery on 30 September 2018: born 22 OCTOBER 1859, died 8 DECEMBER 1930. AGE 73 ON 18 DECEMBER 1930 MEANS BORN ABOUT 1857; THE STONE MAKES HIM 71. Neither is a baptism, and both are at one remove — an age is what an informant said, and a stone is cut after the fact by somebody working from a family memory. THE STONE'S PHOTOGRAPH IS BEHIND A PAYWALL, so its transcription has not been checked against the cutting, and the ten-day gap between the two death dates may be nothing more than a volunteer dropping a “1” from “18”. THE BLOEMFONTEIN OR FAURESMITH BAPTISM REGISTER WOULD END IT and he is not in the index. WHAT HE WAS TO THE FAMILY: he took church membership at Bloemfontein on 6 May 1882, and he was a widower when he died, so his wife went first. THE INFORMANT AT HIS DEATH WAS A PIENAAR — the signature reads W. J. PIENAAR, of 77 St John's Road, Bloemfontein — and the Commandant's eldest daughter CATHARINA WILHELMINA married JOHANNES PETRUS PIENAAR at Bloemfontein on 8 October 1860. A NEPHEW REPORTING HIS UNCLE'S DEATH WOULD LOOK EXACTLY LIKE THIS, AND PIENAAR IS ONE OF THE COMMONEST SURNAMES IN THAT DISTRICT. It is written down because it is suggestive, and it is not adopted.

Fourth on the 1876 notice.

Third of the seven children on the 1891 Sterfkennis, of age by then and not traced since. She is not the Anna Catharina Grobelaar of the 1908 notice — the forenames do not agree — and this archive has not settled whether they are the same woman.

Eighth and last on the 1876 notice, named for her mother Anna Maria van der Merwe.

First on his father's 1876 death notice, and a major — and now with a date. His baptism of 4 JANUARY 1807 names his parents as PIETER JACOBUS BOOIJZEN and ANNA MARIA VAN DER MERWE, which is the only document in this archive that puts Anna Maria in the family at all. His father was eighteen when he was born. He married ADRIANA CHRISTINA VILJOEN — on 3 NOVEMBER 1828 AT CRADOCK, a date and a place this archive did not have until WikiTree was read on 13 September 2026, and FROM WIKITREE, NOT FROM A DOCUMENT THIS ARCHIVE HAS READ — and named a daughter ANNA MARIA in 1835, after his own mother. His nephew, born 1848, carries the same name — the two are told apart only by a generation.

Fourth of the seven children on the 1891 Sterfkennis. Of age by 1891, and absent from her father's 1908 notice, which names only four children — so she probably died in between.

Sixth on the 1876 notice.

Seventh on the 1876 notice — and the man who signed it, four lines under his own name, beside the veldkornet. His own death notice, TAB estate 14380, names HIS mother as ELIZABETHA BOOYSEN, BORN VAN DER MERWE — which resolves this archive’s oldest “Serious” contradiction, because his father’s recorded wife Anna Maria van der Merwe died three years before he was born. A FARMER, “Dutch”, married twice — Anna Catharina Johanna Olivier, then Charlotta Elizabetha Dormehl — and married last at ZEERUST, in the district of Marico. He died in his son-in-law’s house.

Dead at twenty-nine on his father's farm, FIVE DAYS AFTER HIS MOTHER, and unknown to this archive until his notice was read. Sterfkennis 6361: landbouwer, ongehuwd, movables only and not above £25, and line 3 names his parents — Hendrick Stefanus Booijsen and Anna Catrena gebooren Oliefier. He is the seventh child on his mother's list and the first Booysen this archive has documented as BORN in the Transvaal.

THE MAN THE BOOK PUTS WHERE THE DOCUMENT PUTS SOMEBODY ELSE. b3c4 — son of Gerrit Booijsen and Johanna du Rand; burgher at Drakenstein; MARRIED MAGDALENA DE BEER 21 JANUARY 1770 and remarried MARGARETHA PRETORIUS 15 DECEMBER 1793, which is how this archive knows the de Beer wife was dead by then. De Villiers (1893) gives him twelve children, of whom d5 is JAN JONATHAN, d6 MAGDALENA and d7 PETRUS JACOBUS, BAPTISED 21 SEPTEMBER 1788 — this archive's own ancestor. RIËL SMIT CONFIRMS THAT DE VILLIERS & PAMA (1981) STILL PLACES HIM THERE. Pieter van Zyl notes he was dead more than forty years before Petrus Jacobus died in 1876, which is why the grandson who signed the death notice could write somebody else's name in the parents' box. HE IS ENTERED AS INFERRED AND NOT AS DOCUMENTED, because two editions of one printed genealogy are one source agreeing with itself, and the primary document on this site says Gerthardus Lodewikus. The baptism register of 21 September 1788 decides between them.

Fifth on his father’s 1876 notice, and named for the man at the top of the line. HIS is the estate TAB MHG O/2899, which this archive had spent months attributing to his nephew of the same name born in 1855 — the Transvaal probate index gives him as the deceased, aged 67, born district Graaff-Reinet, died 25 May 1885 at Vaalbank in the district of Lichtenburg. His daughter Magdalena Susanna Maria died on the same farm in 1920, and her death notice names him. He is how this family reaches the western Transvaal.

b3c4d5 — the eldest of the three siblings whose marriages braid this family into the Viljoens. Burgher at Graaff-Reinet; MARRIED 28 MAY 1797 to JUDITH CORNELIA THERESIA VILJOEN, three months after his sister Magdalena married that woman's brother Hercules Albertus. A BROTHER AND A SISTER MARRIED A SISTER AND A BROTHER IN ONE YEAR. Seven children, and the sixth is JUDITH CORNELIA THERESIA, BAPTISED 16 AUGUST 1807 — b3c4d5e6, the code this archive resolved last week to settle a Johannesburg gravestone. She carries her mother's three names entire, and her mother was a Viljoen.

Second on the 1876 notice, named for her mother Magdalena de Beer. A niece born 1853 carries the name again.

Named on her mother's 1900 death notice. The married surname is written and this archive cannot read it.

Squeezed in between the lines of her mother's death notice after it had been written, with the words DIED MINOR against her. She carries her mother's names exactly.

Baptised at Rustenburg on 30 January 1882, son of Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen and Elisabetta Johanna Sophia Myburgh — and named for his uncle, who was then twenty and would be dead at Brakfontein before the boy turned ten. He outlived that uncle by sixty-eight years.

Baptised Graaff-Reinet, and absent from her mother's 1863 death notice — she died first.

Baptised at Barkly Oost 24 May 1891, entry 120, named for her mother entire, and fourteen when her father died at Indwe. She married Joseph Heinrich Daschner AT INDWE — the same village — and his 1942 death notice names her “born Booyzen”, with a z, in a Johannesburg typist’s hands. Eleven children, five of them carrying Booyzen and Barry forenames. She died in the Transvaal in 1946 — estate TAB MHG 3734/46, found only when this archive finally searched outside the Cape, and still to be read.

PRISONER OF WAR. A printed transport list in the Pretoria government archives, image group 008019246, carries THREE CONSECUTIVE BOOYZENS shipped on the CITY OF CAMBRIDGE on 3 JUNE 1901, all entered from PRETORIA: 18463 STEPHANUS FRANCOIS, 28 · 18464 PETRUS JACOBUS, 29 · 18465 DAVID SCHALK, 54. Consecutive numbers on one transport means taken together. Age 54 against a birth of 9 June 1848, which would have made him 52 and six days short of 53 when the ship sailed. THE FULLER REGISTER WAS THEN FOUND, and it is better than the De List in every respect: item 1 of the same film, image 126, gives all three as living at PRETORIA, riding with the PRETORIA COMMANDO, and TAKEN AT TOLOSBERG ON 25 APRIL 1901. Its ages are 26, 27 and 53, which match this archive's own dates where the De List's 28, 29 and 54 did not. If it is him, he was a Transvaal burgher in arms at fifty-two, taken and deported, and he came back — he remarried at Pretoria in November 1905. Fourth on the 1863 list, and THE DIRECT ANCESTOR'S BROTHER — Willem Hermanus is sixth on the same list. For the whole of this project he was a line on that list and nothing else. His wife's 1900 death notice gives him a household: married ELIZABETHA MARGARETHA MARAIS at LADY GREY, the same small Cape church where his brother married Kathleen Barry in 1879; eight children; and by 1900 he was at Pretoria, living in a zinc building in Market Street. He signed her notice there in March 1904 — and on 27 NOVEMBER 1905 he married again at Pretoria, to JOHANNA ELENA STOLS, widow Lowies, of Skinners Court. He was 56, a widower of GOEDE HOOP, PRETORIA, and the register gives his birthplace as CRADOCK. The Remarks column cites his remarriage certificate from the Master, NO. 4795 — which is the number of his first wife’s death notice, so the two documents point at each other and the identification needs no inference. His own death is still not found.

A KARWEIER — a transport rider — of Zwartruggens, and a son of Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen and Elizabeth Johanna Sophia Myburgh. His Sterfkennis 87882 is the first document in this archive printed in Afrikaans rather than Dutch or English, and the first Booysen estate here worth more than £300. He married Elizabeth Anna Bronkhorst, widow Joubert, in community of property; their youngest son carries his grandfather’s name.

THE ONE DOCUMENT THAT NAMES HIM HAS BEEN WEAKENED, AND BY SOMEBODY WHO HAD NOT SEEN IT. On 14 September 2026 PIETER VAN ZYL, answering this archive’s G2G question, guessed that the 1876 informant had reached for a name already in the household — and added, from memory, that he thought a CHILD of Petrus Jacobus was called Gerhardus Lodewicus. HE IS RIGHT, AND THE CHILD IS ON THE SAME SHEET: line 12 of that very notice names JAN GERTHARDUS LODEWIKUS BOOIJSEN among the eight children. So the name this archive takes from LINE 3, for the dead man’s FATHER, is the back half of his SON’S name, eight lines below, in one clerk’s hand — and the half that is dropped, JAN, is the name de Villiers gives as the real father. THIS DOES NOT PROVE THE FATHER WAS JAN and this archive is not swapping one unproved father for another. It removes the only document that has ever carried this name from the evidence for him. The top of the male line is now held up by less than it was this morning. He still has no birth date, no death date, and no parents: the oldest open question on this site is about him. 15 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND THE LAST ESCAPE ROUTE IS CLOSED. This archive's standing objection was that de Villiers's 1893 original was revised by Pama in 1981, and a revision can move a man; if the 1981 edition had relocated Petrus Jacobus, the death notice would stand. RIËL SMIT, WHO HAS THE 1981 EDITION: “Yes, DE VILLIERS & PAMA (1981) STILL PLACE PETRUS JACOBUS (b3c4d7) b. 21 SEPT 1788 UNDER JAN b3c4.” Pieter van Zyl adds that he SEARCHED FOR A MARRIAGE BETWEEN A GERHARDUS LODEWICUS AND A MAGDALENA DE BEER AND COULD NOT FIND ONE. FOUR THINGS NOW POINT ONE WAY and the only thing pointing the other is line 3 of Notice 678. THE SPINE IS STILL NOT BEING MOVED ON THIS: everything against him is a printed genealogy agreeing with its own earlier edition, and what he has is a primary document signed by a son. WHAT ENDS IT IS THE BAPTISM ENTRY OF 21 SEPTEMBER 1788 — the register de Villiers compiled his entry from, naming the father in a contemporary hand. It is now the first item on the errands page.

Youngest on the 1863 list, five years old when her mother died.

The eldest of the eight children on the 1863 death notice, and the only one entered as a Major. Estate TAB MHG 52653 — he ended in the Transvaal. WikiTree gives him a wife this archive did not have at all: JACOMINA JACOBA JANSEN VAN RENSBURG, married 12 FEBRUARY 1866 AT MIDDELBURG. FROM WIKITREE, NOT FROM A DOCUMENT THIS ARCHIVE HAS READ, and the profile contradicts itself — its own source line dates that marriage 1899, not 1866. Recorded as a lead and not adopted.

Seventh on the 1863 list, and carries the name of the man at the top of the line. THIS ARCHIVE HAD HIM DYING IN 1885 AND HAS TAKEN IT BACK: estate TAB MHG O/2899 belongs to his uncle of the same name, born 1818, and the death date was never anything but the estate’s year read backwards onto the wrong man. Nothing is known about what became of him — AND THERE IS NOW ONE PLACE TO LOOK. A JGL BOOYZEN countersigned the money papers of a farm school at KWAGGAFONTEIN, DISTRICT MARICO, through 1898 and into 1899: the subsidy application, the book orders, all four quarterly returns, the writing-off of a £61-6-0 deficit, and a letter arguing that the government had paid £8 too little. The elder man of these initials was thirteen years dead by then. This one would have been forty-two, and Marico adjoins the district his uncle died in. IT IS A CANDIDATE AND NOT AN IDENTIFICATION — the index gives initials, a farm and a post office, and Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus is one of the commonest name-strings in the surname. The file itself would carry a signature.

Second on the 1863 list, named for her mother — and now dated. The Dutch Reformed index gives her born 15 May 1844 and baptised at BRAK RIVIER on 4 August 1844, which is the farm her father was still on nineteen years later when her mother died there.

Sixth on the 1863 list.

Signed his father’s 1908 death notice as “son of the deceased” — thirty-two years after his father had signed his own father’s at Brakfontein. Second of the seven children on his mother’s 1891 notice, and he carries HER father’s name: Ocken Johannes Oliefier. Confirmed at Rustenburg on 3 April 1869, the same day as his brother Petrus Jacobus. He died at Klerksdorp on 16 January 1921, aged 69 — a civil registration, which names no parents.

Married at about seventeen; died a widower in the Transvaal, eighty-eight years old, on a farm called Brakfontein. His Sterfkennis — No. 678, written 14 September 1876 — is the oldest document about this family that this archive has read, it names his parents, and it lists eight children. Estate: NOTHING. “Niets nagelaten. Niets bekend.”

Farmer at Zevenfontein, Brak River. Signed his wife's 1863 death notice. Died fifteen years before the war.

Third child. Baptised Graaff-Reinet.

SIX MONTHS OLD — not “0 days”, which is what the index says and what this archive printed for an afternoon. The register keeps Years, Months and Days in three columns and the 6 sits in Months. Hers was a BOUGHT grave, marked Private. The earliest Booyzen burial this archive has found at Brixton, and the beginning of a family plot that would take four more over the next twenty years.

A TWELFTH CHILD, AND THE ONLY WORD CUT FOR HER OR HIM IS “BABA”. The centre pillar of the Silverton stone lists twelve children by their household names; the 1940 estate lists eleven by their registered ones; and when the two are set side by side EVERY ONE OF THE ELEVEN IS CLAIMED EXACTLY ONCE, leaving “✝ BABA” — a birth star, a cross, and no name — with nothing to match. Not on the estate because the child was already dead when it was written. NO DATE, NO SEX, NO NAME, NO ORDER beyond the stone's own. This archive has met the shape before: Joseph Heinrich Daschner's 1942 notice named eleven children and the Brixton register produced a twelfth. A death notice lists the living; a gravestone, cut by the family, lists the children.

BETIE ON THE SILVERTON PILLAR, AND THE ONLY ONE OF THE SIX MISSING CHILDREN WHO CAN BE FOUND. Her husband has a name: TAB MHG 4300/51 — “VERMEULEN, MICHAEL JOHANNES, 1951. PREDECEASED SPOUSE ELSIE KATRINA VERMEULEN. SURVIVING SPOUSE BEATRIX MAGDALENA CATHARINA VERMEULEN (BORN BOOYZEN).” So she was his SECOND wife, and SHE OUTLIVED HIM. Found not by looking for her but by putting VERMEULEN and BOOYZEN to the index together — the same relationship trick that opened the Kolbes. Named for her mother. THE ESTATE IS NOT READ. 15 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND NOW THE YEAR SHE MARRIED HIM. The Marriage Transcription Database indexed by gendatabase.com: “1933 · MICHAEL JOHANNES VERMEULEN × BEATRIX MAGDALENA CATHARINA BOOYZEN”. She was found through a 1951 estate index that named her only as his SURVIVING spouse and his second wife; this is the same marriage from the other end, eighteen years earlier.

Baptised at Indwe 22 September 1910, entry 12, entered ONECHT and GRATIS — the fee waived. Named for her godmother Catharina Willemina Levina Buitendag, who stood at both of her father’s children’s fonts.

Orphaned at eighteen. The hinge to the Lerena archive, and the starting point of this one.

Carries the Kolbe name three generations after the 1820 Settler — AND HE HYPHENATED IT. The family tree recorded his wife Maria Jacoba Smit, married 1921, under the compound surname KOLBE-BOOYSEN, and this archive filed that as a tree oddity with nothing behind it. The Eastern Province Herald prints it twice. 16 OCTOBER 1944: “SAWTELLE – KOLBY-BOOYSEN. The engagement has been announced between LEVINA (FINNIE), only daughter of Mr and Mrs D. KOLBE-BOOYSEN, of PORT ELIZABETH, to Raymond Patrick, only son of Mrs D. Sawtelle, of Cambridge, England.” 19 APRIL 1945: “KOLBE-BOOYSEN – KRUGER. To be married at St Cuthbert's Church, Bingley Street, Port Elizabeth… Hilda, only daughter of Lieut. and Mrs F. Kruger of Heidelburg, Transvaal, to WILLIAM (S.A.A.F.), son of Mr and Mrs D. KOLBE-BOOYSEN, of Port Elizabeth.” A TOWN AND TWO CHILDREN, from two notices six months apart — and the engagement spells the headline KOLBY and the body KOLBE, four words from each other.

BESSIE ON THE SILVERTON PILLAR. The 1940 estate says only that she married a Bekker; the eGGSA index gives “BEKKER IGNATIUS MICHAEL 1908–1981 & ELIZABETHA MARGARETHA BOOYZEN 1909–1982” IN SILVERTON MAIN CEMETERY — the same ground as her parents. Name, surname of the husband, cemetery and a plausible birth all agree, and she is the only one in the collection. A MATCH, NOT A DOCUMENT. FROM THE INDEX; no image read.

Named for his mother's father, EVERT PHILIP BOSHOFF. The Boshoff grandparents are the only two people in this household whose names are accounted for without argument.

Buried West Park three days later. Boomkweker, then Clerk, South African Railways. Married his first cousin once removed.

Youngest on his mother's 1943 notice. Baptised 10 July 1910, and named for his father — Gert is the short form of Gerhardus.

Six hours old, Turf Club Nursing Home. Entry 3920, a different hospital and a different cemetery. Two children, one year apart, on the same date.

Four days old, Queen Victoria Hospital. Entry 4256 — not the same child as the Gertrude of 1947.

Daughter of Willem Hermanus and Kathleen Barry.

Named on the 1940 estate and nowhere else.

AND NOW THERE IS A REGISTER. The G2G question this archive posted on 13 September was answered within eighteen hours by PIETER VAN ZYL, who put the baptism on the profile: “South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Registers (Cape Town Archives)”, ark 1:1:6KPT-T3Z4 — HENRY JAMES BOOŸSEN, BORN 12 AUGUST 1887, BAPTISED 27 NOVEMBER 1887, parents WILLEM HERMANUS BOOŸSEN and CATHARINA MARIA SOPHIA BARRY. Verified here against the index directly. The 12 August 1887 has now travelled from a family tree, to a gravestone, to a church register, in that order, which is the wrong way round and is how it usually goes. THE SAME ANSWER ALSO SAYS he was A CARPENTER WHEN HE MARRIED and A RETIRED MINER OF LANGLAAGTE ESTATES when he died, OF PHTHISIS — and this archive has CORONARY PULMONARY SCLEROSIS off the Johannesburg burial register. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — THE DOCUMENT IS READ, AND BOTH REPORTS WERE WRONG. His FORM OF INFORMATION OF A DEATH, South Africa Civil Death Registration 1953–1967, film 007751812 image 356, FamilySearch 1:1:6Z9Q-2TFG — the image itself, not the index. PHTHISIS IS ON LINE 11, WHICH IS “PENSIONER OR RECIPIENT OF MAINTENANCE ALLOWANCE”. IT IS NOT HIS CAUSE OF DEATH; IT IS THE ALLOWANCE HE DREW, as a certified miners’ phthisis pensioner. LINE 12, CAUSES OF DEATH, READS “COR PULMONALE WITH SILICOSIS”, with “CONTRIBUTING CAUSE: BRONCHO PNEUMONIA”, after an illness of TWO YEARS and a final SEVEN DAYS. AND THE BURIAL REGISTER’S “CORONARY PULMONARY SCLEROSIS” IS A MANGLING OF THAT SAME LINE — cor pulmonale became coronary pulmonary, silicosis became sclerosis. ONE SHEET OF PAPER, TWO WRONG READINGS, AND THIS ARCHIVE WAS CARRYING BOTH. The form also gives: IDENTITY NUMBER 331-452322; his own DATE OF BIRTH AS 12-8-1887, which is the fourth independent statement of it after a tree, a gravestone and a church register; RESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 3 FIFTEENTH AVENUE, MAYFAIR, JOHANNESBURG — the parish where his niece married Nuno Lerena seven years earlier; place of birth CAPE PROVINCE; medical practitioner DR A. L. AGRANAT; and an informant at 6 JORISSEN STREET, BRAAMFONTEIN described only as “PERSON CAUSING BURIAL”, which the form distinguishes from a relative. AND HIS STONE SETTLES THE BIRTH. WEST PARK, Johannesburg: “HIER RUS — MY DIERBARE EGGENOOT — HENRY JAMES — GEB. 12.8.1887 — OORL. 8.12.1956 — RUS IN VREDE”, over the surname BOOYZEN. The 12 August 1887 this archive carried marked FROM WIKITREE AND NOT FROM A DOCUMENT is now on his own gravestone, and the death matches the burial register to the day. “My dierbare eggenoot” — the stone was raised by his widow, Dorothea Regina. HIS GRAVE IS PHOTOGRAPHED: “BOOYZEN HENRY JAMES 1887-1956”, WEST PARK CEMETERY, Johannesburg — matching the burial register this archive read and the 12 August 1887 birth WikiTree gives. IMAGE LOCATED, NOT YET READ. A son of Willem Hermanus and Kathleen Barry. WikiTree gives his birth as 12 AUGUST 1887 and his marriage as 17 JUNE 1912 AT ELLIOT, neither of which this archive had—bothFROM WIKITREE, NOT FROM A DOCUMENT THIS ARCHIVE HAS READ, and the “c. 1887” below is this archive’s own figure, worked back from an age on a burial register. This archive had him as a name on Transvaal estate MHG 10/57 and nothing else — not a birth, not a death. The Johannesburg cemetery register gives all of it: DIED 8 DECEMBER 1956 at the FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE NURSING HOME of CORONARY PULMONARY SCLEROSIS, aged 69, usual residence 3 15TH AVENUE, MAYFAIR — the same suburb where his mother died in 1940 and where his great-niece was married at St Joseph’s in 1949. Buried 12 December in the D.R. section, GRAVE 7110/1, a double plot. In 1912 he married Dorothea Regina Barry, a daughter of his mother's brother Hendrik Nicholaas — the third Barry–Booyzen union in three generations.

Named on the 1940 estate and nowhere else.

NOT THIS FAMILY, and recorded here on purpose. Death notice 6167 — the oldest Booyzen estate paper in the Cape Master's series, and a generation older in form than anything else this archive has read. Widow of Charles du Plessis; one daughter, married to Benjamin Solomon; “no property whatever except a Bond amounting per balance to £15”. Line 3 answers “both dead”. She is here because she was born in 1754 and died in 1843 — the only two dates this archive has for Magdelena Elisabeth de Beer, both off the family tree with no source stated — and because somebody will one day find her and decide she is the same woman. She is not. Her name is not Magdelena, not Elisabeth, and not de Beer.

Baptised at Barkly Oost 15 Sep 1889 with both maternal grandparents standing as godparents — and on the facing page of the same register, the Mountjoy baptism three weeks later.

HIS GRAVE IS READ, and it gives both dates at once. BRENTHURST CEMETERY, BRAKPAN: “IN LIEFDE HERINNERING — AAN ONS VADER — JOHN BARRY BOOYZEN — ★ 26.4.1884 — † 23.1.1952 — RUS SAG.”, cut by Pretoria Grafstene. This archive had “c. 1884” and NO DEATH AT ALL. It now has 26 APRIL 1884 and 23 JANUARY 1952 — the latter matching estate TAB MHG 769/52, a file still unread on a blocked film. “Aan ons vader”: he left children. AND NOW HE HAS A DEATH AND A PLACE. “BOOYZEN JOHN BARRY 1884-1952”, BRENTHURST CEMETERY, BRAKPAN. This archive had him as “c. 1884” with no death at all, and an estate number — TAB MHG 769/52 — on a film that will not open. The stone gives 1884-1952, which matches both the estimate and the estate year, and puts him on the East Rand rather than in Johannesburg. IMAGE LOCATED, NOT YET READ. Eldest son. Present at his father's death in 1905 and the informant — he signs Booyzen four lines under the clerk's Booysen.

Second child. Birth date corrected from 1 October on her mother’s 1944 death notice.

HIS STONE IS READ AND IT CONFIRMS BOTH DATES EXACTLY: “HIER RUS — MY GELIEFDE SEUN — PIETER J. BOOYZEN — GEB. 29 DES. 1904 — OORL. 7 JUNIE 1937 — NA DIE KRUIS DIE KROON.” Dead at thirty-two. AND ONE WORD OF IT DOES REAL WORK: “MY geliefde seun”, not “ONS”. A stone cut by ONE surviving parent — and his mother Isabella Frederika had been dead seven years when he died, so the parent is his father, GERT JACOBUS, who then lay down beside them both fourteen years later. Three of one household in one cemetery, and the grammar of the inscriptions gives the order they went in. Baptised in the Dutch Reformed register with a Z, son of Gert Jacobus Booyzen and Isabella Frederika Coetzee — the second marriage's line, at Middelburg, spelled Booyzen a year before the Indwe sheet.

Sixth child.

TWENTY-FOUR, MARRIED, a SAWYER of 18 Anderson Street, Turffontein — dead of INFLUENZA AND PNEUMONIA after eleven days on 25 October 1918, the centre of Black October, and buried at Brixton on the 27th. Not in this archive before today. Added as a ninth child of Willem Hermanus and Kathleen Barry on three grounds and no document: RICHARD PETER is her own brother's name; a birth about 1894 falls exactly in the gap between her daughter of 1891 and her son of 1901; and his registration gives his birthplace as the CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, which is the migration every one of her children made. A Transvaal death registration names no parents, so this stays INFERRED. And he was NOT A SOLDIER — which kills the best explanation this archive had for his mother's military pension.

THE STONE IS NOW READ, and it is the fullest document this archive has for him. SILVERTON, PRETORIA, a double stone under one base reading BOOYZEN: “'n SIMBOOL VAN LIEFDE — AAN MY DIERBARE EGGENOOT EN ONS VADER — STEFANUS FRANCOIS — ✳ 29-9-1874, † 14-5-1940 — Sy plek is leeg, sy stem is stil, ons swyg o'Heer, dit is Gods wil. Ges. 75:1”. HIS BIRTH IS NOW EXACT: 29 SEPTEMBER 1874, where this archive had only “c. October 1874”. And a pillar between the two halves lists TWELVE CHILDREN by their household names — OUBOET · OUSIE · BESSIE · BETIE · HENNA · EVERT · ✝BABA · FANIE · WILLIE · PIETIE · JOHAN · HENNIE — one of them marked dead with a cross. This archive had almost none of them. They are nicknames, not names on a register, and nothing is claimed from them beyond the count. HIS GRAVE IS FOUND AND PHOTOGRAPHED: “BOOYZEN STEFANUS FRANCOIS 1874-1940”, SILVERTON MAIN CEMETERY, PRETORIA — a joint stone with his wife, “BOOYZEN BEATRIX MAGDALENA CATHARINA NEE BOSHOFF 1889-1977”. Both dates match this archive exactly, and hers is the first death year it has had for her. He died at East Lynne, Pretoria, and lies at Silverton. IMAGE LOCATED, NOT YET READ. PRISONER OF WAR. A printed transport list in the Pretoria government archives, image group 008019246, carries THREE CONSECUTIVE BOOYZENS shipped on the CITY OF CAMBRIDGE on 3 JUNE 1901, all entered from PRETORIA: 18463 STEPHANUS FRANCOIS, 28 · 18464 PETRUS JACOBUS, 29 · 18465 DAVID SCHALK, 54. Consecutive numbers on one transport means taken together. Age 28 against this archive's c. October 1874, which would have made him 26. THE FULLER REGISTER WAS THEN FOUND, and it is better than the De List in every respect: item 1 of the same film, image 126, gives all three as living at PRETORIA, riding with the PRETORIA COMMANDO, and TAKEN AT TOLOSBERG ON 25 APRIL 1901. Its ages are 26, 27 and 53, which match this archive's own dates where the De List's 28, 29 and 54 did not. AND THEN THE PRISONER NUMBER LED SOMEWHERE ELSE ENTIRELY. The medal-roll database at angloboerwar.com holds an entry for a STEPHANUS FRANCOIS BOOYSEN, BURGER, whose PoW number is 18463 — the same number as the register — and it says he was a ZARP, one of the ZAR's police, based at PRETORIA. Quoting a City Coins auction catalogue of November 2020 that described his ABO medal and the papers with it: in action at TALANA, MODDER SPRUIT, COLENSO, PLATRAND (WAGON HILL) where he was WOUNDED IN THE RIGHT LEG ABOVE THE KNEE, SPION KOP and DALMANUTHA — the ZARPs' famous last stand. His applications were completed by his commanding officer, COMMANDANT J. P. DE LA C. SCHROEDER. He was one of FORTY-TWO Boers taken at Tolosberg in the Waterval Valley on 25 April 1901, with two guns and much stock, and was sent to INDIA. This archive has NOT seen the medal or the application; it is strong secondary evidence tied to the register by the number and not by the name. WHAT IT DOES TO THE DISPUTE: he is numbered 18463 and David Schalk Booysen is 18465, two apart on the same transport on the same day, and this man died at EAST LYNNE, PRETORIA, which is the district all three were taken in. That is a FOURTH point favouring David Schalk as his father, and the first that does not depend on a forename. It is still not a document naming a parent. PARENTAGE DISPUTED — see below. A son of the second marriage, and a MESSELAAR — a mason, like his half-brother Willem Hermanus at Indwe. His 1940 Sterfkennis was fetched because it should have named his mother; his widow wrote only “oorlede” for both parents. Married BEATRIX MAGDALENA CATHARINA BOSHOFF at Mosselbaai on 5 SEPTEMBER 1905, certificate 1318 — he 30 and a JONKMAN, she SIXTEEN with her parents consenting. Eleven children; left immovable property and a will. THE REGISTER GIVES HIS RESIDENCE AS PRETORIA, and eleven weeks later David Schalk Booijzen of Goede Hoop, Pretoria — whose 1900 notice names an unmarried major son called Stephanus François — remarried in that same city. This archive placed him under Petrus Jacobus on his birth year alone. It is marked SERIOUS on the disputed page and it is not decided.

Married a Luus. Named for her mother's mother, SUSANNA FREDERIKA ALETTA MEYER — one of two children on this list called straight after the Boshoff grandparents.

WILLIE ON THE SILVERTON PILLAR, and the weakest of the five matches made today: “BOOYZEN WILLIE 1920–2000 & ENID MOUTON 1926–2000” in Silverton main cemetery. The stone gives only the household name, which is the one thing that cannot distinguish him from a nephew — and a WILLIE BOSHOFF BOOYZEN 1962–1993 lies in the same cemetery carrying his grandmother’s maiden name, so there is more than one Willie there. THE CEMETERY AND THE DATE FIT AND NOTHING ELSE DOES. FROM THE INDEX; no image read.

Farmer in 1879, mason in 1905. Died of an ulcer of the stomach after fourteen months — he was not shot by the British.

Eldest of the Johannesburg family.

THE STONE IS NOW READ, and it says more than its index line. “IN DANKBARE HULDE AAN ONS GELIEFDE VADER EN OUPA — GERT JACOBUS BOOYZEN — GEB. 19 JAN. 1870 — OORL. 2_ AUG. 1951 — SY GENADE WAS VIR MY GENOEG.” THE BIRTH DAY MATCHES THIS ARCHIVE EXACTLY, and from a source that is not the death notice it came from: 19 January 1870, cut in granite. THE DEATH IS NOW A MONTH instead of a year — AUGUST 1951 — and the day is a 2 followed by a digit this archive cannot read off the photograph, so it is not guessed. VADER EN OUPA: he was a grandfather, which no document here had said. AND THE LAST LINE IS IN THE FIRST PERSON — “His grace was enough for ME” — a widower’s sentence, cut twenty-one years after his wife died. HIS GRAVE IS PHOTOGRAPHED. The eGGSA gravestone library holds “BOOYZEN GERT JACOBUS 1870-1951” in the MIDDELBURG MAIN CEMETERY, Eastern Cape — born 1870 and dead in 1951, which is the year of estate TAB MHG 5155/51, the file this archive has been trying to read on blocked film. He is buried a few stones from his wife. IMAGE LOCATED, NOT YET READ. The only child entered on his father's 1884 death notice, and born seven years after the first wife died — so a child of the second marriage. He married Isabella Frederika Coetsee at Middelburg on 23 March 1896, and his own son was baptised BOOYZEN, with a z, in 1904.

HER HALF OF THE SILVERTON STONE READS: “AAN ONS DIERBARE MOEDER — BEATRIX MAGDALENA CATHARINA (GEB. BOSHOFF) — ✳ 18-7-1888, † 23-5-1977 — Deur Jesus was vrede behaal, sy kruisdood het alles betaal. Ges. 12:6”. THE DEATH IS NEW AND THE BIRTH DISAGREES WITH THIS ARCHIVE. Her baptism at Mossel Bay on 16 February 1890 gives her born 16 JUNE 1889; the stone says 18 JULY 1888, and the eGGSA index transcribes it 1889. A baptism register written weeks after the event outranks a stone cut eighty-eight years later, so this archive keeps 1889 — and records the disagreement rather than hiding it. BURIED AT SILVERTON, PRETORIA, on a joint stone with her husband: “nee BOSHOFF 1889-1977”. The birth year matches her 1890 Mossel Bay baptism and 1977 is a death year this archive did not have. IMAGE LOCATED, NOT YET READ. His widow, who signed the 1940 death notice at Pretoria on 26 July 1940 — and who could not name her husband's parents. SHE WAS SIXTEEN when she married him at Mosselbaai on 5 September 1905, with her parents consenting; he was thirty. Her own parents were EVERT PHILIP BOSHOFF and SUSANNA FREDERIKA ALETTA MEYER, named on her 1890 baptism — and two of her eleven children are called straight after them.

Her father, named on her 1890 baptism at Mossel Bay with Susanna Frederika Aletta Meyer. Two of his grandchildren carry his names and hers.

Named as her daughter's mother on the 1891 Sterfkennis. A fourth Botha marriage in this archive, and none of them yet joined to another.

Her mother, and Hercules Johannes Mountjoy’s mother-in-law — the only Cape probate hit that comes up under his name, because his name is written on her form. Aged 58 years 5 months. Parents Philip Rudolph Botha and a mother carrying the same four names. Eleven children, one of them called Hercules Johannes van Niekerk.

Richard Pieter Barry's wife, named on their son's 1898 baptism at Barkly West.

Ruben Schoeman's wife.

George Mountjoy's wife. Most likely the “Maria Sophia Mountjoy” standing witness at the 1889 font, aged 62.

Named in line 3 of the 1902 notice as the father of Carolina Deybella Margrietta Alletta Botha, of the district of Cradock.

Sixth of the seven children on the 1891 Sterfkennis, carrying the name that comes down from Magdalena Elisabeth de Beer. Absent from the 1908 notice.

His wife, married in community of property, and a widow before him — her first husband Joubert died 31 January 1916, leaving her two children whom somebody at the Master’s Office marked in pencil as NOT the deceased’s. She signed the 1935 Sterfkennis herself, as nagelate weduwee.

THE ONLY CHILD ON HIS MOTHER’S DEATH NOTICE, and the person whose absence from a 1938 account is the one argument against her parentage. Wilhelmina Ernestina died at twenty in June 1898 leaving him a minor; he is named once, at question nine, and nowhere else in this archive. IF HIS MOTHER WAS A DAUGHTER OF JAMES JONATHAN MOUNTJOY, he should have taken a share of that man’s estate in 1938 the way Gwendoline and Aubrey Diesel took their dead mother’s — and no Brummer is in the account. He would have been about forty. NOTHING IS KNOWN OF HIM AFTER 1898, and whether he was alive in 1938 is the open question, not a claim.

NOT ONE OF THE TEN, AND SHE TURNED UP ANYWAY — AND SHE MARRIED AT BARKLY OOST. Her Sterfkennis, in Afrikaans, is image 469 of 916 in the Transvaal probate volume for 1931. Born at BARKLY OOST, KAAP KOLONIE; a HUISVROU; married to GEORGE MOUNTJOY, and the place of the marriage is given as BARKLY OOST too; dead on the Witwatersrand in the district of Krugersdorp at thirty-eight. HER PARENTS ARE NAMED, WHICH IS RARE IN THIS SURNAME: Vader JACOB STEFANUS BUIS, overlede; Moeder MARIA ELIZABETH DOROTHEA BUIS, geb. COETZEE, overlede. They are hers, not the Mountjoys’. FOUR MINOR CHILDREN, with exact birth dates: Maria Elizabeth, 1 December 1914; Maria Sophia, 11 August 1916; Carolina Isabella Margrieta Elizabeth Aletta, 31 August 1920; Herculaas Johannes, 18 March 1924. Named and not made into people. THE FORENAMES ARE THIS FAMILY’S AND THE TOWN IS THIS FAMILY’S, WHICH IS EXACTLY WHY NOTHING IS CLAIMED. Carolina Isabella Margrieta Elizabeth Aletta and Herculaas Johannes are both names this archive already carries for OTHER children in OTHER years — 1896, 1901, 1904 — and a repeated forename in a family that repeats forenames is the weakest evidence there is. Which George Mountjoy she married is not stated on her form, and this archive holds more than one.

Godmother at Indwe in 1908 and again in 1910, to two children of the same father by two different mothers — and the second child carries her whole name.

Second of the three children of George Augustus Kolbe and Anna Maria Viljoen found in the Burgersdorp register. FamilySearch 1:1:6FWV-27JX, image 745. SISTER OF THE MAN BURIED AT WAKKERSTROOM. NOT FOLLOWED OUT OF THE FONT.

The third godparent at the 1853 Barry font, and the only one who is not a Kolbe. A VAN DER MERWE standing at a Barry christening at Burgersdorp — a surname this archive has been chasing on the entirely other side of the family, among the Booysens of Graaff-Reinet. Not connected, and set down so the coincidence is on the record.

THE SECOND GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE OF WAKKERSTROOM, and the reason this archive had to withdraw a claim within the hour. His stone: “IN LIEFVOLLE HERINNERING AAN ONS OUERS — GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE — GEB. 2 OKTOBER 1861 — OORL. 8 NOVEMBER 1934 — EN SUSANNA MARGARETHA KOLBE — GEB. 26 OKTOBER 1861 — OORL. 28 JULIE 1940 — HULLE RUS.” BORN AT BURGERSDORP, which is where the 1820 Settler is buried and where the Settler's twin son George Augustus was born in 1836; the descent is not documented here and is not claimed. He is buried at WAKKERSTROOM although he died at Standerton, in the same cemetery as the other man of his name, TWO YEARS APART IN BIRTH AND TWENTY IN DEATH. AND THE BIRTH DATE DECIDES THE PRISONER: the 1902 POW record of WO 108/368 gives a George Augustus Kolbe of Wakkerstroom AGED 40, and a man born 2 October 1861 was forty from October 1901 to October 1902, where the other was thirty-nine all year. THE PRISONER IS THIS MAN. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND NOW HE HAS PARENTS. The last 214 images of the Burgersdorp baptism register, film 008039088, hold his font: BORN 2 OCTOBER 1861, BAPTISED 12 JANUARY 1862 AT BURGERSDORP, FATHER G. A. KOLBE, MOTHER ANNA MARIA VILJOEN — FamilySearch 1:1:6FWF-YVJT, image 685. The stone gave a date and a town and this archive wrote that the descent was not documented; THE REGISTER GIVES HIM A COUPLE. He has two younger siblings in the same book. WHETHER HIS FATHER IS THE SETTLER’S TWIN SON — the G.A. Kolbe born 23 February 1836, who would have been twenty-five — IS THE NEXT STEP AND IS NOT TAKEN HERE. 16 SEPTEMBER 2026 — THE POW ENTRY NOW HAS A FOLIO: TNA WO 108/368 FOLIO 709, the War Office list of Boer prisoners of war numbers 1–32,561, which records him as a TRANSVAALER, residence WAKKERSTROOM, and held in NATAL. He is one of SIX KOLBE MEN in that list, and the only one of the six not in the southern Free State.

A daughter of George Mountjoy and Maria Sophia Botha, baptised on a LEAP DAY, and the woman who married William Henry Keys. This archive has carried “a Johanna Catharina Mountjoy” married to Keys since the index was read and could not say which one. This one. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — CONFIRMED INDEPENDENTLY AND GIVEN A REFERENCE. The sweep of images 605–818 reached her font from the other direction and returns the same two dates: FamilySearch 1:1:6FHW-89ND, image 637. HER INDEX ROW READS ONLY “Joha Catha” — the surname survives in the citation and not in the Name column, which is the same failure that hid two other children of this register.

Third of the three children of George Augustus Kolbe and Anna Maria Viljoen. FamilySearch 1:1:6F4H-63P2, image 795. NOT FOLLOWED OUT OF THE FONT — and the forenames are Booysen forenames as much as Kolbe ones, which is worth nothing on its own and is written down anyway.

ELDEST DAUGHTER OF HUGH CALLAGHAN, ESQ., OF ASHBY MANOR, district of Queenstown; married Charles Andrew Werdmuller on 13 February 1884. SEVEN YEARS LATER SHE WAS DEAD AT THIRTY-TWO, at Hoopstad, “after a long illness”, and a correspondent’s obituary in the Queenstown Free Press adds that she had arrived there only a few months before, in indifferent health, with a disorder of the heart that proved organic. SHE LEFT “A HUSBAND AND TWO LITTLE GIRLS”, and it is that line which lets the 1909 marriage notice call Amy a second daughter.

George Augustus Kolbe's colleague at the mission station Boesmanskool, the present Bethulie: the two were placed there together in 1828, and Clark's own letter of 31 December 1828 says they arrived in the beginning of May. He was named on the Bethulie page without a page of his own; this is it, and it holds only what the archive already says of him.

THE STONE IS NOW READ: “TER GEDAGTENIS AAN — ISABELLA FREDERICKA BOOYZEN (GEB. COETSEE) — GEB. 15 APRIL 1874 — OORL. 31 MAART 1930 — HEMELSE RUS.” HER BIRTH IS NOW A DATE. This archive had “c. May 1874”, worked back from an age; the stone gives 15 APRIL 1874, and an exact date cut on a stone beats a month inferred from an age. THE DEATH MATCHES TO THE DAY — 31 March 1930 — which is a third independent source saying 1930 and not 1943. AND HER GRAVE IS PHOTOGRAPHED: “BOOYZEN ISABELLA FREDERICKA NEE COETSEE 1874-1930”, Middelburg main cemetery, in the eGGSA library. The stone's dates match her own death notice exactly and CONFIRM THE CORRECTION below from a second, independent source — the stone says 1930, not 1943. IMAGE LOCATED, NOT YET READ. Married Gerrit Jacobus at Middelburg, 23 March 1896. THIS ARCHIVE HAD HER DYING IN 1943 AND HAS TAKEN IT BACK: 1943 is when her husband finally filed, thirteen years after the death. Her notice — KAB 84992, spelled BOOYZEN throughout — names her parents Pieter Coetzee and Isabella Fredrika Coetzee, and three children.

Her mother, and her namesake entire.

Her father, named in line 3 of the 1943 notice.

A CHILD OF FREDERIK FORTUNATUS KOLBE AND ELIZABETH JOHANNA DU TOIT THAT NO FONT IN THIS ARCHIVE RECORDS. Pietermaritzburg estate files — “FREDERICK FORTUNATIS KOLBE, BORN 1872 COLESBERG, DIED 10 SEPTEMBER 1944 VRYHEID”, probate 1944, FamilySearch 1:1:QPHZ-2361 — and he is named as an heir on his mother’s 1923 estate, 1:1:QLR2-5CF4. HIS BIRTH YEAR FALLS IN THE ONE GAP IN HIS PARENTS’ RUN, between Margaret Harriet at Hopetown in 1870 and Catharina Maria Louisa at Colesberg in 1873. He carries his father’s name entire, which is what a family does with a son born after two daughters. THE COLESBERG REGISTER HAS NOT BEEN CHECKED FOR HIS FONT and the estate file is not read.

A minor in 1942.

Eldest daughter, and the third of that name in three generations — Kathleen Barry, then her daughter, then her granddaughter. A major by 1942.

A minor in 1942.

THREE MONTHS AND FIVE DAYS old — not “0 days”, which is the index's reading and what this archive printed for an afternoon. The Brixton register keeps Years, Months and Days in three columns. Buried 20 June 1925, D.R. section, grave 4410 — seventeen years before his father went into West Park. A TWELFTH CHILD, and not on the 1942 death notice because he was already dead when it was written. The Johannesburg cemetery index has him buried at Brixton on 20 June 1925, the year he was born. He carries George Downing — the sixth Booyzen or Barry forename to cross into this family, and the one that makes the pattern impossible to read as coincidence. FROM AN INDEX, not from an image; the burial register has not been read.

Named for his uncle Henry James Booyzen.

A major by 1942.

A major by 1942, and now probably a grave: “DASCHNER JOSEPH C. 1911–1992 & ELIZABETH H. 1915–1992”, Rynsoord cemetery, Benoni. He and his wife died the same year. A MATCH ON A NAME AND AN INITIAL, not a document. FROM THE INDEX; no image read.

His father, named on the 1942 death notice — “Deceased”, but named.

Her husband. A PENSIONER (ELECTRICIAN) of 132 Sheffield Street, Kenilworth. Estate TAB MHG 1928/42, filed at Pretoria on 13 May 1942 — the first typewritten document in this archive, and one of only two whose question three names both parents. He had not been married before. She signed the notice: “Surviving Spouse — Saw body after death.”

Named for his great-uncle Richard Peter Barry. FamilySearch’s index gives 1923; the document reads 1922.

His mother, entered on the 1942 death notice as “Sophia Daschner (Stoter)” — the maiden name in brackets, which is what a completed question three looks like.

TWO SOURCES FOUND ON THE SAME AFTERNOON AND THEY AGREE. eGGSA: “DASCHNER WILLIE 1915–1963 & MILLIE HARDING 1926–2004”, West Park, Johannesburg. NAAIRS: “MHG 2703/63 — DASCHNER, WILLIAM HERMAN, 1963”. The stone gives the household name and the year, the estate index gives the registered name and the same year. He was 48. Named for his grandfather Willem Hermanus Booyzen — and so, at four removes, for a step-father with no blood tie to this family at all.

The youngest — seven when her father died.

Johannesburg, South Africa

Named on her mother's 1900 death notice, already married.

Married a van Deventer; a major by 1942.

Grandson, a minor in 1938; the other half, £10. 12. 2.

Granddaughter, a major in 1938; half of her dead mother’s tenth, £10. 12. 2.

Daughter, married out of community of property to Evelyn Wilfred Diesel and dead fourteen years before her father. Her tenth share went to her two children. She is on her mother’s notice and not on her father’s — his was typed first and ran out of page.

Daughter; married in community of property to Marthinus Frederick Diesel.

A MOUNTJOY BY MARRIAGE, WHICH IS WHY HER DEATH NOTICE COULD NEVER HAVE DONE WHAT IT WAS WANTED FOR. Death notice 989, Master’s Office Cape Town, stamped 12 April 1921: a housewife, married IN COMMUNITY OF PROPERTY to GEORGE MOUNTJOY JNR, dead at thirty-three at Mt Prospect, Flagstaff, leaving a joint estate of a TRADING STATION AND STOCK IN TRADE and no will. Four daughters, all minors, are named: IVY ELIZABETH, GWENDOLINE HAZEL, EDNA IRIS and DAPHNE JOYCE. They are named here and deliberately not made into people, having between them one forename apiece and no dates. HER OWN PARENTS ARE THE POINT, AND THEY ARE BARELY THERE. Question three is answered FATHER — “Diesel ?”, MOTHER — “Diesel ?”: her husband knew his wife’s maiden surname, wrote it twice, and marked both with a question mark. He did the same to her birthplace, “Maclear (?) District”. THE INDEX KEEPS THE WORD AND DROPS THE DOUBT. FamilySearch publishes her birthplace as Maclear, flat, with no question mark anywhere — so a reading the informant himself refused to vouch for arrives at the next researcher as a fact. AND HER CHILDREN ARE INDEXED AS IF THEY WERE DEAD. Ivy Elizabeth appears in the same collection as a Principal record, “Probate 1920, Grahamstown”, with no death date; she lived, and married a DU RANDT. The Cape probate index raises a record for every person named on a document, so a count of records is not a count of estates.

Baptised at Dordrecht 6 November 1898, named for her mother. FROM THE INDEX.

His second wife, married at Zeerust on 14 April 1892 when she was fifty-one and he sixty-three, and her own Death Notice 844 gives the rest: born Graaff-Reinet about October 1841, FARMER'S WIFE, father JACOB DORMEHL and mother UNKNOWN, dead at Driefontein in Groot Marico on 6 February 1902 aged 60 years 4 months, leaving ONE WAGON AND HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE worth £51 8s 0d and a will. THREE HUSBANDS — Jacob van Staden, then Matthys Roos, then Booysen — and SIX CHILDREN, two van Stadens and four Rooses, NOT ONE OF THEM A BOOYSEN. That is why the four children this archive once drew under her are not hers.

Named as her father on the 1902 death notice. Her mother is entered UNKNOWN — the seventh parent this archive's documents fail to name.

Margaret's father ON THE TREE, AND IN NO DOCUMENT THIS ARCHIVE HAS READ. Graded «documented» here until 11 October 2026, which this archive’s own pages contradict in two places: the 1868 death notice enters Margaret’s parents only as “Both dead” and names neither, and the documents page says in terms that “the tree’s John Paul Downing and Mary P King are therefore not corroborated here”. The 1819 marriage allegation gives her no father either — only that she was “a Spinster of the age of Twenty-one Years and upwards”, and that age is false. The name comes from FamilySearch, which cannot even hold it steady: 1769–1839 in one tree, 1765–1839 in another. REGRADED TO TESTIMONY on the archive’s own precedent — Peter Benjamin Kolbe is «lore» and described as still in no document — and because the matching mother, Mary P King, was never given a record here at all. One of the two was admitted and the other refused, on identical evidence.

THE DAY IS SETTLED AT THE 25th, AND IT WAS SETTLED BY A DOCUMENT ALREADY ON THE SHELF. Her own DEATH NOTICE, filed at Burgersdorp on 30 January 1868, answers question 7 — «The day of the decease» — “25th November 1867”, and question 4 gives her age as “64 years 9 months & 2 days”. Take that age off the 25th and you land on 23 February 1803, which is exactly the birth the stone cuts: the notice confirms the stone and the stone confirms the notice. This record carried “2_ Nov 1867 — the day illegible on the stone” until 12 October 2026, while the 25th was ALREADY WRITTEN in five other files of this archive — places.json, timeline.json, searched.json, corrections.json and the work list. The stone’s digit really is illegible and the inscription is still quoted with the gap; what was wrong was only the date this archive kept for her. IT IS THE SAME FAULT THE JOHAN CASIMIR ROW DIAGNOSED IN SEPTEMBER, in the same file: a search of the index is not a search of the holdings. THE ANSWER WAS ALSO ON A PHOTOGRAPH THIS ARCHIVE HAS HAD ALL ALONG. The Burgersdorp monument is on the Kolbe page, and the caption quoted it as far as “ALSO HIS RELICT MARGARET DOWNING…” AND STOPPED THERE. The stone goes on: “BORN IN LONDON 23 FEBRUARY 1803 AND DIED AT BURGHERSDORP 2_ NOVEMBER 1867.” HER BIRTH IS NOW A DATE — 23 February 1803, where this archive had “c. 1804” — AND THE DEATH IS SETTLED AT 1867. Her son’s obituary of 15 April 1868 said she had died “about three months since”, which would have been January 1868; it was nearly five months, and a journalist rounding is a journalist rounding. THE DAY IS A 2 AND A DIGIT THAT WILL NOT RESOLVE at any magnification, and is not guessed. The Cape estate ran on: MOOC 13/1/253 no. 2, “DOWNING, MARGARET, WIDOW OF KOLBE, GEORGE AUGUSTUS. LIQUIDATION AND DISTRIBUTION ACCOUNT”, 1869 — and she had made a WILL OF HER OWN in 1854, MOOC 7/1/295 no. 70, ten years after she was widowed. Married at fifteen in Shoreditch, signing with a mark. Died owning a house and a farm. 20 SEPTEMBER 2026 — HER MOTHER IS STILL NOBODY, AND THAT IS NOW A TESTED POSITION RATHER THAN A GAP. A user tree gave her as MARY KING POOLEY (1768–1834); this archive’s own copy of the tree gives MARY P KING. FindMyPast holds exactly ONE Downing–Pooley marriage before civil registration — JOHN DOWNING and MARY POOLEY at WELCOMBE, DEVON, 10 MAY 1802, nine months and thirteen days before Margaret’s birth — AND THAT COUPLE STAYED IN DEVON, baptising a child at Welcombe in 1803 and more in 1806, 1809 and 1810, where Margaret was born in LONDON. RULED OUT. And the last Downing record in that parish is A MARY DOWNING BURIED THERE IN 1834, which is the year both trees give her mother’s death — SO “POOLEY” IS VERY PROBABLY A PREVIOUS RESEARCHER’S RECONSTRUCTION out of one Devon marriage and one Devon burial, and not a record at all. FROM A USER TREE, NOT ADOPTED. Her own 1867 death notice asks for her parents and answers “Both dead”, naming neither. AND THERE IS A CERTIFICATE, IN A MUSEUM. The DSAB draft on her husband lists among its sources “ALBANY MUSEUM, GRAHAMSTAD: FOTOKOPIE VAN DIE HUWELIKSSERTIFIKAAT VAN G.A. KOLBE (1819)”. THIS ARCHIVE HOLDS THE ALLEGATION AND NOT THE MARRIAGE — the sworn statement made to get the licence, which is where the false age was sworn, and not the register entry that followed it. A photocopy of the certificate has been sitting in Grahamstown since before 1992. The same entry gives her dates as “(1803–1867)”, WHICH IS WHAT THE BURGERSDORP STONE SAYS, from a source that had not read the stone this way.

Baptised at Indwe 6 December 1908, entry 15, and entered ONECHT — born four months before his parents married. His godmother was his grandmother, Catharina Maria Sophia Barry. The fourth Willem Hermanus in four generations, and the name still comes from a step-relation with no blood tie.

Major son. He signed BOTH death notices on 19 February 1938 — his mother’s three and a half years late — as “son, present at place of death”, and took a tenth share of £21. 4. 4.

Named as her daughter's mother on the 1900 death notice, under exactly the same two forenames her daughter carried — and her granddaughter after that, the child who died a minor. Three Elizabetha Margarethas in three generations.

THE FIRST OF TWO WIVES CALLED MARY, AND THE REASON A SINGLE MARY NEVER FITTED. She is the mother named at the baptisms of Juliet Rosinia 1792, Mary Ann 1794, Elizabeth 1795, Charles 1798, John Henry 1800, George Augustus 1803, Frederick Charles 1805, Charles Samuel 1807 and Frederica Carolina 1813. TNA RG 4/4631 folio 62: died 2 August 1814, buried 5 August, AGED 46 — born about 1768, so she was twenty-four at the first baptism. SHE WAS BURIED A MONTH AFTER HER ELEVEN-MONTH-OLD DAUGHTER. Her surname before marriage is not known and no marriage has been found. 20 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND NOW THAT IS A CONTROLLED NEGATIVE RATHER THAN A SHRUG. FindMyPast holds NO KOLBE–LARMAN MARRIAGE IN EITHER DIRECTION, with a nonsense-value control returning zero so the filter is known to restrict — and the index demonstrably reaches this family, because it carries the 1810 KOHLBECK BANNS AT ST ANNE’S SOHO, a year before the eldest daughter’s wedding there. AND THE GERMAN LUTHERAN REGISTER IS RULED OUT BY STATUTE: under HARDWICKE’S MARRIAGE ACT OF 1753 every marriage in England but those of Quakers and Jews had to be Anglican to be legal, so the Savoy congregation could bury her and baptise her children and could not have married her. THREE DOORS LEFT — an unindexed English parish, a wrong surname off the family tree, or A MARRIAGE ABROAD. He was born in Württemberg in 1765 and the first child was baptised in London in 1792, and the twenty-seven years between are empty.

Wife of John Augustus Barry II and the mother of nine children baptised at Burgersdorp and Dordrecht between 1871 and 1889. This archive had John Augustus II as a name on two death notices with no wife and no children at all until the index was asked for every Barry child of a father called John Augustus. Her surname is spelled nine different ways across the entries — Ellinckhuizen, Ellinckhuisen, Elinchhiusen, Westerhuizen, Ellincahuyzen — and one son carries it as a forename. FROM THE INDEX.

Her son, baptised on the same afternoon as his cousin William Fredrik Barry. Entered in the register as AUGUSTUS KOLBE, with the Enslin left off the child's own line entirely.

Married MARY ELIZABETH KOLBE, not Margaretha — and this archive took weeks and two documents to be sure of it. Named as the father on the Burgersdorp baptism of 23 October 1853, two entries above his sister-in-law's child.

Her mother. Married Willem Slier of Hamburg on 19 November 1780 and gave her own name to a daughter baptised on 14 October 1787 — who carried it through two husbands and ninety-eight years.

Daughter; married out of community of property to Eric Bernard Frachet.

Married in community of property to Willem Grobelaar, in whose house at Koedoesfontein her father died.

A MOUNTJOY BY MARRIAGE, AND THE IMAGE IS NOT HER DEATH NOTICE BUT THE LEDGER IT WAS ENTERED IN. What collection 2517051 holds for her is a page of the REGISTER OF ESTATES, BONDS AND WILLS, and her line on it reads across six columns: estate 66509 · registered 8.11.39 · died 10.10.39 · MOUNTJOY · Aletta Johanna (b. Hattingh) · surviving spouse ALFRED. That is the whole of it, and it matches the NAAIRS reference MOOC 6/9/5599 no. 66509 exactly. ALFRED IS A MOUNTJOY OF KOKSTAD. He is the seventh of the nine children named on George Mountjoy of Kokstad’s 1943 death notice, so she married into the Transkei household and not into this archive’s. HER OWN PARENTS ARE NOT RECORDED ANYWHERE THIS SESSION REACHED — a register row has no question three.

His 1915 death notice types the birthplace as at sea and his mother as “born Neagle” — but the older document wins: his 1903 death registration, made by a son who was in the room, enters him as AN IRISHMAN BORN IN IRELAND. THE CAPE MOUNTED RIFLES ARE NOT HIS REGIMENT, and this entry used to end with their name in a way that read as though they were. They are the RECORDING AUTHORITY on that 1903 certificate — the corps was the authority in the district, stationed at Johnson’s Leap — and nothing here says he ever served in them or in anything else. Their own registers at Johnson’s Leap are on this archive’s list of things that would settle question 5; a soldier’s discharge paper is not, because there is no evidence he was a soldier.

THE ENTRY HAS NOW BEEN READ, film 008119684 image 876, and every witness at his font is a KOLBE: “Gt: JOHN KOLBE, MARGARET KOLBE, AUGUSTA KOLBE” — the third name is the least certain of the three. The clerk writes the child JOHN AUGUST and the mother MARGARETWINA KOLBE. Read beside his brother’s font of the following year, where the godmother is CATHARINE SOPHIA MARIA KOLBER, it makes one point twice: the forenames this archive has spent the project calling BARRY NAMES are Kolbe names, standing at Kolbe godparents’ fonts. The eldest son on the 1915 notice, carrying his father's name exactly — which is why this archive calls the father John Augustus Barry I. His own documents call him simply John Barry, and that is the third man in this family the name has to be shared out between. His birth date does one more job than it looks: being HARD, off a register, it is what forces his brother James Henry's “about 1847” to move.

The FOURTH John Augustus in four generations, and by 1908 at ELLIOT with a wife of his own, Maria Jacoba Gericke — the same village where Henry James Booyzen married Dorothea Regina Barry in 1912. FROM THE INDEX.

She joined the Dutch Reformed congregation at Indwe on 23 JULY 1907, arriving FROM BARKLY OOST — six weeks after Willem Hermanus Booijzen was confirmed in the same church — and the register’s last column records her dead there 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. 15 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND THERE IS NOW A CANDIDATE BIRTH DATE, NOT ENTERED. The baptism transcriptions indexed by gendatabase.com hold a JOHANNA CATHARINA MOUNTJOY BORN 28 JANUARY 1860, one of four Mountjoy children baptised between 1858 and 1864. She would be FIFTY-ONE in June 1911. IT IS NOT BEING TAKEN: this family already contains a Johanna Catharina Mountjoy born 1819, so the name repeats within it, and WHAT WOULD DECIDE IT IS THE CONGREGATION THE 1860 BAPTISM WAS REGISTERED IN — which is the field that site charges for. If it is Barkly East or its district, the two women are almost certainly one. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND SHE HAS A JOINING DATE. The Indwe LIDMATE register enters her on 23 JULY 1907 — FamilySearch 1:1:6PR3-HNWZ — SEVEN WEEKS AFTER WILLEM HERMANUS BOOIJZEN WAS CONFIRMED IN THE SAME CONGREGATION on 31 May 1907. This archive had her death at Indwe and nothing before it. It does not make the two families relatives; it makes them neighbours, in one small coal town’s register, in one winter.

AN EIGHTH CHILD, and one this archive did not have. Confirmed at Indwe on 31 May 1907, aged 21, entered “Booijzen”. A MIJNWERKER of DUGMORE MIJN when he married Susanna Adriana Roodt, 16, at Indwe on 21 September 1908 — the only miner in five generations of read occupations, and the answer to the last line of the family testimony. Two children in nine months by two women of the same surname, both entered “onecht”. His mother stood godmother at the first font, which is how this archive knows whose son he is. AND THEN JOHANNESBURG: a WILLIAM HERMAN BOOYZEN, 47, born Cape Province, married, EX MINER UNDERGROUND, of 62 Langford Street, Booysens, died at Johannesburg Hospital on 29 July 1932 of a perforated duodenal ulcer after about one day, and was buried at BRIXTON on 31 July. The occupation, the province, the age within a year and the cemetery all fit; no parents are named, because a civil registration does not ask. And then the grave register closes it: GRAVE 6889 holds “Boysen, William” and, thirty-six years later, SUSANNA ADRIANA BOOYZEN, buried 29 August 1968 — the woman he married at Indwe in 1908. Husband and wife in one grave.

Two years old. He is NOT the John Barry Booyzen who signed his father's death registration at Indwe in 1905 — a second child of the name, one generation down, and this archive did not have him.

AND HER HUSBAND HAS A NAME AND SHE HAS DATES: “VAN JAARSVELD GERT ANDRIES 1914–1957 & MARGARET WILHEMINA ELIZABETH JEANETTE DASCHNER 1913–2009”, WEST PARK, Johannesburg — the same cemetery as her parents. She outlived him by fifty-two years and died at ninety-six. FROM THE INDEX; no image read. Married a van Jaarsveld and was a major by 1942. Her first three names are the Barry name, carried into a third surname.

HIS WIDOW, AND SHE SIGNED FOR HERSELF. She completed and signed the Sterfkennis of Frederik Fortunatus Downing Kolbe at Hooipoort, district Wakkerstroom, on 13 February 1919, in the capacity “overlijvende echtgenote” — surviving spouse — and her signature is written out, not a mark. Married at Volksrust IN COMMUNITY OF PROPERTY, which the death notice states and which is why the estate had to be wound up at all. She was a joint testator with him: their mutual will of 30 May 1914, five weeks before their only child was born, is in the same file and she signs it TESTATRICE. HER SECOND FORENAME IS SPELT TWO WAYS BY TWO DOCUMENTS and this archive does not choose between them: the marriage entry has GERBINA, the death notice GERTINA. Neither is a transcription — both were read from the image. NOT ADOPTED HERE: an estate reference NAB MSCE 1229/1960 for a widow of this name born at Volksrust is noted at /searched/ and has not been read, so her death is left blank rather than guessed.

Baptised at Barkly East — the family had moved from Dordrecht by 1891. A Cecil Frederick Keys turns up later in the Transvaal probate index, unread.

Named for his mother's father, GEORGE MOUNTJOY the saddler of Cradock — and baptised two years after he was born, which this family did more than once.

Barkly West, and named for Herklaas — Hercules Johannes Mountjoy. FROM THE INDEX.

Baptised at Dordrecht, 2 December 1883, and named for James Jonathan Mountjoy. FROM THE INDEX.

The second Byron. LANCELOTT and BYRON in one name, in a Dordrecht font, in 1888.

The only daughter among the eight. RACHEL is rare here — the archive has met it once before, in Rachel Margaretha Williamse, born Booijzen, on a 1900 death notice at Pretoria.

Eldest of the eight Keys children. BYRON is a name that appears nowhere else in this archive, and it appears twice among these children — it comes in from the Keys side, not the Mountjoy.

Married JOHANNA CATHARINA MOUNTJOY, baptised at Burgersdorp on 29 February 1860 — a daughter of George Mountjoy and Maria Sophia Botha, which this archive had been asking about and can now answer. Eight children baptised across Dordrecht, Barkly East and Barkly West between 1878 and 1898: Robert Byron, William Henry, JAMES JONATHAN, George, Lancelott Byron, Cecil Frederik, Rachel Anna Maria and HERKLAAS EDWARD JOHANNES. The Mountjoy forenames crossing into a third surname, exactly as the Barry names crossed into the Daschners — and BYRON twice, which appears nowhere else in this archive.

HER HALF OF THE STONE: “MOEDER — MARTHA SOPHIA (GEB. KLOPPER) — GEB. 27 MEI 1867 — OORL. 14 OKT. 1950 — Ons dank God elke maal as ons aan haar dink.” The birth is new; the death matches the civil register to the day. Married George Augustus Kolbe of Wakkerstroom AT SEVENTEEN, about 1885 — the fourth bride in this archive married before eighteen, and the third in the Kolbe line. Named as the mother on her daughter Maria Johanna's 1953 estate file, which is how this archive learnt she existed. She died four years before her husband.

THE ONE OF THE TEN THAT IS STILL ONLY AN INDEX ENTRY. MOOC 6/9/12630 no. 334/46: FamilySearch holds her but answers IMAGE UNAVAILABLE, so everything here is a volunteer’s transcription and NOT A DOCUMENT THIS ARCHIVE HAS READ — which is why she is marked inferred and not documented. What the index says: aged 49, born about 1896 at MIDDELBURG, TRANSVAAL, died 12 December 1945, place as originally written FLAGSTAFF. FLAGSTAFF IS THE POINT. It is where Susan Elizabeth Mountjoy born Diesel died in 1920, at Mt Prospect, and it sits in the same Transkei country as Kokstad and Bizana. A third Mountjoy wife in that one district is the pattern, not a coincidence — but her husband is not named by the index and no image exists to name him. THIS IS THE ONE OF THE SIX THAT STILL NEEDS ORDERING FROM THE CAPE ARCHIVES.

THE HEAD OF THE OTHER MOUNTJOY FAMILY, THE ONE THIS ARCHIVE HAS TWICE SAID IS NOT ITS OWN. His death notice, signed at Bizana on 25 May 1943 by a son who was not present at the death, gives him as RETIRED, of KOKSTAD, EAST GRIQUALAND, born in the ORANGE FREE STATE, a Union national, eighty-one years old, married IN COMMUNITY OF PROPERTY to MARY MOUNTJOY, BORN FISCHER, the marriage in the KING WILLIAMSTOWN DISTRICT. He left movables, immovables, an estate over £300 and a will. NINE CHILDREN, NAMED: Minnie Burger born Mountjoy; Maria Kirsten born Mountjoy; George Mountjoy; Christian Mountjoy; Emily Lloyd born Mountjoy; Joseph Mountjoy; Alfred Mountjoy; Nellie Bouwer born Mountjoy; Lettie van der Sandt born Mountjoy. THEY ARE NAMED HERE AND NOT MADE INTO PEOPLE, because nothing yet joins this house to this archive’s and a family chart is not a place to park a maybe. AND QUESTION THREE FAILS AGAIN: Father — “Names unknown”. Mother — “Names unknown: deceased”. So the one line that could have connected or disconnected him from the Cradock saddler’s descendants is blank, exactly as it is blank on the saddler’s own notice a century earlier. THIS ARCHIVE'S EARLIER JUDGEMENT STANDS AND IS NOW BETTER EVIDENCED. The Transkei Mountjoys — Lusikisiki, Bizana, Mnyameni, Kokstad, Flagstaff, traders and labour agents — were recorded as “not this family so far as anything shows”. They are still that, but they are now a documented household rather than a scatter of index hits, and three of the ten estates this archive wanted belong to it.

SHE MARRIED PIERRE FRANCOIS OOSTHUIZEN, WHO WAS BORN AT COLESBERG — his estate, NAB MSCE 414/1960, names her as his spouse, “ADRIANA HENRIETTA JOHANNA, BORN KOLBE”. Like her sister Petronella, she was sitting in this archive’s own search log two days before she had a family. THE ESTATE IS NOT READ. Youngest of the eight — and baptised at BETHULIE, the Orange Free State mission station where her father had himself been born forty-two years earlier. The family goes back to the same font in the next generation. NOT FOLLOWED OUT OF THE FONT.

Aged 25 in the Conduit Street household at the 1841 census, and the youngest of the three women there. AND SHE MARRIED: Amelia Ann Kolbe, at ST PANCRAS in 1854, indexed twice. The groom is not in the index this archive read and she is the only one of the three sisters who can currently be followed out of the house. FROM THE CENSUS AND THE MARRIAGE INDEX. 11 OCTOBER 2026 — AND A «MISS A. KOLBE» IS GIVING MONEY TO HER BROTHER'S MISSIONARY SOCIETY, FIVE MINUTES' WALK FROM HOME. The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for 1836 prints the subscription lists of the ORANGE STREET CHAPEL AUXILIARY of the London Missionary Society, and the Juvenile Branch carries “Miss A. Kolbe”, with a plain “Miss Kolbe” in a collector's list on the same page. ORANGE STREET CHAPEL IS OFF LEICESTER SQUARE, IN WESTMINSTER — the parish this family was baptised in, and a few minutes from Conduit Street, where she was living five years later. THE SOCIETY IS THE ONE HER BROTHER SERVED: George Augustus Kolbe was the LMS missionary at Philippolis in 1836, the year of these lists. WHAT MAKES IT ATTRACTIVE IS THE WHOLE OF THE EVIDENCE: a surname, an initial, a parish and a society. No address, no age, no relationship is printed, and “Kolbe” in London is not unique — this archive has already had to keep four men of one name apart in South Africa. Nothing is claimed and no record is altered. WHAT WOULD SETTLE IT is the auxiliary's own papers rather than the printed total: the Orange Street Chapel records, or the LMS auxiliary returns in the Council for World Mission archive — which is the same collection row 135 is already writing to. AND IF IT IS HER, IT SAYS SOMETHING THIS ARCHIVE HAS WANTED AND NOT HAD: that the family in London knew what the son at the Cape was doing, and paid towards it.

A WOMAN OF THIS NAME DIES AT WAKKERSTROOM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WAR, and this archive cannot say who she is. Twenty-eight years old, female, surname Kolbe, registered at Wakkerstroom on 15 November 1900. SHE IS NOT THE VOLKSRUST CAMP GRAVE: that is a G.E. Kolbe aged 35, a different age in a different year in a different place, and the camp was barely open in November 1900. She is not on the list of Frederik Fortunatus's eight children either — too young for Martha Angelina of 1868, too old for Catharina Maria Louisa of 1873. A daughter-in-law, most likely. THE RECORD NAMES NO PARENTS, NO HUSBAND AND NO CAUSE.

THE SETTLER'S FOURTH DAUGHTER HAS THREE DOCUMENTS AND THIS ARCHIVE HAD NONE OF THEM. A WILL, MADE IN 1868 AND FILED IN 1873: KAB MOOC 7/1/332 no. 205, “KOLBE, AUGUSTA LOUISA. WIFE OF COENRAAD JOHANNES OTTO WERDMULLER VAN ELGG” — which is the first document read here that ties her to that man by anything but a newspaper. A DEATH NOTICE, MOOC 6/9/145 no. 9981, 1873. And a LIQUIDATION AND DISTRIBUTION ACCOUNT, MOOC 13/1/299 no. 93, 1874, which means there was something to distribute. SHE DIED IN 1873 AND HER HUSBAND REMARRIED IN JULY 1874 — a year and a month, which is what a widower does, and which settles the question this archive left open yesterday about whose son Charles Andrew is. NONE OF THE THREE IS READ. 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND SHE NAMED A SON AFTER HER BROTHER. The Cape Dutch Reformed register has a JOHAN CASMIRE, born 17 November 1866 and baptised at GRAAFF-REINET on 21 NOVEMBER 1866, of Coenraad Joh[anne]s Otto Werd[m]uller and AUGUSTA LOUISA KOLBE — the index files the child under his mother's surname, which is how he was found at all. HER BROTHER JOHAN CASIMIR HAD TAKEN CHURCH MEMBERSHIP AT COLESBERG EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER and would marry six months later. A WOMAN NAMES A BABY AFTER A BROTHER WHO IS ALIVE AND NEARBY, and this archive has traced the Fortunatus and Rector names on exactly that reasoning.

Fifth of the eight. Two aunts' names run together: CATHERINE MARIA SOPHIA, born 1825, and AUGUSTA LOUISA, born 1829. NOT FOLLOWED OUT OF THE FONT. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — SHE MARRIED A LOUW. Both her parents’ Pietermaritzburg estates write her “CATHARINA MARIA LOUISA KOLBE LOUW” (1923, 1:1:QLRL-WTBN) and “CATHERINA MARIA KOLBE LOUW” (1929, 1:1:QLR2-ZDB5). A MARRIED SURNAME IS THE ONLY THING THAT LETS A DAUGHTER BE FOLLOWED, and an estate file is where it is written down. Her husband’s forename is not given in the index.

THE COMMANDANT’S ELDEST, AND SHE WAS AN INFERENCE UNTIL 9 OCTOBER 2026. This archive had her as a probable sixth child built out of a year, a town and a surname: a CATHARINA WILHELMINA KOLBE marrying JOHANNES PETRUS PIENAAR at Bloemfontein on 8 October 1860, born 1843, on a record that does not name her parents. One document now carries the whole chain. Her civil death registration — Orange Free State, Births & Deaths Registration Proclamation 1902, sections 27 and 39 — gives FATHER: JAN GERSEM ELIEZER KOLBE, STOCK FARMER, and MOTHER: ANNA JACOBA. AND FIELD SEVEN SETTLES THE MARRIAGE THAT MADE HER FINDABLE. The form asks, of a woman married more than once, to state to whom; the answer written is PIENAAR. So the Pienaar of 1860 and the Anderson she died as are one woman, and the user tree’s clumsy “Pienaar Anderson” was reporting two marriages in order rather than inventing a double surname. THE REST OF THE FORM: Dutch, born in the Cape Colony, a housewife, of Veelroem in the district of Ladybrand; dead on 3 February 1909 of heart disease and dropsy after an illness of one year and six months; buried at Veelroem; the doctor Dr Hofmeyr. HER SON REGISTERED IT AND HIS NAME IS THE CORROBORATION. The informant, present at the death, signs JAN G. E. ANDERSON — his grandfather’s three names entire, on a form that names that grandfather four lines above. TWO SMALL THINGS THE FORM GOT WRONG, KEPT BECAUSE THEY ARE THE DOCUMENT. Field 15 asks for the mother’s maiden surname and was given her married one, KOLBE, after a crossed-out word; she was born VAN DER MERWE. And her year of birth here is 1844 where the 1860 marriage record implies 1843 — an age at death is not a birth certificate, and neither is a marriage clerk’s arithmetic.

SHE IS WHERE THE NAME COMES FROM, and this archive had her down as “Catharine Kolbe” and nothing more. On 13 November 1848 she stood godmother at Graaff-Reinet to her sister Margaretha's son HENRY JAMES BARRY, entry 603, and the clerk wrote her out in full: CATHARINE SOPHIA MARIA KOLBER. ELEVEN YEARS LATER her sister named a daughter CATHERINE MARIA SOPHIA — the Kathleen Barry who married into this family — and the name then ran through four more generations and three more surnames. This archive had called it a Barry name. It is a Kolbe name, and it belongs to a woman who never married into the Booyzens at all. She is also godmother at Burgersdorp in 1853, two entries above her sister Mary Elizabeth's son.

ONE OF THE EIGHT SONS, NAMED FOR THE FIRST TIME. Father John, mother Mary. Batch C15051-2. HIS DEATH IS NOT IN THE GERMAN LUTHERAN REGISTER, which holds six other Kolbe burials — but a second son was christened CHARLES Samuel nine years later, and families reused a name when the first child carrying it had died. That is an inference and not a record.

ONE OF THE EIGHT SONS, AND THE FIRST OF THE SEVEN TO BE GIVEN A DATE. Baptised 3 February 1807, father JOHN GOTTLEB, mother Mary, batch C15051-2. TNA RG 4/4631 folio 47 and again in the duplicate at RG 4/4630 folio 44: died 6 December 1807, buried 11 December, AGED 1 YEAR AND 10 DAYS — so born about 26 November 1806. He is entered in two volumes with the same death date and the same age to the day, which is a register and its duplicate and not two children.

Aged 30 in the Conduit Street household at the 1841 census. FROM THE CENSUS. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — SHE IS NOT IN THE 1851 CENSUS AND SHE PROBABLY DID NOT DIE BEFORE IT. There are only FOUR KOLBE DEATHS IN ALL ENGLAND AND WALES BETWEEN 1837 AND 1867 — John Gottlob 1845, George 1848, Elizabeth 1852 and CHARLOTTE KOLBE AT LAMBETH IN 1867. The single Kolbe in the entire 1851 census is also at Lambeth. If the 1867 death is hers she outlived her father by twenty-two years and was simply not caught by the 1851 enumerator under this surname. 20 SEPTEMBER 2026 — SHE IS NO LONGER AN INFERENCE. This record was marked inf because she matched no baptism in the family’s own register run and her place in the house was read off a census that records no relationships. MSB 751, her father’s letter of 23 August 1830: “CHARLOTTE SENDS YOU AN EVANGELICAL MAGAZINE, with the account of the death of the Rev. W. Orme, late Secretary to the L.M.S.” HER FATHER NAMES HER SENDING A MAGAZINE TO HER BROTHER. She is a daughter of this house on the evidence of the house.

His death registration carries the words “G A KOLBE'S SON”, mangled by the index into “G A Kolbelsson” — and that is the line that ties the 1918 graves to the old man who outlived them by thirty-six years. Dead at twenty-five, four months before his brother Freddie. The stone at Wakkerstroom reads DAAN 1893–1918.

Sixth of the eight, named for her mother exactly. AND SHE MARRIES AT WAKKERSTROOM: Elizabeth Johanna Kolbe, aged 21, to JOHN CHARLES PATTISON — the ages agree with the font to the year. The second of her father's children to be found in the eastern Transvaal.

Father JOHN GOTTLEB, mother Mary, batch C06236-1. TNA RG 4/4631 folio 61: died 1 July 1814, AGED 11 MONTHS. HER MOTHER WAS BURIED FOUR WEEKS AFTER HER, on 5 August 1814, aged 46.

ONE OF THE EIGHT SONS. Baptised 12 March 1805, father JOHN GOTTLEB, mother Mary, batch C15051-2. TNA RG 4/4631 folio 49: died 8 March 1809, AGED 4 YEARS AND 6 WEEKS — which puts his birth at the end of January 1805, six weeks before the font.

THE MAN WHO PROVED THE CONVERGENCE. He carries BOTH of this family's Kolbe names at once — FREDERIK FORTUNATUS off his grandfather, DOWNING off a London marriage of 1819 — and a London surname has no business in the eastern Transvaal except through that wedding. Born seventy-two years after it. Married HESTER GERBINA SUSANNA JOUBERT at Volksrust at twenty-one, the clerk writing his second name as “Daomig”. Dead at Wakkerstroom on 2 November 1918, four months after his brother Daniel, which is the influenza. 9 OCTOBER 2026 — HIS DEATH NOTICE IS READ, AND IT NAMES HIS PARENTS IN HIS OWN FILE. TAB MHG 40293, the document this archive has called its biggest single gap, is filmed and free: the Sterfkennis gives VADER GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE and MOEDER MARTHA SOFIA KOLBE, GEBOREN KLOPPER. Until today that parentage rested on his brother Daniel’s death registration reading “G A KOLBE’S SON” and on his sister Maria Johanna’s 1953 estate file; now it is stated on his own. AND IT DECIDES WHICH GEORGE AUGUSTUS, which is the whole difficulty at Wakkerstroom — two men of that name are buried in one cemetery, and only one of them married a Klopper. The form adds what no index carried: he was a VEEBOER, his ordinary residence and the place he died was VILLIERIA, A PORTION OF KLEINFONTEIN in the district of Wakkerstroom, he was married IN COMMUNITY OF PROPERTY, the marriage was at Volksrust, and he was TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS AND SIX MONTHS old — which puts the birth at about May 1891, where this archive had only the year. He left movables, fixed property, an estate worth more than £300 and a will. THE INDEX WAS WRONG ABOUT WHERE HE DIED AND THIS ARCHIVE WAS RIGHT. FamilySearch standardises the place to “Wakkerstroom, Zoutpansberg, Transvaal” and renders it Villieria, Pretoria; Wakkerstroom is nowhere near Zoutpansberg, and Villieria here is a farm portion, not the Pretoria suburb of that name. The reading that was published on 9 October said the image was not yet read and attributed Pretoria to the index. It is a reason the hedge is written every time.

THE SOURCE OF THE FORTUNATUS NAME across three families — and, as of 14 September 2026, A MAN WITH A HOUSEHOLD. The Settler's tenth child, born at a mission station the year his father was working the Orange River. He married ELIZABETH JOHANNA DU TOIT, and eight of their children are in the Dutch Reformed registers: baptised at COLESBERG in 1863, 1865, 1868, 1873, 1876 and 1877, at HOPETOWN in 1870, and at BETHULIE in 1881. The eldest is a GEORGE AUGUSTUS, named for the grandfather who had been dead nineteen years. THEN THE HOUSEHOLD GOES NORTH: three of those children marry or die at WAKKERSTROOM in the eastern Transvaal, four hundred miles from the font. That is the second proof of the Wakkerstroom convergence, and it does not depend on a name — it is a family moving. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — HE HAS A DEATH, A DISTRICT AND AN ESTATE. Pietermaritzburg estate files: “FREDERICK FORTUNABIS KOLBE, BORN 1839 KAAP PROVINSIE, DIED 23 NOVEMBER 1929 AT UTRECHT”, probate 1929 — FamilySearch 1:1:QLR2-XFJC. NINETY YEARS OLD. AND THE ESTATE NAMES HIS CHILDREN, the daughters under both surnames, which is how a daughter gets followed: George Augustus, Gabriel Stephanus, Martha Angelina, MARGARET HARRIET KOLBE VAN DER SPUY, FREDERICK FORTUNATUS, CATHARINA MARIA LOUISA KOLBE LOUW, ELIZABETH JOHANNA KOLBE PATTISON, PETRONELLA JACOBA ADRIANA KOLBE BEUKES and ADRIANA HENRIETTA JOHANNA KOLBE OOSTHUIZEN. NINE, NOT EIGHT — the note above is careful and says eight are in the REGISTERS; the ninth is not. THE FILE ITSELF IS NOT READ.

Second of the eight. The only one of his generation whose forenames come from neither the Kolbes nor the Downings — a du Toit name, presumably, off his mother's side. NOT FOLLOWED OUT OF THE FONT. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — FOLLOWED, AT LAST, INTO NATAL. He is named as an heir on his mother’s Pietermaritzburg estate of 1923 and his father’s of 1929 — 1:1:QLR2-TBW4 and 1:1:QLR2-Z9J1 — so he was alive at fifty-eight and at sixty-four. A GABRIEL STEPHEN KOLBE is also named on a 1904 estate in the same collection and a GABRIEL STEPHANUS KOLBE has a probate record of his own; neither is attached to him here.

HIS OBITUARY IS FOUND, eighteen days after the death: Grahamstown Journal, 19 December 1844. “DIED at his Farm, Wirtemberg, near the Orange River, December 1st, THE REV. GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE, aged 44 years, a man possessed of a most amiable temper, and of more than ordinary abilities. HE WAS THE LAST REMAINING OF EIGHT SONS OF JOHN GODLOFF KOLBE ESQ. OF BRUNSWICK-SQUARE, LONDON, has left a WIDOW AND TEN CHILDREN... he having been for many years engaged in RENDERING THEM MEDICAL ADVICE AND ASSISTANCE whenever called upon... HIS DISEASE WAS AN AFFECTION ON THE LUNGS.” EIGHT SONS, seven of them dead before December 1844 and not one in this archive. BRUNSWICK SQUARE, which is not Conduit Street and is a mile and a half from it. A MAN WHO DOCTORED A DISTRICT FOR THIRTY YEARS, where his own death notice says only “Agriculturist”. And a cause of death, after nearly a year ill. The notice also says 44 when he was 41, and ten children when this archive counts eleven living — it is the best kind of source and it is not a register. 1820 Settler — the Nautilus, Owen's party, Algoa Bay 14 Apr 1820. Married at sixteen on a sworn falsehood, AND THE ROLL CARRIES A SECOND ONE: “KOLBE, GEORGE AUGUSTUS 20. CHEMIST. W MARGARET 19”, where he was sixteen and she was sixteen. HE SAILED FROM GRAVESEND FOUR DAYS BEFORE HIS SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY. The two lies do not even agree — nobody “twenty-one and upwards” in January 1819 is twenty in December. OWEN'S PARTY WAS 52 PEOPLE, No. 3 on the Colonial Department list, joint-stock and recruited in London, and IT COLLAPSED IN 1821 when Thomas Owen refused to draw rations and left; his brother took over and the party dispersed. He was eighteen, with no leader, no rations and no location, and the next record of him is the Graaff-Reinet mission three years later. Preached across the Orange River. His grandson could not name him in 1915. 15 SEPTEMBER — HE WAS AN LMS MISSIONARY, AND HIS FATHER WROTE TO HIM. The South African Library at Cape Town holds MSB751, the GA KOLBE COLLECTION, donated by Dr Jean Griffiths of Somerset West in 1985: “George Augustus Kolbe, PHARMACIST, 1820 settler, MISSIONARY, married Margaret Downing” and, on a second entry, “George Augustus Kolbe, 1802–44. LMS MISSIONARY.” IT CORROBORATES A MEMORY THIS ARCHIVE PUBLISHED THE SAME MORNING AS AN INFERENCE — John Montgomery's recollection of a BUSHMAN MISSION SCHOOL AT KOOLSKOP about 1824, where Colesberg now stands. Two sources with nothing to do with each other, agreeing. THE COLLECTION IS FOUR PHOTOCOPIED PAGES CONTAINING A LETTER OF 23 AUGUST 1830 FROM JOHAN KOLBE IN LONDON TO HIS SON — the only known document connecting the tailor of Conduit Street to the settler of Colesberg. IT HAS NOW BEEN READ, AND IT DOES NOT CARRY A STREET ADDRESS. THE CATALOGUE CALLED IT A LETTER “ON HIS ORDINATION” AND THIS ARCHIVE REPEATED THE CATALOGUE; IT IS NOT. 20 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND A SECOND ATTACHMENT CAME WITH IT. A two-page Afrikaans typescript headed “MSB 751 / [Konsep] vir DSAB / VOORLOPIGE TEKS”, initialled KS and dated 18/2/92 — A DRAFT ENTRY FOR THE DICTIONARY OF SOUTH AFRICAN BIOGRAPHY, BY DR KAREL SCHOEMAN, on the word of the National Library that holds the file: “the author, KS, would be Dr. Karel Schoeman who worked here at the National Library”. IT IS A SECONDARY WORK AND THIS ARCHIVE DOES NOT TAKE SECONDARY WORKS AS EVIDENCE — BUT IT AGREES WITH THIS ARCHIVE ON NINE POINTS REACHED BY NINE OTHER ROADS (the 1802 birth, J.G.E. Kolbe 1822–68 at Leeuberg as a commandant, Margaret Downing 1803–1867, the 1819 London marriage, the apothecary’s trade, the farm Wurthemberg, ten children, Philippolis from March 1831) AND IT IS WRONG ABOUT EXACTLY ONE THING: it calls his father A GERMAN APOTHECARY. He was a tailor, on 121 rate books, two printed masters’ lists, three Gazette notices, the census, the burial register and his other son’s sworn deposition. THE TRADE IS THE SON’S, MOVED ONE GENERATION UP. WHAT THE ENTRY ADDS, ALL OF IT UNTESTED: the GRAAFF-REINET MISSIONARY SOCIETY from about 1824, WORKING AMONG THE SLAVES of the district; acceptance as an LMS MISSION ASSISTANT ON 8 FEBRUARY 1828 and posting to BOESMANSKOOL — THE PRESENT BETHULIE — with JAMES CLARK among the SAN; a journey with MELVILL to the CALEDON VALLEY IN NOVEMBER 1828, as far as present-day Ladybrand, THE EARLIEST JOURNEY IN THE PRESENT FREE STATE OF WHICH A WRITTEN RECORD SURVIVES, and PRINTED UNDER HIS OWN NAME in the Transactions of the Missionary Society for 1829 — a second document he wrote himself, SEARCHED FOR AND NOT FOUND; PHILIPPOLIS from March 1831, alone after Melvill left in March 1832; ORDINATION ON 25 MAY 1833 BY THE FRENCH MISSIONARIES ARBOUSSET AND CASALIS; his advice behind the Berlin Missionary Society’s founding of BETHANIE in 1834; AN ACCUSATION OF ADULTERY IN 1836 with the wife of one of his congregation, agitated by H. HENDRICKS, secretary of the Griqua Council — AN INQUIRY BY THE FRENCH MISSIONARIES ACQUITTED HIM — continued opposition from T. ATKINSON, withdrawal from the station in MARCH 1837 and DISMISSAL BY THE LMS ON 19 JUNE 1837; and the farm DRIEFONTEIN near Philippolis. IT IS ALSO WRONG A SECOND TIME, AND IN ITS OWN FIRST SOURCE: it says his death notice records only eight children. THE DEATH NOTICE NAMES TEN, and this archive has read it, photographed it and published the transcription — KAB MOOC 6/9/35: 7698, signed M. Kolbe at Colesberg in January 1845. IT ALSO SETTLES THE FARM NAME. This archive had WIRTEMBERG from the obituary and KNAPDAAR from the death notice and had quietly run them into one address; “WURTHEMBERG, SOMETIMES ALSO GIVEN AS KNAPDAAR” is the statement that assumption needed. AND IT NAMES A PORTRAIT: a likeness of him AS A YOUNG MAN, in 1992 with C.J. DU PLESSIS OF RUIGTEVLEI, district Bethulie, reproduced in Olivier (1973); and a CHARLES BELL WATERCOLOUR OF A CHURCH SERVICE AT PHILIPPOLIS IN 1834 WITH KOLBE IN THE PULPIT, in the Africana Museum, Johannesburg. THIS ARCHIVE HOLDS NO LIKENESS OF ANYBODY BORN BEFORE 1850. There may be two of this man. AND HE WROTE SOMETHING ELSE, AND IT IS FINDABLE. The 1829 journal extract the DSAB cites is catalogued under the OTHER man’s name, which is why a search for Kolbe found nothing: “EXTRACTS OF THE JOURNAL OF MESSRS MELVILL AND KOLBE, ADDRESSED TO THE REV. RICHARD MILES, SUPERINTENDENT OF THE SOCIETY’S MISSIONS IN AFRICA, PHILIPPOLIS, 25 NOV. 1828”, in the Council for World Missions archive at SOAS — which is source 4 on the DSAB’s own list, two lines above source 6. An edited version dated 18 November 1828 appears in MELVILL (1829), and the journey is printed entire in KAREL SCHOEMAN (ed.), EARLY WHITE TRAVELLERS IN THE TRANSGARIEP, 1819–1840 (Protea, 2003), p. 30. AND A SWORN WITNESS PUTS HIM AT BETHULIE WITH THE BUSHMEN, IN JUNE 1831. Basutoland Records (1883), the Cape's printed compilation of official documents, carries at page 436 the deposition of Frans Johannes Cornelis Cronje, taken at Smithfield on 14 September 1858 before Johannes Jacobus Sauer, Landdrost of the Caledon River District. Cronje had come up from Colesberg to hunt in June 1831 with Piet Venter, Barend Venter, Willem Venter, his brother Stephanus Cronje and Hendrik Weber, the Commandant of the District: “We then met with the missionaries KOLBE AND KLERK with some BUSHMEN AT BETHULIE.” “KLERK” IS ALMOST CERTAINLY JAMES CLARK, the man Sibree pairs him with at the Bushman station — a Dutch deponent writing an English surname down as he heard it — and the pairing is what identifies the Kolbe. This is an eyewitness, under oath, naming him at work, and it is the earliest independent sighting of him this archive holds. IT ALSO SITS AWKWARDLY WITH THE CHRONOLOGY AND IS NOT SMOOTHED OVER. Sibree has him reaching Philippolis on 13 March 1831, and Schoeman's chronology says March 1831 too, so by that June he should have been a long ride away. Either he was back at his old station, or a man deposing twenty-seven years later has slipped a year — and nothing here decides which. AND THE DOCUMENT HAS AN INTEREST. These depositions were taken to argue that the land had been empty, so the party's “no other native tribes besides a few Bushmen” is testimony with a purpose and is read as such. The page was read as an image, which corrected the transcript twice: the text file gives “Barend Teater” and “Bethulle” where the type says BAREND VENTER and BETHULIE. 11 OCTOBER, LATE — HIS OWN JOURNAL IS IN PRINT, IT IS FREE, AND IT HAS BEEN SINCE 1833. The London Missionary Society's own monthly, The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, is on the Internet Archive unrestricted, volume by volume, 1828 to 1837 — the whole of his mission. Ten volumes were taken and read. THE SUM OF HIS OWN WORDS IN THIS ARCHIVE WAS ONE SENTENCE, QUOTED AT SECOND HAND. IT IS NOW ELEVEN MONTHS OF A JOURNAL AND TWO LETTERS. THE JOURNAL. Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, 1833, pp. 410–412: “Extracts from the Journal of Mr. George Augustus Kolbe, from 8th October, 1831, to 3rd September, 1832.” Philippolis, day by day. 6 November 1831, 260 at the services, three admitted as members, the Lord's Supper to fifteen, and at ten at night he can still hear praying and singing. 9 November, the chief writes to Veld-Cornet Joubert complaining that colonists have insulted and beaten his people. 18 January 1832, “Vaccinated twenty-six persons” and ninety children in the school. 29 January, a day of thanksgiving for deliverance from small-pox. 5 February, two elders and two deacons chosen, and he sets out the church's discipline in his own hand. 15 February, Bushmen take two heifers, the thieves are whipped and the rest sent away with meat, and he writes: “there is no need of discharging a gun, much less of shooting them.” 1 April, the new church opens — built entirely by the inhabitants of the district, the Society giving 200 rix-dollars and some nails and hinges; stone walls two and a half feet thick and twelve feet high, room for five hundred, and a hundred left standing in the street. 2 April, 335 children in the school. 8 May, he rides out to a horde of Corannas with the small-pox. 23 May, having preached against the brandy the colonists bring in, the chief prohibits its sale at the station; three days later a Griqua is given so much brandy by a colonist that he is found dead in his bed. 21 July, “The Veld-Cornet Joubert … and two other farmers, arrived here this afternoon, for the purpose of obtaining MEDICAL ADVICE” — which is the obituary's «rendering them medical advice and assistance whenever called upon», sixteen years before the obituary, in his own journal. 5 August, the chapel «literally crammed», five hundred present, Captain Waterboer and his council down from Griqua Town. THE LETTER THAT SETTLES THE DATE THIS ARCHIVE COULD NOT SETTLE. Same serial, 1831: “Extracts of a Letter from Rev. G. A. Kolbe, dated Philippolis, April 30, 1831, addressed to the Foreign Secretary.” It opens: “As I resided for NEARLY THREE YEARS among the Bushmen previous to my removal to this station …” and then says it outright — “WHEN I ARRIVED, IN APRIL, 1828, WITH MY COLLEAGUE, IN THE BUSHMAN COUNTRY.” AND HIS COLLEAGUE SAYS THE SAME THING FROM THE OTHER SIDE. The 1830 volume prints a letter from Mr James Clark, dated Bushman Station, near Caledon River, 31 December 1828: Landdrost Stockenstrom of Graaff-Reinet and the Lieutenant-Governor asked him to begin a new station east of Philippolis near the Caledon, and “brother Kolbe and myself removed to this station, and arrived here in the beginning of MAY last.” TWO MEN, WRITING THREE YEARS APART AND NEITHER FOR THE RECORD, PUT HIM AT THE BUSHMAN STATION IN APRIL OR MAY 1828. So the DSAB's 1828 is right and SIBREE'S 8 FEBRUARY 1829 IS NOT AN ARRIVAL AT ALL — it is the Society formally accepting a man who had already been in the field a year, which is exactly the reading Schoeman's chronology suggested this morning and which is now his own word and his colleague's instead of an inference. The conflict this archive has carried since September is closed. IT ALSO DATES BETHULIE. The station Clark describes founding with him, at Stockenstrom's request and with farmers' subscribed cattle, is the Boesmanskool that became Bethulie. AND IT IS THE FIRST TIME THIS ARCHIVE HAS HEARD HIM ON THE PEOPLE HE WORKED AMONG. In the same 1831 letter: the Bushmen's raids on the farmers' herds “proceeded from a recollection of former injuries, excited by the intrusion of the colonists into their country”; and “Truly, the oppression of the Bushmen has been great; they have been looked upon, by many, little above the level of the brute creation; and having been subjected to a temporary slavery, they have smarted under the lash of the oppressor.” He also writes that not one of them had been brought to the faith, that “Temporal advantages are all they desire”, and that revenge and disobedience are reckoned virtues among them — the condescension and the indictment in one paragraph, and both are left standing here, because quoting only the half that reads well in 2026 would be choosing his words for him. LEGASSICK QUOTES HIM: on the Caledon they met people with “NO OTHER MEANS OF SUBSISTENCE THAN THE WILD ANIMALS FOUND IN THESE PARTS”. THE FIRST WORDS OF HIS THIS ARCHIVE HAS READ, AND THEY ARE ABOUT FAMINE. AND THE MAN HE ADDRESSED IT TO IS VERY PROBABLY THE MAN WHO CALLED AT HIS FATHER’S HOUSE: Richard Miles was sent to Cape Town to act as DR PHILIP’S SUBSTITUTE while Philip was in England, which puts him at the Cape in 1828 and back in London by 1830. The 1830 letter says only “Mr Miles”, so this is an identification and not a document. 20 SEPTEMBER, LATER — AND THE SOCIETY’S OWN REGISTER HAS HIM, FREE, IN EIGHT LINES. James Sibree, A REGISTER OF MISSIONARIES (LMS, 4th ed. 1923), ENTRY 278: “Was previously connected with the GRAAFF REINET MISSIONARY SOCIETY, and laboured AMONG THE SLAVES around Graaff Reinet. Was ACCEPTED PROVISIONALLY BY MR. MILES, FEB. 8, 1829, which action was CONFIRMED BY THE DIRECTORS, JULY 29, 1829. First laboured with MR. CLARK, at the BUSHMAN STATION, CALEDON RIVER. Thence proceeded to PHILIPPOLIS, arriving there, MARCH 13, 1831. On MAY 26, 1833, he was ordained by the French missionaries, Messrs. LEMUE, PELLISIER, AND ARBOUSSET. His connection was dissolved by the Directors, JUNE 19, 1837.” IT SETTLES MR MILES — the man who called at the tailor’s house in London was no messenger, HE WAS THE OFFICER WHO ACCEPTED HIM — and it explains the father’s adverb, because “provisionally” by Miles and “confirmed” by the Directors is precisely what “FULLY accepted” means. IT DISAGREES WITH THE DSAB on the year of acceptance (1829, not 1828), the day of the ordination (26 May) and the men who performed it (Lemue, Pellissier and Arbousset — no Casalis). AND IT IS WRONG ABOUT A SON. Entry 522 calls FREDERICK WILLIAM KOLBE, the Rhenish then LMS missionary of George and Paarl, “SON OF REV. G. A. KOLBE (No. 278)”, where Schoeman says he was no relation. SCHOEMAN IS RIGHT AND THE SOCIETY’S OWN REGISTER IS WRONG: the arithmetic gave it away — a birth of 3 November 1821 against John Gerson Eliezar’s 7 July 1822, EIGHT MONTHS APART — and three works settled it. The New Catholic Encyclopedia calls his son Monsignor F.C. Kolbe “the son of a WESTPHALIAN (GERMAN) PROTESTANT MISSIONARY”; S2A3 names him FRIEDRICH WILHELM KOLBE, Herero scholar, married at Cape Town in 1849 and at Okahandja by April 1850; and the DSAB had published its own entry on him in 1987. SIBREE HAS TWO KOLBES IN SOUTH AFRICA AND A COMPILER JOINED THEM. AND THE DICTIONARY ITSELF NOW SAYS SO, WITH A TOWN. Read 11 October 2026 by search-inside, which opens a borrowable scan without borrowing it: Dictionary of South African Biography V, 419 — Kolbe, Friedrich Wilhelm, born GÜTERSLOH IN WESTPHALIA on 3 NOVEMBER 1821, died CAPE TOWN 1899, a missionary and Herero scholar. The arithmetic above stands and no longer has to carry the argument alone: a man born in Westphalia in 1821 is not the son of a settler who had been at the Cape since April 1820. HIS PARENTS ARE STILL NOT READ — the dictionary names parents in a fixed form, and that sentence falls outside every snippet the preview allows. AND THE SAME INDEX SAYS WHAT IS NOT THERE: its cumulative list at p.922 carries F. C. Kolbe at I, 433 and the two above at V, 419, and no George Augustus Kolbe anywhere in five volumes — which is what this archive had already reasoned about the draft, now with the printed index agreeing. AND THE SON'S ENTRY FINISHES IT. Dictionary of South African Biography I, 433 — Friedrich Carl (Frederick Charles) Kolbe, the Monsignor, born George, 28 September 1854, died Sea Point, Cape Town, 12 January 1936 — “was the son of Friedrich Wilhelm Kolbe of Gütersloh in Westphalia, who came to SOUTH AFRICA IN 1844 as one of the earliest missionaries of the Rhenish mission society in Damaraland, and his wife, Isabella Elliott”. THE SETTLER DIED AT COLESBERG ON 1 DECEMBER 1844. So the man Sibree made his son reached this country, aged twenty-three, from Westphalia, for a different society and a different field, in the year the Settler died. Two volumes of the dictionary give the Westphalian birth independently, and neither has ever joined the two families. F. W. Kolbe's own parents remain unread, which is all that is left of that question. AND HIS OWN JOURNALS ARE CATALOGUED, IN LONDON. The Council for World Mission archive at SOAS, item-level: CWM/LMS/05/05/100 — “Extracts from the Journal of JOHN MELVILL AND GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE, during a tour to the north-eastwards of Philippolis, 13–22 NOV 1828”, the manuscript behind the printed extract this archive hunted all morning; /102, extracts at Philippolis 1828–1831; /106, Journal, Philippolis 1831–1834; /108, Journal, Philippolis 6 Oct 1832 – Sep 1833. SIX YEARS OF HIS LIFE IN HIS OWN WRITING. Until 11 October 2026 this archive held one sentence of his at second hand; it now holds ELEVEN MONTHS of his journal and two of his letters, printed by the Society in its own monthly and free — but printed as EXTRACTS, visibly cut, so the manuscripts behind them are still the ask. AND THE YEAR OF THE ACCUSATION IS ONE BOX: incoming correspondence /044 (1835, which the catalogue says contains him), /046 (1836) and the 1837 file — 1836–1837 IS BOX 15. AND ONE LIKENESS IS CATALOGUED, IN SCOTLAND: University of Edinburgh, Centre for the Study of World Christianity, CSWC 60 — five photograph copies of Bell sketches of African congregations, ITEM 3 “MR. KOLBE… AT PHILIPPOLIS IN 1834”. Edinburgh calls him “a moravian missionary?”, question mark and all; HE WAS LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY, and this archive has his father’s letter saying so. The DSAB puts the original watercolour in Johannesburg and never mentions Scotland; Edinburgh never mentions Johannesburg. 11 OCTOBER — SCHOEMAN PUBLISHED THE DOCUMENTS BEHIND HIS OWN DRAFT, AND THEY NAME A THIRD MAN IN THE CHARGE. Everything above about 1836 rests on his voorlopige teks of February 1992, which this archive has always labelled a secondary work it does not take as evidence. The same scholar then edited “Griqua Records: the Philippolis Captaincy, 1825–1861” for the Van Riebeeck Society, Second Series 25 (Cape Town, 1996), ISBN 0958411212, which prints the Captaincy's own papers — including those of H. Hendricks, who led the agitation. Its index puts G.A. Kolbe on three pages, and all three have now been read through the Internet Archive's search-inside, which gives page numbers and their text on a borrowable book without borrowing it. PAGE 35 IS A CONTEMPORARY DOCUMENT AND NOT A GLOSS: the Griquas complain of their late missionary Kolbe, whom they, with Wright and Atkinson, hold dangerous to peace and good order, and they claim the right to make him quit their territory. Schoeman's footnote to it has him incurring the enmity of Hendrik Hendrickze — the book's own spelling, which its index says is discussed at p. xiii — accused of adultery, with his colleagues Wright and Atkinson particularly zealous in pressing the charges, gone from the station but still living north of the Orange. THE DRAFT NAMED HENDRICKS AND ATKINSON; THE DOCUMENTS ADD PETER WRIGHT OF GRIQUATOWN. The same index gives the eleven missionaries who served Philippolis — Atkinson, Christie, Clark, Kolbe, Melvill, Philip, Schreiner, Solomon, Thomson, van der Schalk and Wright — so two of the eleven pressed the charge against a third. AND ITS CHRONOLOGY MAY DISSOLVE A DISAGREEMENT THIS ARCHIVE HAS CARRIED SINCE SEPTEMBER. It dates the founding of the Bushman School, later Bethulie, by James Clark and G.A. Kolbe to MAY 1828; his own arrival at Philippolis to March 1831; Theophilus Atkinson's to August 1836; and his withdrawal to March 1837. If he was founding the school in May 1828 he was in the field before the Society formally took him on, and Sibree's 8 February 1829 and the DSAB's 8 February 1828 are then dating two different things — the acceptance and the posting — rather than contradicting one another. That is a reading of a chronology and not a document, and it is offered as one. Three pages is where the index has him BY NAME: page 35 calls him “their late missionary” without the surname, which is exactly what an index cannot catch, so the volume is not finished with. A SECOND KOLBE IN THE SAME BOOK IS NOT HIM: the index carries Kolbe, J. at p. 130, a lessee of a farm owed Rds1480 under a settlement of Sir Harry Smith's, printed in Dutch there and in English at p. 268. Nothing is claimed about him, and he is written down so that the next reader does not fold two initials into one man.

Godfather at the same font, the same day. He carries his own father's name — George Augustus Kolbe, the 1820 Settler, dead at Colesberg nine years earlier.

HIS PARENTS ARE NAMED IN A BAPTISM REGISTER, AND THE QUESTION THIS ARCHIVE ASKED ALL MONTH IS ANSWERED. South Africa, Free State Dutch Reformed Church Records, 1848–1956: born 5 JULY 1849, baptised at FAURESMITH on 9 OCTOBER 1849, son of JAN GERSON ELIESE KOLBE and ANNA JACOBA VAN DER MERWE. THE SAME ENTRY IS INDEXED A SECOND TIME in the Cape Town Archives collection, as “Hendrik Kolbe”, with the identical two dates and the same two parents — one event, two indexings, which is agreement between transcribers and not between witnesses. SO HE IS THE COMMANDANT'S SON FROM A DOCUMENT, where this archive had him from a user tree since 20 September and would not adopt it. AND IT EXPLAINS THE FARM. HE FARMED THE COMMANDANT'S FARM, AND UNTIL THIS MORNING THAT WAS THE NEAREST THING TO AN ANSWER. He married ROSE MARIA McCABE at BLOEMFONTEIN on 4 JUNE 1872 — South Africa, Civil Marriage Records, FamilySearch 1:1:6ZHB-XQ1R — and the register image was read on 27 SEPTEMBER 2026. It enters him as 23, JONGELIEDEN, VEEBOER, living at LEEUWBERG (BLFN.); his bride's residence is written “Dito”, the same farm. LEEUWBERG IS WHERE COMMANDANT J.G.E. KOLBE DIED IN 1868, and where the register had placed the Commandant's widow eleven months earlier, at her own second marriage. A TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD KOLBE RUNNING STOCK ON THAT FARM IN 1872 is exactly what a son of that house would be doing, and his year of birth sits correctly among the children of a man who married in 1843. IT IS STILL NOT PROOF. A farm is not a father; brothers, nephews and hired kin all live on farms, and this archive has already been caught once this month reading a household as a parentage. THE FORM CANNOT SETTLE IT AND NEVER COULD — it has no parents' columns, which is a correction against this archive's own assumption rather than a disappointment. He signed himself J. H. Kolbe. THE SECOND WITNESS SIGNED G. A. KOLBE — a name this family carries in three generations, and one more reason to want VAB MHG M777, which would name all twelve children at once. He is the second of two Kolbes to marry a McCabe in ten months. AND ON 2 AUGUST 1869 HE AND HIS BROTHER TOOK CHURCH MEMBERSHIP AT BLOEMFONTEIN ON THE SAME DAY — “John Henry Kolbe” and “Willem Johannes Kolbe”, both entered that date in the Free State registers, which was Willem Johannes's twenty-second birthday and fifteen months after their father died. JOHN HENRY IS JAN HENDRIK ANGLICISED, and under that spelling the registers give him five children by Rose Maria McCabe: JOHN GERSON ELIEZER — the Commandant's name entire — Elizabeth Magdalena, Ada Francis, Anna Jacoba and Rosa Euphemia. A man names his eldest son after his own father, and this one did.

Father JOHN GOTTLOB, mother Mary, batch C06236-1. SHE IS THE PROOF THAT THERE WERE TWO MARYS: the first was buried in August 1814, five years before this baptism. The forename DAY is unusual enough to be a surname, and is the only hint this archive has of the second wife’s family. SHE LIVED AND SHE MARRIED: GRO index, third quarter of 1853, CITY OF LONDON, volume AM, 1170, page 33. The youngest of the eleven, and thirty-four when she married.

NAMED IN BOTH HIS PARENTS’ DEATH NOTICES AND IN THIS ARCHIVE’S PEOPLE LIST UNTIL 21 SEPTEMBER 2026 IN NEITHER. The Settler’s death notice, signed M. Kolbe — Margaret, the widow — at Colesberg in January 1845, names ten children and he 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 it is careful about the dead: Mary Elizabeth is entered as “(dead), who was married to George F. Enslin” and he is not. SO HE WAS ALIVE AT ABOUT TWENTY-THREE, twenty-three years after his father died. THE FORENAME IS THE POINT. This archive already called the family’s forenames extraordinary — Hachilah Machilah, Gerson Eliezar, Fortunatus — and listed Casimir among them. A compiled register report published on a Barry family website in 2012 gives him as JOHAN CASMIER, ninth of thirteen, and that spelling was treated here as a name the archive had never held. IT IS A THIRD SPELLING OF A NAME IN TWO PRIMARY DOCUMENTS — the family list already carried the variant “Casiner”. AND THE NAME OUTLIVED HIM IN SOUTH AFRICA. This archive’s own register carries three men of it out of SOUTH AFRICA, CIVIL MARRIAGE RECORDS, 1801–1974: JOHAN HENDRIK CASIMIR KOLBE, born 1863, who married Gertruida Jacomina Louw; JOHAN CASIMIR KOLBE, who married Elizabeth Geertruida Pienaar; and JOHAN CASIMIR KOLBE, born 1934, who married Maria Monica Van Der Walt. A SHARED SURNAME IS NOT A RELATIONSHIP and none of the three is joined to this house — they are index rows, and they are here because a rare forename recurring in the same country for ninety years is a thing to follow, not a thing to assume. THAT SENTENCE IS KEPT BECAUSE IT WAS WRONG BY SIX DAYS. It read: nothing is known of his own life: no baptism, no marriage, no death. The Bethulie and Colesberg registers are where to look. COLESBERG WAS THE RIGHT ANSWER AND THE BAPTISM WAS THE WRONG QUESTION. 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 — HE HAS A LIFE, AND NONE OF IT IS A FONT. Searched not on his own name but on his MOTHER'S: MARGARET DOWNING. HIS DEATH NAMES BOTH HIS PARENTS OUTRIGHT — South Africa, Orange Free State, Civil Death Registration, FamilySearch 1:1:D9SM-K2N2: JOHAN CASIMIS KOLBE, died 11 MARCH 1906 at SMITHFIELD, O.R.C., aged 60, born in the Cape Colony, son of GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE and MARGARET DOWNING. Until today he existed here only inside his parents' death notices; now a civil register puts him in the household from the other end of his life. AND COLESBERG HAS HIM TWICE, IN THE REGISTER THIS ARCHIVE WAS LOOKING IN. He took church membership at COLESBERG on 31 MARCH 1866, and his MARRIAGE BANNS were called at COLESBERG on 1 MAY 1867 — to ELIZABETH GEERTRUIDA PIENAAR. Their daughter ADRIANA is in the Cape register, and the Free State registers give five more: ELIZABETH AUGUSTA, ANNA SOPHIA, JOHANNA, GEORGE AUGUSTUS and MARGARET DEWNING — he named a son for his father and a daughter for his mother, which is this family's habit and is the best corroboration a namesake can give. HIS ESTATE EXISTS: Orange Free State Probate Records from the Master of the Supreme Court, probate 1906 at Smithfield, not ordered and not read. THREE SOURCES, THREE BIRTH YEARS, AND A DOCUMENT ALREADY HELD HERE SETTLES TWO OF THEM. The family list says 1844 at Bethulie; the death registration's age of 60 implies 1846; the probate index says 1845. HE IS THE FIFTH OF THE TEN CHILDREN NAMED ON HIS FATHER'S DEATH NOTICE, SIGNED AT COLESBERG IN JANUARY 1845 — so 1846 is impossible, and an age at death is the weakest of the three. 1844 or 1845, and the font would say which. THE BAPTISM IS NOT IN THE CAPE DUTCH REFORMED INDEX: fifteen records answer Casimir in that whole collection and not one is a baptism of his.

HE HAD EIGHT SONS, AND THIS ARCHIVE KNEW OF ONE. His son’s obituary in the Grahamstown Journal of 19 December 1844 calls George Augustus “THE LAST REMAINING OF EIGHT SONS OF JOHN GODLOFF KOLBE ESQ. OF BRUNSWICK-SQUARE, LONDON”. SEVEN BROTHERS, ALL DEAD BEFORE DECEMBER 1844, none of them named anywhere in this archive — and dead men do not appear in a census, which is why the 1841 Conduit Street household holds three women and no sons. THE OBITUARY ALSO PUTS HIM AT BRUNSWICK SQUARE, in Bloomsbury, where the census and the death put him at CONDUIT STREET in Mayfair, a mile and a half away. Both can be true twenty years apart, and this archive has already moved this man once — off the family tree’s Lamb’s Conduit Street — so it records a second address rather than making a second correction. “ESQ.”, not “tailor”. AND HE IS IN THE LONDON GAZETTE, nine years before he died: issue 19424, page 1702, 29 September 1836, dissolving the copartnership of “JOHN GOTTLOB KOLBE and DAVID FLETCHER, of Conduit-Street, Bond-Street, in the County of Middlesex, TAILORS”. That is his trade, his street and a business partner, in print, from a free source — and it pushes him back to Conduit Street in 1836. AND THE DEATH IS NOW A GRO REFERENCE: FreeBMD gives one Kolbe death in all of England and Wales for 1845–46 — “Deaths Dec 1845, KOLBE, JOHN GOTTLOB, ST GEO HAN SQ, VOL 1, PAGE 35”. The district matches the census; the name form JOHN GOTTLOB matches his son's 1803 baptism; and the certificate, not yet ordered, would name the informant. FOUND IN THE 1841 CENSUS, which settles two things this archive had argued from other documents. He is at CONDUIT STREET, St George Hanover Square, sub-district MAY FAIR, aged 76 — four years before he died at number 34, and independent of the death record that corrected the family tree's Lamb's Conduit Street. And his birth county is entered as “FOREIGN”, which is the first document in this archive to say in its own words that he was not English. HO107, piece 734, book 1, folio 11, page 15, SCHEDULE 38. Three women share that schedule: Marianne, 35, Charlotte, 30, and Amelia A., 25. Tailor. Died at 34 Conduit Street, Mayfair — not Lamb's Conduit Street; the tree's photograph is of the wrong building. 16 SEPTEMBER 2026 — THE ADDRESS ARGUMENT IS OVER, AND HE HAD TWO WIVES. The WESTMINSTER RATE BOOKS index him ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE TIMES between 1800 and 1831, under TWENTY-FOUR SPELLINGS of his forename — Gothel, Gotleb, Gotleib, Gotlieb, Gotliel, Gotlob, Gotlobe, Goltief, Gottieb, Gottiel, Gottlieb, Gottlob, Gutlieb, Kottieb, Gilliet and once “Jos Gottiel”. In 1800 he is at BROAD STREET NORTH, St James Piccadilly, folio 41 — which independently corroborates the printed 1799 list of 234 master tailors, “Kolbe, John, 18 Broad-street, Soho”. From 1811 to 1831 he is at CHURCH STREET SOUTH, ST ANNE’S SOHO, year after year, and the 1829 land tax return says the same. BRUNSWICK SQUARE APPEARS IN NO RATE BOOK, NO LAND TAX RETURN, NO CENSUS AND NO BURIAL REGISTER — those are Westminster sources and Bloomsbury would not be in them, so they cannot disprove it, but Soho 1800–1831, St George Hanover Square in 1841 and a death there in 1845 leaves no window for it. AND THE BURIAL IS NOW A REGISTER ENTRY RATHER THAN A TREE CLAIM: Westminster Burials, City of Westminster Archives Centre — DIED 18 NOVEMBER 1845, BURIED 26 NOVEMBER 1845 AT ST JOHN THE BAPTIST, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET, page 7, year of birth given as 1764. The date matches the tree’s “26 November 1845, entry 55, grave 7” to the day and the “7” matches; the church does not. 20 SEPTEMBER 2026 — HE WRITES, AND HE SIGNS HIMSELF. MSB 751 at the National Library of South Africa is a letter of FOUR SIDES headed “LONDON AUGUST 23. 1830”, opening “DEAR GEORGE” and signed “YOUR AFFECTIONATE FATHER, J G KOLBE”. IT IS THE FIRST DOCUMENT IN THIS ARCHIVE HE WROTE HIMSELF — everything else is somebody writing about him. IT DOES NOT CARRY A STREET ADDRESS: the heading is “London” and nothing finer, so it does NOT settle Brunswick Square against Conduit Street, which is what this archive most hoped for. WHAT IT DOES CARRY: his son’s acceptance by the LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY in the father’s own words, DR PHILIP carrying an earlier letter to the Cape, MR MILES of the Society calling at the house, HENRY dying of DROPSY and “resigned to the Catastrophe”, MILNE AND ELIZABETH — “Betsey” — removed to EDINBURGH, CHARLOTTE sending an Evangelical Magazine, a SUIT OF BLACK CLOTHES sent out for a newly accepted missionary, the death of George IV and the French revolution of July 1830 as fresh news, and a request that his son fact-check a baboon story in a magazine. AND THE LINE THAT COUNTS MOST: “KIND LOVE FROM YOUR SISTERS & BROTHER” — SISTERS PLURAL, BROTHER SINGULAR. Of the eight sons, two were alive in August 1830. 20 SEPTEMBER, READ AGAIN FROM THE FILE INSTEAD OF FROM A MAIL PREVIEW, AND IT CARRIES MORE. DR PHILIP IS NOT JUST THE COURIER — “Dr Philip was exceedingly glad to hear of you being accepted by the L.M.S. as you may well imagine, HE HAS PROMISED TO WRITE TO YOU A LETTER BY THE FIRST OPPORTUNITY”. HE SENDS A BOX: a suit of black clothes for George, and a jacket and waistcoat FOR JOHN with a further jacket, “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. AND THE HOUSE HAS FRIENDS WITH NAMES, the first in this archive who simply knew them: MR & MRS STANHOPE, MR AND MRS WARNER, and MRS FIELD AND HER DAUGHTERS — “the eldest, Miss Mary, that was, HAS MARRIED A MR BELLEW, A SURGEON”. TWO OF HIS FOUR PAGES GO ON A STORY FROM THE MIRROR about a Scottish colonist near the Xhosa whose wife was carried off by orang-outangs and recovered after two years as their queen — AND HE DOES NOT BELIEVE A WORD OF IT: “here we look upon the Story as a fictious & romance… I should be glad to hear from you, WHETHER THAT REPORT MAY BE FOUNDED IN TRUTH, OR FALSEHOOD.” A tailor of seventy, reading a cheap weekly, writing to the one man he knew who was actually there to ask whether it was true. 21 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND THE STORY IS FOUND, AND HE WAS RIGHT. It is “A SINGULAR LETTER FROM SOUTHERN AFRICA, COMMUNICATED BY MR. HOGG, THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD”, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, VOLUME XIV (1829), pages 313–318 — FICTION BY JAMES HOGG, author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, printed as though it were a settler’s letter home. Every detail he recalled is in it: the chief KAROO offering oxen and “a choice virgin to boot” for the settler’s wife, “he foretold I should repent it”, CAPTAIN JOHNSTONE, the wife “carried across the river by a band of pongos, (ourang-outangs)”, and her discovery as their QUEEN. AND THE DETAIL HE GOT WRONG IS WHY FIVE SEARCHES FOR IT FAILED: he thought the colonist was called “either Williams, or Williamson”, and the narrator is anonymous — IT IS HIS SON WHO IS CALLED WILLIAM. HIS FIRST WIFE MARY DIED 2 AUGUST 1814 AGED 46 and his SECOND, ALSO MARY, DIED 15 AUGUST 1824 AGED 36, both buried in the German Lutheran Church register, TNA RG 4/4631 — which is why one Mary could never be made to fit a run of baptisms from 1792 to 1819. AND THE LONDON GAZETTE HOLDS FIVE NOTICES, NOT THE ONE THIS ARCHIVE HAD. 12 MAY 1824 — the partnership of JOHN GOTLOB KOLBE AND JOHN HENRY KOLBE, of CHURCH-STREET, SOHO, TAILORS, dissolved. 30 SEPTEMBER 1836 — Kolbe and DAVID FLETCHER of Conduit-Street dissolved. 21 MARCH 1845 — “JOHN GOTLIEB KOLBE AND RICHARD DAVIES, OF CONDUIT-STREET, BOND-STREET, TAILORS, HAS BEEN DISSOLVED BY MUTUAL CONSENT”, EIGHT MONTHS BEFORE HE DIED and still calling himself a tailor, which is what the obituary’s “Esq. of Brunswick-square” has to be set against. 1824 WAS THE YEAR IT ALL WENT: the partnership dissolved in May, his second wife dead in August, and his son in the insolvent debtors’ lists in October and November. 16 SEPTEMBER, LATER — AND THE 1799 TAILORS’ LIST HAS A TWIN. In APRIL AND MAY 1834 the London press printed the roll of “considerably more than THREE HUNDRED of the Master Tailors of the metropolis” who met at Willis’s Rooms, St James’s-street, to resist THE GRAND NATIONAL CONSOLIDATED TRADES’ UNION, and the entry reads “KOLBE AND FLETCHER, CONDUIT-STREET” — Morning Post 30 April, Globe 30 April and 10 May, Old England 4 May, Morning Herald 10 May, London Courier 10 May, True Sun 10 May, Public Ledger 12 May. SEVEN NEWSPAPERS, ONE LINE. 20 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND A HISTORIAN CALLED HIM AN APOTHECARY. The DSAB draft entry on his son opens “die seun van J.G.Kolbe, ’n DUITSE APTEKER wat in Londen woonagtig was”. THE GERMAN IS RIGHT AND THE LONDON IS RIGHT AND THE TRADE IS HIS SON’S — George Augustus sailed in 1820 as an apothecary, and the apothecary has been handed back up to the father. IT IS THE ONLY THING IN THAT ENTRY THIS ARCHIVE CAN SHOW TO BE WRONG, and it can only show it because it read the rate books. IT CLOSES THE GAP: the rate books had him in Soho to 1831 and the Gazette at Conduit Street by 1836; HE WAS AT CONDUIT STREET, WITH FLETCHER, BY 29 APRIL 1834. AND IT RHYMES WITH THE FIRST LIST THIRTY-FIVE YEARS EARLIER — in December 1799 one of 234 masters over the Combination Acts, a young man at 18 Broad-street; in April 1834 a firm with a partner and a Bond Street address, seventy years old, on the masters’ side of the same argument.

THE ELEVENTH OF THE TWELVE, AND HE NEVER MARRIED. His civil death registration completes field 14 as JOHN GERSON ELIEZER KOLBE, FARMER and field 15 as ANNA JACOBA VAN DER MERWE — the Commandant and his wife, both named in full, the mother’s MAIDEN surname given correctly. A STOCK FARMER OF GEORGIA, DISTRICT BLOEMFONTEIN, entered as Dutch, born in the Orange Free State, buried at Georgia; the medical practitioner Dr S. A. de Kock; the informant signed from THABA’NCHU in the capacity of arranging the burial. Dead at sixty on 14 September 1923 after a last illness the form records in two columns at once — two days, and many years. HE IS ENTERED AS UNMARRIED AND THE FORM THEN GIVES AN AGE AT MARRIAGE OF 24. Both are on the page; field 6 says unmarried and field 7, which only applies if he was married, carries a number. This archive is not going to choose between them and does not need to — nothing here turns on it. TWO FORMS, ONE MOTHER, TWO ANSWERS. His sister Catharina Wilhelmina’s registration of 1909 was asked for the same mother’s MAIDEN surname and was given her MARRIED one, Kolbe, after a crossed-out word. His gives van der Merwe. The field is identical; the informants were not, and that is the whole difference between a document that closes a question and one that merely repeats a household.

A STOCK FARMER, and it is his daughter who says so: her 1909 death registration completes field 14 — father’s name in full, and occupation — as “JAN GERSEM ELIEZER KOLBE, STOCK FARMER”, which is the first trade this archive has for him from a document rather than from an obituary’s account of his soldiering. THE SETTLER'S ELDEST CHILD, AND UNTIL TODAY A LINE IN A TABLE. His obituary — Grahamstown Journal, 15 April 1868, headed “DEATH OF COMMANDANT KOLBE” — gives the whole man. Born 7 JULY 1822; married 3 APRIL 1843 to ANNA JACOBA VAN DER MERWE; DIED 3 APRIL 1868, ON HIS WEDDING ANNIVERSARY, at the farm LEEUWBERG, of TYPHUS OR TYPHOID CAUGHT ON COMMANDO — “thus adding another to the long list of victims of our miserable war”. He had settled on KAALSPRUIT about 1850 and lies there — AND HE CONFIRMS THE FARM HIMSELF. A lost-property advertisement he placed in the Friend on 9 MARCH 1864 is signed “J.G.E. KOLBE, Kafferberg, Kaalspruit” (the address as the paper printed it). The Friend’s own obituary transcription reads “[Randspruit]”, bracketed by the transcriber as doubtful; the man’s own address settles it. THAT ADVERTISEMENT ALSO PUTS THE TWO BROTHERS IN ONE DOCUMENT: it concerns “a promissory note, date 9th March 1864, drawn by GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE in favor of J.G.E. KOLBE, payable 4 months after date for £154 Stg” — lost on the Market Square at Bloemfontein. HE LEFT A WIDOW AND TWELVE CHILDREN — “OF THE EIGHT SONS AND FOUR DAUGHTERS HE HAS LEFT BEHIND HIM”, which is the Friend of the Free State’s own wording and a count the Grahamstown reprint drops. Only one daughter was married and the youngest child was an infant; TWO SONS HAD BEEN SERVING WITH HIM IN THE FIELD and “proved themselves amongst the bravest of our burghers”. NONE OF THE TWELVE IS NAMED AND NONE IS IN THIS ARCHIVE. 20 SEPTEMBER 2026 — A COLLABORATIVE TREE NAMES THEM, AND IT IS NOT THIS FAMILY’S OWN. A Geni profile for FREDERIK FORTUNATUS KOLBE, born 22 October 1857 at Bloemfontein and dead there 18 December 1930, gives him as SON OF COMMANDANT.GEN. JOHN GHERSON ELIEZER KOLBE AND ANNA JACOBA, and lists as his siblings CATHARINA WILHELMINA MAGDALENA PIENAAR ANDERSON, GEORGE AUGUSTUS, GENERAL WILLEM JOHANNES, JAN HENDRIK and PETRUS JACOBUS “and 6 others” — which is twelve. THIS IS FROM A USER TREE, NOT FROM A DOCUMENT, and none of the twelve is adopted here on it — it is a lead and not a witness. But TWO OF ITS CLAIMS MATCH DOCUMENTS THIS ARCHIVE REACHED INDEPENDENTLY: his wife MARIA PETRONELLA ELIZABETH ANTOINETTE and daughter ROSA MAGDALENE against the 1890 Bloemfontein baptism already held, and his daughter MARIA MARGARETHA DOWNING ROUSSEAU against TAB MHG 5450/68, an orphan index entry here that now has a father. VAB MHG M777 IS STILL THE DOCUMENT THAT WOULD PROVE THEM, and it is a better thing to order now that there is something to check it against. He was COMMANDANT OF THE DISTRICT, A JUSTICE OF THE PEACE, A DIRECTOR OF THE BLOEMFONTEIN BANK and a DEACON of the Dutch Reformed Church, and he had spoken in the VOLKSRAAD in May 1867. He had refused public life for twelve years after THE ABANDONMENT, having protested the British withdrawal and applied to SIR GEORGE CLERK for compensation for his land so that he might leave with the troops; failing that, “he, like many more, had to cast his lot with the Free State”. AND ON HIS DEATHBED, in full possession of his senses, he told the doctor and the others present THAT THIS STATE HAD TAKEN TOO MUCH LAND FROM THE BASUTOS, that he had always thought so and had said so in the Raad, and begged them to rescind the resolution and treat with the Governor for an equitable boundary. 20 SEPTEMBER 2026 — A HISTORIAN’S DRAFT NAMES HIM TOO, AND NAMES THE WAR. The DSAB entry on his father says the eldest son “J.G.E. KOLBE (1822–68), was later op LEEUBERG naby Bloemfontein woonagtig en het gedurende die TWEEDE SOTHO-VRYSTAATOORLOG roem verwerf as KOMMANDANT”. BOTH YEARS MATCH THIS ARCHIVE TO THE YEAR — born 7 July 1822, dead 3 April 1868 — and both were got from an obituary and an auction advertisement that the entry does not cite. It is the strongest of the nine places where that entry and this archive agree from different documents. AND IT NAMES WHAT KILLED HIM: the obituary said only “our miserable war”; the war was the SECOND SOTHO–FREE STATE WAR. AND HE MAY BE IN THE 1830 LETTER, AGED EIGHT. Read from the file rather than from a mail preview, MSB 751 encloses “a Jacket & waistcoat FOR JOHN & a further Jacket also for him, tell him HIS OLD FATHER has sent it him, & TO MAKE HASTE TO FILL THEM OUT”. CLOTHES FOR A GROWING CHILD, sent from Soho to the Cape in August 1830, when this man was eight years old and the eldest son of the house. IF IT IS HIM IT IS THE EARLIEST DOCUMENT IN THIS ARCHIVE THAT MENTIONS HIM. “His old father” is the difficulty and is not glossed over — the writer is his GRANDFATHER, and this is an inference, not a reading. 11 OCTOBER 2026 — A PUBLISHED HISTORY OF THE FREE STATE MOURNS HIM BY NAME, AND IT HAS BEEN SITTING IN THE OPEN SINCE 1876. H. J. Hofstede, Geschiedenis van den Oranje-Vrijstaat (1876), is out of copyright and its full text is free on the Internet Archive. It names him seventeen times. In an aside the author cannot help making, he writes of “den kommandant van Bloemfontein J. G. E. Kolbe”, taken from them “door een noodlottige koorts” — by a fatal fever — “niet op 't bed van eer, maar in het midden zijner betrekkingen”: not on the bed of honour, but in the midst of his relations, “bemind en geacht door alle rechtgeaarde Vrijstaters als een goed en verstandig medeburger en een voorganger in den strijd tegen geweldenarij en roof”. THAT IS A STRANGER'S VERDICT ON HIM, IN PRINT, EIGHT YEARS AFTER HE DIED, and it is the first this archive has had from anybody who was not a newspaper or a relative. IT ALSO NAMES HIS COMMAND: he is the commandant OF BLOEMFONTEIN, which this archive had nowhere — it had the farm, the district and the rank, never the seat. AND IT AGREES WITH THE OBITUARY ABOUT WHAT KILLED HIM WITHOUT HAVING READ IT. The Grahamstown Journal said typhus or typhoid caught on commando; Hofstede says a fatal fever and is careful to say he did not die in action but at home among his people — which is exactly what a man who carries a camp disease back to his own farm looks like, and the two accounts are the same event told by two men who wanted different things from it. ON THE DATE THEY DIFFER BY ONE DAY AND THE ARCHIVE'S STANDS. Hofstede gives 4 April 1868. The obituary gives 3 April, and 3 April 1868 was a Friday, and it was his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary — three facts that lock together and that a historian writing in 1876 had no reason to hold. 4 April is recorded as a variant and is not adopted. AND IT IS THE FIRST ACCOUNT OF WHAT HE ACTUALLY DID ON COMMANDO. He and Commandant Roos were sent by the President as gijzelaars — hostages for Moshesh's personal safety — so that Moshesh would come in to the meeting; the chief came with his principal sons an hour later. At Klokkelani he surrounded the Basotho and sent word to the hoofdkommandant, who came up with the Armstrong gun. At the Thiemie he went up a footpath with Commandant Prinsloo and two hundred men, reached the summit with fifty, and then held the captured position that divided the mountain in two while the others cleared the northern point; the day's taking was 10,657 cattle, 5,468 sheep and goats and 1,007 horses, and he came back into camp at sunset soaked through and spent. THIS IS THE MAN THE OBITUARY CALLED A LEADER, DOING IT. ONE KOLBE IN THE BOOK IS NOT ESTABLISHED AS HIM: a Kolbe climbs a krans on other men's shoulders with Hunton, Owen, Raaff and the Hangers in a different action under Commandant Wessels, and nothing in the passage says which Kolbe he is. THAT ACTION HAS NOW BEEN PLACED, BY READING THE PAGES BEFORE IT. They are the assaults on THABA BOSIU in August 1865 — the ones Louw Wepener died in — and the page that runs into it ends with the stormers reaching “de eerste loodrecht opgaande rots, die omtrent 20 voet hoog was”, the first sheer rock about twenty feet high. Seven men got up it on each other's shoulders and one of them was a Kolbe. HE IS STILL NOT ESTABLISHED AS THIS MAN, who was a commandant and would not be named bare among a captain and five burghers; a son is as likely, and two of his sons were serving with him. AND THERE IS A SECOND NAME IN THE SAME BOOK THAT IS HARDER TO PUT DOWN. On 6 April 1866, three men were allowed by Sephanja to go up and bring away Louw Wepener's bones: Jan Jonathan Durand, Franz Holm, and “Jan Colbe”. THE ARCHIVE'S OWN MAN IS “JAN GERSEM ELIEZER KOLBE” — that is his daughter's wording on her 1909 death registration — so the given name is exactly right, and that is precisely why it is not adopted. THE PRINTED PAGE HAS NOW BEEN READ, AND IT SAYS COLBE. The leaf was found by parsing the scan's own _djvu.xml, whose page objects carry the OCR leaf by leaf; the Colbe falls on leaf 211, printed folio 160, and the type on that page is unambiguous: “Durand, Franz Holm en Jan Colbe door Sefoni (Sephanja) toegelaten om de beenderen van L. Wepener weg te nemen.” The OCR was faithful and the spelling is the book's own, in a volume that sets Kolbe seventeen times for the Commandant. So the resemblance is weaker than it looked and this archive takes nothing from it. The page is kept for a different reason: it says the bones were buried by J. J. Durand at Wepener's last dwelling place, Constantia in the district of BETHULIE — the district the Settler helped open as the Bushman School — and it dates the failed storming to 15 August 1865, naming the Timie as the mountain taken later. That later mountain is the Thiemie, and the man who held its summit was this Commandant. AND A SECOND BOOK HAS WHAT NO OTHER SOURCE HAS: A DOCUMENT HE WROTE. D. C. F. Moodie, History of the Battles and Adventures of the British, the Boers and the Zulus in Southern Africa (1888), page 93, read as an image and not only as text: “A report from Commandant J. G. E. KOLBE to Commandant Botha, dated PLATBERG, 2nd Nov., 1867, gives an account of the capture of some caverns and strongholds at MARIENDALL.” Moodie summarises it rather than printing it: one Boer killed and two severely wounded; eleven of the enemy killed as far as was known; 120 WOMEN AND CHILDREN TAKEN OUT OF THE CAVERNS AND PUT ACROSS THE CALEDON; twenty wagon loads of corn taken. The next report on the same page is Commandant J. C. BOTHA to the President, Platberg, 7 November 1867 — which gives Botha his initials — and Botha is the commandant who stood beside him on the Thiemie in Hofstede. TWO BOOKS TWELVE YEARS APART, NEITHER CITING THE OTHER, PUT THE SAME TWO MEN TOGETHER. WHAT SURROUNDS IT ON THE PAGE IS MOODIE'S DOING AND IS NOT HIDDEN HERE. Immediately above, Moodie quotes the Rev. Mr Jousse writing from Thaba Bosigo in October 1867 that in a raid nearby people were “killed as dogs indistinctly men, women, and children”, the women and children outnumbering the men. Kolbe's report, as summarised, does not describe killing women and children — it says they were taken out and put across the river — and the juxtaposition is the historian's, not the record's. Both are set down, because an archive that prints a man's commendations and not the war they were earned in is not describing the same war. THE REPORT ITSELF IS NOW A THING TO LOOK FOR, with a date, a place and an addressee to look for it by.

A TAILOR OF CONDUIT STREET, MAYFAIR, and the grade rests on paper rather than on the tree. FOUR INDEPENDENT DOCUMENTS call him John Gottlob where the family tree calls him Johan Gottlieb, and this archive follows the documents: his WILL of 1842, a Prerogative Court of Canterbury register copy; his death in 1845; the marriage at ST LEONARD’S, SHOREDITCH on 20 January 1819 where his son swore a false age; and his own letter of 23 August 1830 to that son at the Cape. This note said only “Of the London Kolbes” until 11 October 2026, under a heading that promises what the archive holds.

ONE OF THE EIGHT SONS, AND THE ONE WHO LIVED LONGEST OF THOSE FOUND. Baptised 29 July 1800, father John, mother Mary, batch I02559-1. TNA RG 4/4631 folio 100: died 13 April 1832, buried 22 April, AGED 32 — twelve years before the obituary that counted him among the seven already gone. AND HE SPEAKS. Old Bailey, session of 13 January 1819, trial t18190113-149 — Richard Kerr indicted for stealing “one coat, value 6l., the property of JOHN HENRY KOLBE”. His own deposition: “MY FATHER IS A TAILOR, AND LIVES IN CHURCH-STREET, SOHO. On the 9th of January, about eleven o’clock at night, I stopped at the Star and Crown public-house, Westminster, and left my coat over my horse’s head — I had a chaise standing at the door; I saw the prisoner go out, and suspected him — I went out, and missed my coat.” NOT GUILTY. HE WAS EIGHTEEN, and his brother George Augustus sailed for Algoa Bay the following year. It is the only voice this archive has from the Soho house, and it corroborates the rate books’ address from a source that had no interest in it. AND THE LONDON GAZETTE SAYS WHAT BECAME OF HIM. 12 MAY 1824, issue 18027 page 796: the partnership of “JOHN GOTLOB KOLBE AND JOHN HENRY KOLBE, OF CHURCH-STREET, SOHO, IN THE COUNTY OF MIDDLESEX, TAILORS” dissolved — father and son, in business together, at the address he gave the court five years earlier. Then 9 OCTOBER and 16 NOVEMBER 1824, issues 18069 page 1668 and 18080 page 1900, in the INSOLVENT DEBTORS lists, petitions to be heard at Portugal-Street, Lincoln’s-Inn Fields on 5 November: “KOLBE, JOHN HENRY (SUED AS HENRY KOLBE), FORMERLY OF NO. 22, NORFOLK-STREET, MIDDLESEX-HOSPITAL, AND LATE OF NO. 4, MANSFIELD-PLACE”. HE WAS TWENTY-FOUR, OUT OF THE FAMILY BUSINESS AND OUT OF SOHO IN THE SAME YEAR HIS STEPMOTHER DIED, and he was dead at thirty-two. 20 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND HIS FATHER WRITES ABOUT HIS DYING. MSB 751, the letter of 23 August 1830 to his brother at the Cape: “HENRY had wrote to you himself & left his letter at the Mission house to be forwarded to you… 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.” HE HAD TWENTY MONTHS LEFT. And the same letter’s closing — “kind love from your SISTERS & BROTHER” — makes him THE LAST OF THE EIGHT SONS ALIVE BESIDES GEORGE AUGUSTUS, so that the obituary’s “last remaining of eight sons” became true on 13 April 1832, twelve years before it was printed. AND HE MARRIED THREE MONTHS AFTER THE TRIAL: Westminster Marriages — JOHN HENRY KOLBE AND MATILDA FORD, 26 APRIL 1819, ST MARGARET WESTMINSTER, both of that parish. He was eighteen. A MARY ANN MARIA FORD KOLBE MARRIED AT WHITECHAPEL IN THE FIRST QUARTER OF 1847 — GRO index volume AZ, 840, page 16 — and “Ford” carried as a forename is how families carried a mother’s maiden name. SHE IS VERY PROBABLY HIS DAUGHTER. AND THE PRESS GIVES HIS TRADE, WHICH THE GAZETTE DID NOT. Law Chronicle, Commercial and Bankruptcy Register, 13 January 1825: “KOLBE John Henry, of Norfolk-street, Middlesex-hospital, LAST OF MANSFIELD-ST., KENTISH TOWN, TAILOR, DRAPER” — so he set up on his own account in his father’s trade, and the Gazette’s “Mansfield-Place” is Mansfield Street, Kentish Town. THE MAY 1824 DISSOLUTION WAS REPORTED IN AT LEAST SIX LONDON PAPERS, all of them putting HIS name first: “J. H. Kolbe and J. G. Kolbe, Church-street, Soho, tailors”. AND THE 1830 LETTER SHOWS HIM DOING AN ORDINARY THING. Packing a year of newspapers for the Cape, his father notes one number missing — “the one of the 4th of Decr last, which cannot be found, supposing that HENRY, WHO HAS THEM EVERY WEEK, AFTER I HAVE DONE WITH THEM, — has lost”. The father read the paper first and the son had it after. IT IS THE ONLY DESCRIPTION THIS ARCHIVE HAS OF WHAT ANYBODY IN THAT HOUSE DID WITH AN ORDINARY EVENING, and he had four months to live when it was written.

Godfather at the Burgersdorp font on 23 October 1853, standing for his sister Margaretha's son William Fredrik Barry. A brother this archive did not have.

One of the five Kolbe children whose death records are not yet read.

The eldest of the ten children found in the Westminster registers. Father John Kolbe, mother Mary. Register batch C72301-3, which is not the batch of the others — a different parish book. NOT FOLLOWED ANY FURTHER.

FOUND IN WESTMINSTER ARCHIVES’ OWN BAPTISM REGISTER AND NOT IN THE FAMILYSEARCH INDEX AT ALL, which is the whole argument for searching a county set as well as a national one. Father JOHN GOTTLOB, mother Mary. SHE IS THE ONLY ONE OF THE ELEVEN WITH A BIRTH DATE AS WELL AS A BAPTISM DATE — born 13 May 1810, baptised seven weeks later. She sits in the 1808–1812 gap in the run, which is one of the two places the three unnamed sons must also be. NOT FOLLOWED ANY FURTHER.

Fourth of the eight, and the only one baptised at Hopetown — the register there calls her mother Elizabeth GEERTRUIDA du Toit, which is the single wobble in eight entries. SHE IS ALSO THE FIRST OF THE EIGHT TO SURFACE IN THE TRANSVAAL: a Margaret Harriet Kolbe, aged 24, marries DIRK JACOBUS ASPHELING VAN DER SPUY at Wakkerstroom. Her name is her aunt's — Harriet Hachilah Machilah, born at Philippolis in 1831.

His wife, married at COLESBERG on 23 FEBRUARY 1846 — entry 735, read at the page on 9 October 2026. SHE SIGNED IT HERSELF, Margaret Wilhelmina Elizabeth Kolbe, and her mother consented: the register's last column reads “DE WEDUWE KOLBE, MOEDER”, which is MARGARET DOWNING giving permission fourteen months after the Settler died. The couple were living at STORMBERG SPRUIT. Daughter of the 1820 Settler — and the reason the Kolbe name runs through the Booyzens. Her own DEATH NOTICE 1291, filed by her son R. P. Barry at Barkly East in May 1915, THREE YEARS after she died, gives her age as 84, her nationality as AFRIKANDER OF EUROPEAN EXTRACTION, her father as “Kolbe, thinks James was Christian name” and her mother as UNKNOWN. She died in R. P. Barry’s house at Manorowen and left NOTHING — no movable property, no immovable, estate Nil, no will. And she names NINE children where her husband’s notice names eight. The ninth is WILLIAM.

HER STONE IS READ AND IT NAMES HER CHILDREN THE WAY THIS FAMILY ALWAYS DOES. “IN LIEFDEVOLLE HERINNERING AAN ONS MAMMIE — MARIA JOHANNA VAN DER MERWE (GEB. KOLBE) — 26 OKT. 1886 – 1 OKT. 1953 — Wat hy doen is wel gedaan.” And underneath, six household names: MARTZI · P.S. · JUDIE · PIETMAN · CHARL EN SUZAN. THE BIRTH IS NOW A DATE — 26 October 1886, where this archive had only the year — and THE SIX CHILDREN ARE NEW. This is the THIRD stone in this archive to list children by what they were called rather than what they were registered as: the Booyzens at Silverton, the Kolbes at Wakkerstroom, and now this. BORN AT WAKKERSTROOM AND DEAD AT WAKKERSTROOM, sixty-seven years apart, in a town her grandfather had never seen. Her 1953 estate file is the document that names the whole household: FATHER George Augustus Kolbe, MOTHER Martha Sophia Klopper, HUSBAND Charl Daniel van der Merwe. Her birthplace is entered as “Wakkerstroomn, Transvaal, Blanke Unie-burger” — the clerk's spelling, and the Union's category.

Of the London Kolbes.

Aged 35 and living with her father Johan Gottlieb in Conduit Street at the 1841 census, schedule 38. Almost certainly a sister of George Augustus, who had sailed for the Cape twenty-one years earlier and never came back. FROM THE CENSUS — no baptism has been read for her. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND THE REASON IS NOW SHARPER. The eleven known children of the house leave gaps at 1808–1812 and 1814–1818, and the 1841 ages of the three women in it — rounded down to the nearest five, so born about 1802–06, 1807–11 and 1812–16 — fall in and around those gaps. THE SAME TWO GAPS THE THREE MISSING SONS MUST SIT IN. The 1841 census records no relationships, that column beginning in 1851, SO HER PLACE IN THIS FAMILY IS AN INFERENCE FROM LIVING IN THE HOUSE. The Savoy baptism register would settle it and is locked.

Third of the eight. Her name is the one that then travels: an ANGELINE KOLBE dies at Wakkerstroom in 1900 and a MARTHA ANGELINE KOLBE is buried at Volksrust in 1901, aged two months. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — SHE IS NEITHER OF THEM, AND THE QUESTION IS ANSWERED BY EXCLUSION. She is named as an heir on her mother’s Pietermaritzburg estate of 1923 and her father’s of 1929 — 1:1:QLRL-SP81 and 1:1:QLR2-FKZP — SO SHE WAS ALIVE FOR BOTH, twenty-nine years after the woman who died at Wakkerstroom. The Volksrust infant has her own dates now: BORN 9 OCTOBER 1901, DIED 8 DECEMBER 1901. AND SHE IS STILL WRITTEN KOLBE IN 1929, where five of her sisters are written under married names — at sixty-one she had not married, or had been widowed back to her own name.

HER STONE IS READ, AND IT TAKES BACK WHAT THIS ARCHIVE SAID THIS MORNING. “TER GEDACHTENIS VAN ONS GELIEFDE KLEINE — MARTHA ANGELINE KOLBE — GEBOREN 9 OCT. 1901 — OVERLEDEN 8 DEC. 1901 — HEBR. 6”, and cut across the base, the mason’s town: NEWCASTLE. IT STANDS IN WAKKERSTROOM MAIN CEMETERY, NOT AT VOLKSRUST. The index this archive read gives her burial as “Volksrust, Eastvaal District Council” — which is the DISTRICT, not the town, and Wakkerstroom lies inside it. WITH THE TOWN GOES THE CAMP: a family stone in a town churchyard, in Dutch, cut by a monumental mason twenty-five miles away in Natal, is not a camp burial, and this archive should not have gone near the word. She was sixty days old, she died in the middle of the war, and that is all that can be said. She carries the name of her great-aunt Martha Angelina, baptised at Colesberg in 1868.

Father John, mother Mary. Batch C32052-8. NOT FOLLOWED. She is not the Marianne Kolbe of the 1841 Conduit Street household, who was returned as 35 and would have to be about 47.

HER DEATH IS NOW DATED, AND SHE DIED WITHOUT A WILL. The Friend of the Free State, 23 October 1863, twice in two weeks: “Derwyl MARIA ELIZABETH KOLBE zonder testament na te laten is overleden en de nagebleven echtgenoot G.F. ENSLIN by brieve van administratie ter vereffening van haren boedel als executeur is aangesteld” — she had died INTESTATE and her husband was appointed executor of her estate. This archive had only “before 1867”, inferred. It is now BEFORE 23 OCTOBER 1863, from a notice her own husband placed. MARGARETHA'S SISTER, and the woman who married GEORGE FREDERICK ENSLIN — which is the whole answer to a contradiction this archive carried as Serious, that Margaretha appeared to marry Enslin while married to John Barry. It was resolved from Margaret Downing's 1867 death notice. The Burgersdorp register of 23 October 1853 shows it instead: the two sisters baptising a son each, two entries apart, on one page.

27 SEPTEMBER 2026 — STILL IN NO DOCUMENT, AND NOW THAT IS A TESTED STATEMENT RATHER THAN AN ABSENCE OF TRYING. The Cape Dutch Reformed registers were searched for Peter, Benjamin and Rector together: five records in the entire collection, and every one of them somebody else — two Petrus Jacobuses, a Pieter Joubert Kolbe, and the two fatherless entries this family already has. NO COLESBERG BAPTISM FOR 1840. THE NIL IS CONTROLLED BUT IT IS NOT STRONG, and the reason is visible in the same result set: this collection indexes his own brother's 1838 baptism with the father as the bare word “Kolbe” and no forename, and his eldest sister's the same way. AN INDEX THAT LOSES THE FATHER'S NAME CAN LOSE A CHILD'S, so this is evidence that he is not in the index and weaker evidence that he was never at the font. THE MAN WHO MAY EXPLAIN THE RECTOR, AND WHO IS IN NO DOCUMENT. This archive has carried him as “KEETOR Peter Benjamin”, born 1840 at Colesberg, from the family list. KEETOR IS NOT A NAME. The 2012 Barry report gives the same person as PETER RECTOR KOLBE, and Rector is — so on the ordinary reading, “Keetor” is “Rector” misread out of a hand, and the compiled report is the better witness to the form of the name even though it is the weaker source overall. THAT MATTERS BECAUSE OF A CHILD BORN FORTY-TWO YEARS LATER. This archive holds ANTON RECTOR KOLBE BARRY, born 3 November 1882 and baptised at Burgersdorp in 1883, and has never been able to say where his Rector came from. A great-uncle of the name would say it, and namesake reasoning is how the Fortunatus name was traced across three families. BUT THE SAME REPORT SPLITS HIM IN TWO, listing PETER RECTOR and BENJAMIN as separate children where the family list has one man carrying all three forenames — so the report inflates its own count, and this is one of the places it does it. AND THE DOCUMENTS DO NOT HELP HIM. The Settler’s 1845 notice names ten children and he is not among them; Margaret Downing’s 1867 notice names the survivors and he is not there either. A boy born in 1840 would have been four when his father died and a minor children’s name is exactly what a death notice records. SO HE DIED BEFORE 1845, OR HE DOES NOT BELONG TO THIS FAMILY, and the archive has not been able to tell which since it first raised it. NOTHING HERE IS ADOPTED: two compiled sources agreeing about a forename are still two compiled sources. A Colesberg baptism for 1840 would settle him, and it has not been read.

SHE MARRIED A BEUKES AND DIED IN NATAL, and this archive had her file days before it knew who she was. “BEUKES, PETRONELLA JACOBA ADRIANA, BORN KOLBE, BORN IN COLESBERG”, Pietermaritzburg deceased estates — recorded here on 12 September as one of “two Kolbe-born women of Colesberg with estate files, neither in this archive”. On 14 September the relationship search gave her a father, a mother and a font, AND THE FONT SAYS COLESBERG, which is what her own estate says eighty-two years later. Seventh of the eight, and the last baptised at Colesberg. THE ESTATE IS NOT READ.

Taken prisoner in 1900, aged 24, at Bossiespan in the Fauresmith district. TNA WO 108/368 folio 381. Sent to Cape Town. FAURESMITH IS THE DISTRICT THIS ARCHIVE WITHDREW A PIN FROM earlier this month, when the Commandant's farm turned out to be two hours from Bloemfontein instead.

“Only daughter of Mr and Mrs D. Kolbe-Booysen, of Port Elizabeth.” Her engagement to Raymond Patrick Sawtelle, only son of Mrs D. Sawtelle of Cambridge, England, was announced in the Eastern Province Herald on 16 October 1944, in the last winter of the war. The paper called her FINNIE in brackets, which is the household name and the kind of thing a register never records.

South African Air Force. Married Hilda Kruger — only daughter of Lieut. and Mrs F. Kruger of Heidelberg, Transvaal — at St Cuthbert's Church, Bingley Street, Port Elizabeth, at half past three on the afternoon of Thursday 19 April 1945, three weeks before the war in Europe ended. The notice gives both their service initials and neither of their ages.

Farmer, married Wilhelmina née Nass. Her father — and the man whose death notice an external source mistook for James Jonathan's.

His wife, married in community of property at Dordrecht. Her estate IS the file immediately after his, 58380 — as this archive predicted from the sequence — but for the reason that nobody filed at all until her husband died three and a half years later. His notice records it in four words: “death not reported.” Her age of 73 years 9 months is the only birth date this archive has for her.

Named on the 1902 notice as Anna Francisa Roos's husband, married in community of property. The only son-in-law on the page.

TAKEN PRISONER IN 1901, AGED 45, AT LEEUWBERG IN THE BLOEMFONTEIN DISTRICT. TNA WO 108/368 folio 431. Sent to Cape Town and Natal. LEEUWBERG IS THE FARM COMMANDANT JOHN GERSON ELIEZAR KOLBE DIED ON, on 3 April 1868, of typhus caught on commando, leaving a widow and TWELVE CHILDREN — EIGHT SONS AND FOUR DAUGHTERS, of whom this archive can put a hand on two. THIRTY-THREE YEARS LATER A KOLBE IS STILL FARMING IT. Born about 1856, this man would have been twelve when the Commandant died, and he sits inside the age bracket of those eight sons. The farm also carries the Jephts of the 1868 horse-theft case. 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 — THE DESCENT IS NOW DOCUMENTED, AND THIS SENTENCE IS KEPT SO THE CHANGE CAN BE SEEN. It used to read: no descent is documented and none is claimed here — what is documented is a farm, a surname and a date. HIS OWN DEATH REGISTRATION NAMES BOTH PARENTS. South Africa, Orange Free State, Civil Death Registration, 1902–1954: ANDRIES FREDERICK KOLBE, died 11 APRIL 1918 at BLOEMFONTEIN, born 1856 in the Orange Free State, son of JOHN GERSON ELINGER KOLBE and A. J. VAN DER MERWE — the Commandant's name mangled in a way this archive has now seen five times, and his wife's reduced to initials. SO THE MAN FARMING LEEUWBERG IN 1901 WAS THE COMMANDANT'S SON, FARMING HIS FATHER'S FARM THIRTY-THREE YEARS AFTER HE DIED ON IT. READ FROM THE INDEX AND NOT FROM THE IMAGE — the entry is a transcription, and the register page has not been opened. The paper that would settle it is VAB MHG M777, the 1896 estate of the Commandant’s widow ANNA JACOBA VAN DER MERWE, filed under her second husband’s name McCABE, WHICH WOULD NAME ALL TWELVE CHILDREN. Identified, unread, in Bloemfontein.

Johannesburg, South Africa

Her husband, married 15 Jan 1949 at St Joseph's, Mayfair.

Taken prisoner in 1900, aged 51, at Linberg in the Bloemfontein district. TNA WO 108/368 folio 294. Sent to Cape Town. HIS NAME IS THE WARNING LABEL ON THIS WHOLE SET: it writes Jan as Ian, Willem as Williem and Petrus as Pietrus, so a search for JAN returns nothing at all.

A MINOR on the 1905 death notice, estate 7081 — one of the six children still under age when their father died in the Pretoria asylum, and part of what the Master was protecting when he made their mother wait for a remarriage certificate. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen.

A major on his mother's 1905 death notice, estate 7081. Named for his father, whose own name the notice spells Charles. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen, who married their widowed mother a month after she signed that notice.

Her first husband, and estate 7081 — the OTHER number cited in the Remarks column of the 1905 marriage register. Born in the district of CRADOCK about 1849, within a year of David Schalk Booysen and in the same Karoo district; dead at Pretoria, where David Schalk had been widowed five years earlier. His parents were JAN LOWIES and ELISABETHA MARIA LUBBE, and he left TWELVE children. THE FILE IS NOW READ. He was a HAWKER, of GOEDEHOOP, PRETORIA — which is the exact address David Schalk Booyzen gave on the marriage register three weeks later, so the two men lived in the same place. Dutch, of the Cradock district, 56 years and 8 months, dead in the LUNATIC ASYLUM at Pretoria on 5 June 1905. Movables but no land, an estate over £100, and a will. Six of the twelve children were still minors. His widow signed the notice on 27 October and married David Schalk on 27 November.

A major on her mother's 1905 death notice, estate 7081. Named for her grandmother, Elizabetha Maria born Lubbe. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen, who married their widowed mother a month after she signed that notice.

A major on his mother's 1905 death notice, estate 7081. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen, who married their widowed mother a month after she signed that notice.

A major on his mother's 1905 death notice, estate 7081. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen, who married their widowed mother a month after she signed that notice.

A major on his mother's 1905 death notice, estate 7081. Named for his grandfather Jan Lowies. Eldest of the twelve. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen, who married their widowed mother a month after she signed that notice.

Named with Elisabetha Maria Lubbe as the parents on estate 7081. Index only.

A MINOR on the 1905 death notice, estate 7081 — one of the six children still under age when their father died in the Pretoria asylum, and part of what the Master was protecting when he made their mother wait for a remarriage certificate. Youngest of the twelve. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen.

A MINOR on the 1905 death notice, estate 7081 — one of the six children still under age when their father died in the Pretoria asylum, and part of what the Master was protecting when he made their mother wait for a remarriage certificate. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen.

A MINOR on the 1905 death notice, estate 7081 — one of the six children still under age when their father died in the Pretoria asylum, and part of what the Master was protecting when he made their mother wait for a remarriage certificate. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen.

A MINOR on the 1905 death notice, estate 7081 — one of the six children still under age when their father died in the Pretoria asylum, and part of what the Master was protecting when he made their mother wait for a remarriage certificate. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen.

A major on his mother's 1905 death notice, estate 7081. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen, who married their widowed mother a month after she signed that notice.

Named as his mother on estate 7081. Index only.

His wife, married at Lady Grey near Aliwal North. Daughter of STEPHANUS FRANCOIS MARAIS and ELIZABETHA MARGARETHA MARAIS, born in the district of Cradock about April 1850. She died in a ZINC BUILDING IN MARKET STREET, PRETORIA on 1 June 1900 — four days before Lord Roberts entered the town — and her husband did not file the notice for three years and nine months. Nothing movable left, and a compensation claim filed.

Named as her father on the 1900 death notice, with her mother entered under the same names as her own — Elizabetha Margaretha Marais. He is where the forename STEPHANUS FRANCOIS comes into this family, and that matters: the archive has a Stephanus Francois Booyzen whose parentage it inferred and cannot prove.

THE SECOND HUSBAND, and the reason the Commandant's widow is filed under the wrong surname in the Free State estate index. LANDDROST OF BLOEMFONTEIN, son of DR PATRICK McCABE, a Staff-Assistant Surgeon attached to the British Army on the Cape Frontier; his mother ROSE died at Bloemfontein on 1 August 1858, aged 72 years 3 months and 8 days. He married Anna Jacoba van der Merwe about APRIL 1871 — “his second wife, about ten months since” — and was dead within fifteen months. ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE STATE'S INDEPENDENCE he had spent the day superintending the burghers' annual target shooting for the government prize; at a quarter past five he set off by spring-cart for the Diamond Fields meaning to sleep at his own farm “UITVLUGT” on the Modder River; at about half past seven, in deceptive moonlight and one hour's ride short of the farm of G.F. Enslin, the cart went into a sluit washed out by the rains. He was dead of heart disease that evening. HE LEFT FOUR SONS AND TWO DAUGHTERS OF HIS OWN AND “A LARGE FAMILY OF STEP-CHILDREN”, which is a newspaper counting the Commandant's twelve. His brother JOSEPH, the well-known trader and traveller, had died in the interior in December 1865; his brother JOHN died at Bloemfontein in 1860. He was buried on the Sunday afternoon at six o'clock, the coffin carried by the resident members of the Volksraad and the principal government officers, with the State President and upwards of two hundred walking behind. 15 SEPTEMBER, FROM THE FREE STATE ESTATE INDEX. VAB MHG C129: “MCCABE, FRANCIS. EGGENOTES 1) MARIA PETRONELLA ELISABETHA ANTOINETTA RAATH EN 2) ANNA (GEBORE VAN DER MERWE)”, 1872 — SO HE HAD A FIRST WIFE AND SHE HAS A NAME. And VAB 1/3/1/12 BC11: “MCCABE, FRANCIS. INSOLVENTE BOEDEL”, with the remark “BEVAT GEEN STERFKENNIS NIE” — CONTAINS NO DEATH NOTICE. The Landdrost of Bloemfontein, buried with the State President walking behind him and two hundred people after that, LEFT AN INSOLVENT ESTATE. His widow's own entry, M777, names both her husbands, so the remarriage is in the archives and not only in a newspaper. 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 — THE MARRIAGE REGISTER CONFIRMS THE OFFICE AND THE CONDITION, AND FIXES THE DATE. The Free State civil marriage entry of 13 JULY 1871 — not “about April”, which was a tree's guess — enters him as FRANCIS McCABE, 53, WEDUWNAAR, LANDDROST, of Bloemfontein. WEDUWNAAR is the register agreeing with VAB MHG C129, which names a first wife: he had been widowed before he married the Commandant's widow. An age of 53 in July 1871 agrees with the birth date of 29 September 1817 to within three months, from a different document. He signed his own name. He had SEVEN MONTHS AND TEN DAYS left.

SEVENTEEN, FATHERLESS, AND ALREADY LIVING IN THE HOUSE SHE MARRIED INTO. She married JAN HENDRIK KOLBE at Bloemfontein on 4 JUNE 1872, entered as seventeen and born about 1855 — and FRANCIS McCABE, whom the tree gives as her father, had died on the Modder River road on 23 FEBRUARY 1872, fifteen weeks before. A FIFTH BRIDE IN THIS ARCHIVE MARRIED BEFORE EIGHTEEN. THE IMAGE WAS READ ON 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 AND IT DOES NOT NAME HER FATHER — the Free State form of 1869–72 has no parents' columns, and this archive was wrong to say it would. WHAT IT DOES SAY IS CLOSE TO IT. The consent column reads MOEDER: she was a minor, and it was her MOTHER and not her father who gave permission, which is what the record of a girl whose father died fifteen weeks earlier looks like. It is consistent with the tree and it is not the same as the tree being right. AND HER RESIDENCE IS “DITO” — LEEUWBERG, the Kolbe farm, the same entry as her husband's. She was living there before she married into it, which is what the stepfamily reading has always predicted: her father had married the Commandant's widow the year before. SHE SIGNED HER OWN NAME, Rose Maria Mc Cabe, at seventeen.

SHE REMARRIED, AND HER SECOND HUSBAND IS WHY SHE WAS HARD TO FIND. The Free State archives hold her under a different surname: VAB MHG M777 — “MCCABE, ANNA JACOBA. NOOIENSVAN VAN DER MERWE. EGGENOTE JOHN GHERSON [KOLBE]”, 1896. WIDOWED IN 1868 WITH TWELVE CHILDREN AND DEAD TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS LATER AS MRS MCCABE. Her husband’s own estate is beside it — VAB MHG K71, “KOLBE, JOHN GERSON ELEAZAR. EGGENOTE ANNA JACOBA (GEBORE VAN DER MERWE)”, 1868. AND THE McCABE NAME IS ALREADY IN THIS ARCHIVE: a ROSA MAGDALENA KOLBE was baptised at Bloemfontein in 1890 to Frederik Fortuna Kolbe and MARIA PETRONELLA ELIZABETH ANTOINETTA MCCABE — a second Kolbe–McCabe marriage in the same small Free State world, and this archive does not yet know whether that is a coincidence. 20 SEPTEMBER 2026 — IT MAY NOT BE ONE. On a Geni profile, the FREDERIK FORTUNATA KOLBE of that baptism is the COMMANDANT’S OWN SON, born 1857 at Bloemfontein — so the Commandant’s widow married FRANCIS McCABE the Landdrost about April 1871, and her son married a McCABE. McCabe died ten months later leaving “four sons and two daughters, BESIDES A LARGE FAMILY OF STEP-CHILDREN”. THE TWO HOUSEHOLDS WERE ONE FOR ELEVEN MONTHS, and a marriage across them afterwards is ordinary rather than remarkable. AND THIS ARCHIVE ALREADY HELD THE OTHER HALF WITHOUT NOTICING. VAB MHG C129, the 1872 estate index for FRANCIS McCABE, names his FIRST wife as MARIA PETRONELLA ELISABETHA ANTOINETTA RAATH — and the Bloemfontein baptism of 1890 names the mother as MARIA PETRONELLA ELIZABETH ANTOINETTA McCABE. THE SAME FOUR-PART NAME, CARRYING McCABE AS A SURNAME: she is almost certainly his daughter by Raath, named for her mother entire. So a stepbrother married a stepsister, nine years after their parents’ eleven-month marriage, and McCabe’s obituary had already said he left “four sons and two daughters, BESIDES A LARGE FAMILY OF STEP-CHILDREN”. THE ONE LINK THAT IS FROM A USER TREE AND NOT FROM A DOCUMENT is that her husband is the Commandant’s son; it is not adopted, and VAB MHG C129 would settle it by naming the daughters. NEITHER ESTATE IS READ. M777 is the document that would name the twelve children. Married JOHN GERSON ELIEZAR KOLBE on 3 APRIL 1843 and was widowed on the same date twenty-five years later. She is the third van der Merwe to marry into these families. 15 SEPTEMBER 2026 — McCABE HAS A FIRST NAME, A BIRTH DATE AND AN OFFICE. He is FRANCIS McCABE, LANDDROST OF BLOEMFONTEIN, son of Dr Patrick McCabe, a Staff-Assistant Surgeon attached to the British Army on the Cape Frontier, born at one of the military posts in what is now British Kaffraria on 29 SEPTEMBER 1817. His obituary in The Friend says he “married his second wife about ten months since — THE WIDOW OF THE LATE COMMANDANT J.G.E. KOLBE, OF KAFIRBERG, NEAR THIS TOWN”, and he died suddenly of heart disease on the Modder River road on 23 FEBRUARY 1872, aged 54, leaving “a widow, four sons and two daughters, BESIDES A LARGE FAMILY OF STEP-CHILDREN”. SO: MARRIED 3 APRIL 1843, WIDOWED 3 APRIL 1868 WITH TWELVE CHILDREN, MARRIED AGAIN ABOUT APRIL 1871, WIDOWED AGAIN FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER, AND DEAD IN 1896 UNDER HIS NAME. For about eleven months there were eighteen children attached to one household. She was living at SPRINGFIELD, WARD UPPER MODDER-RIVER, DISTRICT BLOEMFONTEIN in October 1868, when a black mare and foal of hers were stolen — the court record that says so is the only document this archive has that shows her doing anything at all. 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 — HER SECOND MARRIAGE IS READ FROM THE PAGE, AND IT GIVES HER AN AGE, A FARM AND HER OWN HANDWRITING. The Free State civil marriage register, 13 JULY 1871, enters her as “ANNA JACOBA KOLBE, GEB: VAN DER MERWE”, aged 46, condition WEDUWE, occupation a dash, living at LEEUWBERG (BLOEMF.) — the farm her husband died on, and the first record to place her there rather than at Springfield. Francis McCabe is entered opposite her as 53, WEDUWNAAR, LANDDROST, of Bloemfontein. Married by LICENTIE rather than by banns, entry 874, by GUSTAV RADLOFF V.D.M. in the church of the Nederduitsch Gereformeerde Gemeente at Bloemfontein. AN AGE OF 46 IN JULY 1871 PUTS HER BIRTH ABOUT 1825, which is the first indication of it this archive has had from a document. AND SHE SIGNED IT HERSELF — A. Jacoba Kolbe geboren van der merwe — the only specimen of her hand here, and she wrote her first husband's name before her own. THIS IS ALSO THE DOCUMENT THAT WITHDRAWS A PERSON THIS ARCHIVE INVENTED: an “Anna Jacoba Kolbe” was briefly entered here as a daughter, and the word WEDUWE in the register's own hand says she is this woman.

WikiTree makes her a daughter of DAVID SCHALK VAN DER MERWE and ANNA ELIZABETH LOUW—which, if right, is where the forename DAVID SCHALK entered this family: her eldest son carries her father’s names entire.FROM WIKITREE, NOT FROM A DOCUMENT THIS ARCHIVE HAS READ, and it is checkable against the van der Merwe baptism registers rather than the tree. 15 SEPTEMBER 2026 — DE VILLIERS HAS HER, AND HE DISAGREES WITH THE TREE. Volume 2 of the Geslacht-register der oude Kaapsche familien, in the van der Merwe genealogy: “(e) 3 WILLEM, gedoopt 30 September 1764, burger te Stellenbosch, gehuwd 7 November 1784 met HESTER MARIA VAN DER MERWE — (f) 1 Johanna Catharina, gedoopt 8 Maart 1787; 2 ANNA MARIA, GEDOOPT 5 OCTOBER 1788, GEHUWD MET PETRUS JACOBUS BOOIJSEN; 3 DAVID SCHALK, GEDOOPT 10 OCTOBER 1790; 4 Hendrina Magdalena, 1792; 5 Hester Maria, 1793; 6 Hendrik Petrus Jacobus, 1796.” SO THE TREE MAKES DAVID SCHALK HER FATHER AND THE BOOK MAKES HIM HER BROTHER, and the two parentages cannot both be right. BUT THE CONCLUSION SURVIVES EITHER READING: on both accounts the name stands one step from her. A BAPTISM DATE AT LAST, AND IT IS FOURTEEN DAYS AFTER HIS — he on 21 September 1788, she on 5 October. His wife, married 1805 at Graaff-Reinet — and DOCUMENTED, which she was not until today. A Dutch Reformed baptism of 4 JANUARY 1807 names her as the mother of DAVID SCHALK BOOIJZEN, born 12 December 1806, who is FIRST of the eight children on the 1876 Sterfkennis. That resolves a contradiction this archive marked Serious (they were married by 1806, so the 1825 Cape Town marriage record is a different couple) and it rewrites the wall on the ancestor chart, which said only a family tree put her there. WHAT IS STILL NOT PROVED is that she is the mother of the 1812 man in the direct line.

Married Jacoba Catharina Mountjoy at Cradock, 24 Mar 1838.

The second wife of Petrus Jacobus Booysen (b. 1788), and a name this archive did not have until her son’s 1908 death notice was read. The first wife, Anna Maria van der Merwe, died before March 1825; this son was born about June 1828. Two van der Merwe wives, one after the other — which is why the eight children on the 1876 Sterfkennis cannot all be drawn under one marriage.

Her mother, named on the 1890 Mossel Bay baptism. Her granddaughter Susanna Fredrika Aletta Booyzen carries all three of her names.

Saddler. Owned a house and erf at Cradock worth £90. His 1840 death notice gives his parents as NOT KNOWN — the oldest document here, and the top of this line. 15 SEPTEMBER 2026 — A MAN WHO SLEPT IN HIS HOUSE SAYS WHERE HE CAME FROM. John Montgomery, founder of Burgersdorp, in The Friend of the Free State of 25 November 1869, recalling his arrival at Cradock in January 1822 when the place held about six people: “Messrs. SOLOMON and S.M. DE BEER, the Rev. Mr. EVANS, Mr. P. GIE, JAMES MOUNTJOY (A SADDLER, WHO WAS DISCHARGED FROM THE 21ST LIGHT DRAGOONS), the two Messrs. ZIERVOGEL, Mr. HEILBERG, Fieldcornet B.J. VORSTER, and Gert VAN DEVENTER. After some trouble I obtained lodgings for the night from Mr. MOUNTJOY.” THERE IS NO ROOM IN A VILLAGE OF SIX FOR TWO SADDLERS OF ONE NAME. The 21st Light Dragoons were the cavalry of the Cape garrison from the 1806 expedition until the end of that decade, so HE ARRIVED IN UNIFORM — which is exactly why no Cape document can say where he was from, and why the marriage register of 1817 rules a line through the column and leaves it empty. He was not a passenger on anything. THE RECORD THAT ANSWERS IT IS WO 97 AT KEW, the Chelsea discharge papers, arranged by regiment before 1855, which give a soldier's PARISH AND COUNTY OF BIRTH, his age at enlistment and his trade. 16 SEPTEMBER 2026 — HIS DISCHARGE NOW HAS A DEADLINE, AND IT CAME FROM THE LONDON PAPERS. The 21st Light Dragoons were relieved at York in MAY 1806 and sailed from Portsmouth for the Cape; part of them went on to SOUTH AMERICA in 1806 and came back to the Cape in 1807; Parliament complained in MARCH 1809 that they had been sent “WHERE THEY COULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO”; a large reinforcement followed in OCTOBER 1810; SIR JOHN CRADOCK reviewed them and pronounced them “IN THE HIGHEST STATE OF DISCIPLINE”; a DRAFT OF 140 MEN embarked for the Cape in OCTOBER 1813; and then, in a letter from the Cape dated 1 AND 10 SEPTEMBER 1817 and printed in five London papers that November, “THE 21ST LIGHT DRAGOONS HAVE EMBARKED FOR INDIA”. HE MARRIED AT GRAAFF-REINET ON 9 MARCH 1817. HIS REGIMENT SAILED FOR INDIA SIX MONTHS LATER. A man who married in March 1817 and was keeping a house and a saddler's trade at Cradock by January 1822 was discharged at the Cape BEFORE SEPTEMBER 1817, and what he was choosing between was a wife at Graaff-Reinet and a transport to Madras. THE TOWN HE SETTLED IN IS NAMED AFTER THE GOVERNOR WHO REVIEWED HIS REGIMENT.

Eldest of the eight children of George Mountjoy and Maria Sophia Botha this archive can name, out of the thirteen their marriage certificate says they had.

Baptised at Dordrecht on 6 September 1896, named for her mother's mother entire, and dead at fourteen months. Her name was given again to the next daughter but one. FROM THE INDEX.

Major son, a tenth share.

BORN IN THE RIGHT TOWN AND ASKED THE RIGHT QUESTION, AND THE ANSWER IS NO. Death notice 83676, read in full: born at DORDRECHT, dead at Kokstad at eighty years and eleven months, the widow of JOHN JOSEPH DEMMER, ALIAS JOSEPH IGNATZ DEMMER, who died on 1 August 1906; married at STUTTERHEIM; eight children, the eldest already dead. Letters of Administration in the same file appoint her son HARRY THOMAS DEMMER executor testamentary, and the inventory values the estate at about £1,048 in Kokstad erven still registered in her dead husband’s name. QUESTION THREE IS REFUSED IN SIX WORDS: “Do not know, both deceased.” SHE CANNOT BE A DAUGHTER OF THE BARKLY EAST HOUSE, and the arithmetic says so without needing an opinion: Maria Louisa Bertha Kumm was born about October 1860, and a daughter born in January 1862 would make the mother fifteen months old. If she belongs to that family at all she belongs a generation higher — a possible SISTER of James Jonathan Mountjoy, who was born about June 1854. NOT CLAIMED. AND NAAIRS HAS HER FORENAME WRONG. It files her as ELIZABETH MARTHA; the death notice and the Letters of Administration both read ELIZABETH MARIA, and the file number 83676 is the same on all three, so it is one woman and two readings.

Baptised 17 July 1864 at Smithfield, Orange Free State. Elsje appears nowhere else in this archive.

Major daughter, entered on the distribution account as “spinster”.

HIS GRAVE IS IN THE TOWN HE WAS BAPTISED IN: “MOUNTJOY FRITZ J. 1893–1973 & ALETTA J. BRITS 1895–1976”, Barkly East main cemetery, photographed three times over in the eGGSA collection. The birth year matches the font exactly and the death year is new. Baptised 5 August 1894. FROM THE INDEX, which mangles the place to “Barkly, Queensland, Australia” — it is Barkly East.

Baptised 27 April 1862 at SMITHFIELD in the Orange Free State — the family had crossed the border. He carries his father's name and his brother's.

Saddle maker — his father's trade, learned after his father died when he was four. Married Maria Sophia Botha at Cradock, 20 Aug 1848, certificate 735. Thirteen children.

The child baptised at Barkly Oost on 6 Oct 1889 — second cousin to the Booyzen daughter baptised in the same register three weeks earlier.

Baptised 29 Jul 1866, parents George Mountjoy and Maria Sophia Botha. Married at Dordrecht 8 Oct 1888, aged 22. Father at the 1889 font. No estate file exists for him under any spelling.

Baptised at Barkly Oost, 17 April 1904, his father's namesake. FROM THE INDEX.

A sibling our tree lacked entirely. Married David Schalk van der Merwe at Cradock, 24 Mar 1838.

Named for her aunt Jacoba Catharina Mountjoy, who married David Schalk van der Merwe at Cradock in 1838 and died in 1842.

Witness at the 1889 font. A RETIRED BUILDER, married at Dordrecht, of a dwelling house at Barkly East. His estate — KAB MOOC 6/9/5047 ref 58379 — has now been read to the last shilling: £664 in the Post Office Savings Bank, a house on Lot 380 let at £2 10s a month, £400 out on note at six per cent. His death notice says he left a joint will; his executors’ account says he died intestate. Ten children and two grandchildren took £21. 4. 5. each.

Listed alive, a minor, at his father's death in Sept 1827 — so the tree's “1826–1826” infant death is wrong.

Baptised at Barkly Oost, 8 November 1891, and named for his mother's father Jan Dirk Abram Frans van Niekerk of Dordrecht. FROM THE INDEX; the register page has not been read.

The Mountjoy–Booysen junction. Married 4 Nov 1838 at Cradock. Her death notice gives her age to the day and names her parents.

Baptised two days after she was born, at Graaff-Reinet — which is where this family keeps turning up.

Absent from the four children listed at his father's death in Sept 1827, which supports a death that year rather than in infancy.

A MOUNTJOY DAUGHTER WHO DIED FORTY YEARS TOO EARLY TO BE COUNTED. Her death notice, filed at Barkly East on 19 August 1898 and numbered 2345, is read: born at DORDRECHT, dead at TWENTY at her husband’s residence, a farmer’s wife, married to ANDRIES JOHAN BRUMMER — his third forename is written and this archive cannot read it — and leaving ONE MINOR SON. AND LINE THREE NAMES HER PARENTS: FATHER JOHN JAMES MOUNTJOY, MOTHER MARIA LOUISA BERTHA, the surname trailing into a single capital and a flourish that is not legible. THAT IS ALMOST THE BARKLY EAST HOUSEHOLD AND IT IS NOT ADOPTED AS IT. The man this archive holds is JAMES JONATHAN MOUNTJOY, retired builder, recorded here under the variants James John and Jakobus Jonathan, who married MARIA LOUISA BERTHA KUMM at Dordrecht in community of property — a surname with five spellings across seven baptisms, so an illegible one is what you would expect. Three forenames match exactly, the town of birth is the town of the marriage, and the town of death is theirs. ONE DOCUMENT SAYS NO, AND IT IS THE BETTER DOCUMENT. The distribution account of that man’s estate, KAB MOOC 6/9/5047: 58379, pays ELEVEN HEIRS in 1938 — nine living children, and GWENDOLINE and AUBREY DIESEL taking half a tenth each as the children of a daughter who had died in 1923. If this woman were an eleventh child, her own son would have had the same claim by representation, and THERE IS NO BRUMMER IN THAT ACCOUNT. The innocent explanation is that the boy died before 1938 without issue, which for a child born by 1898 is ordinary. The other explanation is that the father on this notice is a different John James Mountjoy. A SECOND ARITHMETIC TO WATCH: Maria Louisa Bertha Kumm’s age at death puts her birth at about October 1860, which would make her SEVENTEEN when this daughter was born. Possible, and tight. WHAT WOULD SETTLE IT: the Dordrecht baptism register for 1878, or her own marriage record. Until one of them is read she is a person here and not a daughter of that house.

ONE OF THE TEN, AND THE FILE THAT WAS WANTED FOR HER IS NOT ON FILM — BUT THE ANSWER IS. Her own estate, MOOC 6/9/16573 no. 5683/49, is not imaged on FamilySearch and is not indexed either; what is indexed is MINNIE MOUNTJOY BURGER as a CHILD, twice, on her father’s 1943 death notice. SO THE THING THE ORDER WOULD HAVE BOUGHT — HER FATHER’S NAME — CAME FREE FROM HIS OWN FILE. She is the first of the nine children of GEORGE MOUNTJOY OF KOKSTAD, born in the Orange Free State about 1862. MINNIE IS WILHELMINA, which is why a search on “Wilhelmina Louisa” returned seven hundred and twenty-four strangers and not her. That the Minnie of 1943 and the Wilhelmina Louisa of 1949 are one woman is a strong reading and not a proved one: same surname, same maiden name, same province, six years apart.

Baptised 27 June 1915 — and the Booyzen name crossing into the Mountjoys, twenty-six years after the two families stood at the same font. FROM THE INDEX.

His wife, named with him on their son’s 1882 baptism at Rustenburg — an index entry with no image. She is named again, and readably, on the 1935 Sterfkennis of their son Diederik Arnoldus, where both she and Ockert are entered OORLEDE. Two sons documented: Hendrik Stephanus Nicolaas, baptised 1882, and Diederik Arnoldus, born about August 1887.

Daughter; married in community of property to Arnoldus Fredeman Nepgen.

Ninth, and a minor in 1902.

Eldest, and named for her mother entire. The notice enters her as married to an Edward Huskins.

Seventh on the 1902 list.

Second on the 1902 list.

Sixth on the list — and his sister married a man of exactly the same two names. This archive notes the coincidence and does nothing with it, because there is no document behind any story it invites.

Her father. Signed his wife’s death notice at Dordrecht on 29 December 1902 as “nablyvende echtgenoot”.

His wife, married at Dordrecht 8 Oct 1888 aged 20 — and now documented from her mother’s side. Her mother’s 1902 death notice lists her fifth of eleven children: “Maria Sophia van Niekerk, getrouwd met Hercules Johannes Mountjoy.”

Eleventh and last, named for his mother's father.

Tenth, and a minor in 1902.

Her elder sister, baptised at Cradock eleven months before her, same parents. The name comes down: Anna Johanna's own daughter is Aletta Catharina Johanna, who married Stephanus Andries Venter.

THE FIRST WIFE OF HENDRIK STEFANUS BOOIJSEN, and for a week this archive had her filed as a stranger. Her own Sterfkennis 6332 gives her parents as OCKEN JOHANNES OLIEFIER and ANNA JOHANNA BOTHA, her age as 67 years 8 months and 1 day, her farm as BRAKFONTEIN — which this archive read as Boekfontein — and her surname as OLIEFIER, which this archive read as Alberts. She was still married when she died: her husband outlived her by seventeen years and remarried at Zeerust eleven months later. Seven children, all of age: Petrus Jacobus, Ocken Johannes, Anna Johanna Maria, Elesabettha Maria Cornelya, Alettha Catrina Johanna, Magdalena Johanna, Hendrick Stefanus Nicolaas. Her father is where OCKERT JOHANNES came into this family — and her 1824 baptism gives his name entire, OCKERT JOHANNES STEPHANUS OLIVIER, which is exactly what her son was called. She married Hendrik Stephanus Booijzen at POTCHEFSTROOM on 3 JULY 1850, entry 206, she 25 and he 23 — the earliest evidence this archive has of this family north of the Vaal, twenty-six years before the 1876 death at Rustenburg and two years before the Sand River Convention.

Eldest of the four children this archive can name for Ockert Johannes Stephanus Olivier and Anna Catharina Botha, born four years after their marriage at Graaff-Reinet.

Third on the 1902 list, and already a widow when her mother died — the notice calls her “weduwe van Gert Olivier”.

Named with his wife Anna Johanna Botha on line 3 of their daughter's 1891 Sterfkennis, and the reason a Booysen grandson was called OCKERT JOHANNES STEPHANUS. He is the head of a line this archive has not worked at all.

Married the second Carolina Isabella Margaretha Aletta. FROM THE INDEX.

12 OCTOBER 2026 — AND THE DAY OF HIS DEATH WAS HERE TOO. This record carried “1941 — aged about 94” while the Timeline already gave 23 April 1941, at Meriba in the district of Bloemfontein, from his civil death registration. Born 2 August 1847, he was 93, not about 94. The registration is also the strongest thing this archive has for the identification, and it was not read for that: it enters him born 1848 at PHILIPPOLIS, which is the birthplace the Afrikaans sources give for the general — arrived at independently by a registrar who had never read them. The year loses to his own baptism entry; the PLACE is the corroboration. The conflation flagged below is therefore better supported than it was, and still not proved by a document naming the two together. 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 — A BAPTISM REGISTER NAMES HIS PARENTS, AND CORRECTS HIS BIRTHDAY. South Africa, Free State Dutch Reformed Church Records, FamilySearch 1:1:Q2HL-BYCG: WILLEM JOHANNES KOLBE, born 2 AUGUST 1847, baptised at FAURESMITH on 12 MARCH 1848, entry number 18, son of JOHN KOLBE and ANNA JACOBA VAN DER MERWE. THE PEDIGREE THAT WAS NIENABER'S IS NOW A REGISTER'S — this archive had his parents at one remove, from a Wikipedia article citing a 1947 dictionary whose page had never been seen, and the font has now said the same thing. THE DATE IS NOT THE SAME, AND THE DATE IS THE POINT. The dictionary gives 9 July 1847 in the district of Philippolis; the register gives 2 August 1847 and baptises him at Fauresmith. A register entered within seven months of the birth beats a dictionary compiled a century later, so this archive now carries 2 August — and a discrepancy of four weeks in a life otherwise agreed to the year is worth leaving visible rather than tidying away. WHAT IS STILL NOT PROVED is that the child baptised at Fauresmith is the general: the register makes a Willem Johannes Kolbe, born 1847 to this couple; the prisoner list makes a Williem Johannes Kolbe, aged 54 in 1901, at Panfontein in the Bloemfontein district; the dictionary makes a general born 1847 who died in 1941. THREE DOCUMENTS AND ONE YEAR — and no single paper yet carries the career and the font together. AND HE TOOK CHURCH MEMBERSHIP AT BLOEMFONTEIN ON 2 AUGUST 1869, HIS OWN TWENTY-SECOND BIRTHDAY, on the same day as his brother JOHN HENRY. AND HIS DEATH IS IN A CIVIL REGISTER, WITH PHILIPPOLIS ON IT. South Africa, Orange Free State, Civil Death Registration: WILLEM JOHANNES KOLBE, died 23 APRIL 1941 at MERIBA, BLOEMFONTEIN, born 1848 at PHILIPPOLIS, ORANGE FREE STATE. THE 1941 IS THE DICTIONARY'S 1941 AND THE PHILIPPOLIS IS THE DICTIONARY'S PHILIPPOLIS, arrived at from a government register that never read the dictionary — which is the strongest thing yet said for the prisoner, the general and the baptised child being one man. The 1848 is an age at death and loses to the font's 2 August 1847. HE MARRIED CHRISTINA CATH PETRONELLA PRETORIUS on 8 MAY 1880 in the Free State, aged thirty-two. TAKEN PRISONER IN 1901, AGED 54, AT PANFONTEIN IN THE BLOEMFONTEIN DISTRICT, and recorded as a Free Stater. TNA WO 108/368 folio 603. Sent to Natal. AND ON 21 SEPTEMBER 2026 THE LINE IN THE PRISONER LIST GOT A LIFE. He is GENERAL WILLEM JOHANNES KOLBE (1847–1941), who led the BLOEMFONTEIN COMMANDO and commanded the southern districts of Bloemfontein. Born 9 July 1847 in the district of PHILIPPOLIS — the place his grandfather preached at, and where Charles Bell drew a Kolbe in the pulpit in 1834. He was at the siege of KIMBERLEY, where he was made general, and afterwards at PAARDEBERG, DRIEFONTEIN and the BRANDWATERKOM, and he rode in DE WET'S INVASION OF THE CAPE COLONY in February 1901 — the year he was captured. Two horses were shot under him. The French general DE VILLEBOIS-MAREUIL spoke of his leadership with praise; he was liked in his commando and is said to have treated the burghers kindly. THE SOURCE IS PRINTED, NOT A TREE — but read at one remove, and that is said plainly. The career above is in Afrikanergeskiedenis (Petronel Fourie) and on the Afrikaans Wikipedia. The pedigree below is on the Wikipedia article only, which cites P. J. Nienaber, Afrikaanse Biografiese Woordeboek (Voortrekkerpers, 1947), p. 139 and the Fourie piece without saying which carries what; the Fourie piece was read here in full and has no genealogy in it at all, so Nienaber is the source by elimination and his page has not been seen. AND IT NAMES HIS HOUSE. Father J. G. E. KOLBE, mother ANNA JACOBA VAN DER MERWE, grandfather GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE, “a German missionary”, grandmother MARGARET DOWNING, the grandfather at KNAPDAAR, BURGERSDORP, the home farm ONDER-LEEUWBERG in the Bloemfontein district, and the father a commandant in the Basuto war of 1865. Every one of those is held here already and independently, including the two women's names and the farm the Commandant died on. THE 1847 IN THE PRISONER LIST AND THE 1847 IN THE DICTIONARY ARE THE SAME YEAR, and Panfontein and Onder-Leeuwberg are the same district. WHAT IS STILL NOT PROVED: that the man in the prisoner list is the man in the dictionary. Two documents agreeing on a name, a year and a district is strong and is not a register. VAB MHG M777, the widow's 1896 estate, would name all twelve children — and so, in his own words, might Herinneringe van genl. W J Kolbe at the Free State Archives.

ANNA CATHARINA SLIER'S FIRST HUSBAND, AND UNTIL TODAY THIS ARCHIVE HAD HIM AND HIS SON AS ONE MAN. De Villiers, volume 3: “HERMANUS PIETERSEN, NAMEN VAN OUDERS ONBEKEND, gehuwd 5 APRIL 1807 met ANNA CATHARINA SLIER — (b) 1 Willem Hermanus, gedoopt 12 Maart 1809; 2 Johan Christiaan, gedoopt 28 April 1810.” The entry here used to read “Willem Hermanus Pieterzen, her first husband”, built from two documents that spell him differently — the 1817 marriage register's HARMANUS PIETERZE and the 1840 death notice's WILLIAM PIETERSEN — and two spellings looked like one long name. THEY ARE A FATHER AND A SON. His own parents were unknown to the book, as James Montjoy's would be to the clerk ten years later: TWO MEN IN ONE WOMAN'S LIFE AND NEITHER OF THEM HAD A RECORDED FATHER.

A PERSON NOBODY HAD. The second of Anna Catharina Slier's two sons by Hermanus Pietersen, baptised 28 April 1810 — thirteen months after his brother — and therefore a second half-brother to the Montjoy children. He appears on nothing else in this archive, and he is here because de Villiers's volume 3 lists him on the line below one this archive had already read wrong.

THE SON, not the husband — and the man the name in this family actually comes from. Baptised 12 March 1809, the elder of Anna Catharina Slier's two Pietersen boys, and so HALF-BROTHER to the Montjoy children. He stood godfather at the 1851 Graaff-Reinet font, where his surname is written PIETERZEN twice in the same hand that wrote BOOYZEN three lines above — the entry that taught this archive that a z is Dutch orthography and not intent. HIS NAME IS HIS TWO GRANDFATHERS AND HIS FATHER: WILLEM for Willem Slier of Hamburg, HERMANUS for Hermanus Pietersen.

Godfather at the 1851 font and the boy's namesake — Johanna Catharina's half-brother by her mother's first marriage. His surname, spelled with a z by the same clerk, is what emptied this archive's name argument.

Third witness at the 1851 baptism. The given name is not certain.

Eldest on the 1943 notice, and the third of her name in three generations.

Second witness at the 1851 baptism.

Eldest on his mother's 1900 notice, an unmarried major in 1904. The fifth Petrus Jacobus this archive has found in the male line — and now with a date: born 29 May 1873 and christened at LADY GREY, the same small Cape church where his uncle Willem Hermanus married Kathleen Barry six years later.

Third witness at the 1870 font, and presumably the bride's people — the only trace the archive has of Johanna Margaritha Pretorius's own family.

His wife, married 30 Dec 1924 at Vereeniging aged eighteen, with parental consent. Three documents put her birth in 1906, not 1905. THE DAY OF HER DEATH WAS CARRIED AS “1944” UNTIL 12 OCTOBER 2026, while the FORM OF INFORMATION OF A DEATH was already published on this site and already summarised on the Timeline. Question 10 of it reads “Twenty-sixth day of February, 1944”. The same form gives her age as 37, her place of death as 85 Rheeders Street, Forest Hill, Johannesburg, her intended burial at West Park Cemetery, and the cause as haemorrhage from a ruptured tubal pregnancy — she was not carrying her first child. It was signed before a Justice of the Peace at Johannesburg and registered on 29 February 1944, entry 2045; 1944 was a leap year, so that date is real. The form writes her married name Booysen, with the z. THIS IS THE MARGARET DOWNING FAULT AGAIN, FOUND BY THE SAME SWEEP: the exact date sat in timeline.json and in a document on the shelf, and the person record — which is what the pages and the charts read — kept the year only.

Of the Pretorius family.

Of the Pretorius family.

The second wife of Petrus Jacobus Booysen, named at last from the 1870 baptism of her son Gert Jacobus — not from any death notice, none of which would give her. Mother of Gert Jacobus (1870) and, with the tree's misattributions corrected, of Izak (1864) and Stephanus Francois (1874).

Anna's father. Gave consent to her marriage at eighteen.

On the same stone, and known by two initials only. If her husband is the Settler's twin son then she is a daughter-in-law of the 1820 Settler and this archive does not know her name. “VAN HUN KINDERS” — the stone was raised by their children, and it does not name them either.

A DATE FOR THE TWIN, IF IT IS HIM. The stone at PIET RETIEF reads “VADER EN MOEDER — G.A. KOLBE — GEB. 23 FEB. 1836 — OVERL. 7 JAN. 1913 — A.M. KOLBE — GEB. 4 MEI 1843 — OVERL. 21 SEP. 1907 — VAN HUN KINDERS”. The Settler's ninth and tenth children were TWINS born at BURGERSDORP IN 1836, Charlotte Felicia and George Augustus, and this archive has never had a day for either. A G.A. KOLBE BORN 23 FEBRUARY 1836 IS EXACTLY THE RIGHT MAN IN EXACTLY THE RIGHT YEAR — and it would date his twin sister too. IT IS INITIALS AND A YEAR, NOT A NAME AND A PARENT, and this archive has spent today being careful about exactly this. It would also give the OTHER George Augustus Kolbe — born Burgersdorp 2 October 1861, dead Standerton 1934, buried Wakkerstroom — a plausible father aged twenty-five, which is the shape the eastern Transvaal Kolbes have been missing.

“P.J. KOLBE — GEB. 1_ AUG. 1865 — OORL. 28 NOV. 1919 — RUS SAG.” The day of birth will not resolve on the photograph and is not guessed. A second Kolbe stone at Piet Retief, thirty years younger than the first; if G.A. of 1836 is the twin, this is very likely his son. NOTHING ON THE STONE SAYS SO.

Baptised at Slang River, 3 April 1892, daughter of Hendrik Nicholaas Barry and Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman — and named for her aunt. FROM THE INDEX.

Seventeen at the same confirmation, number 25 on the page to Susanna Adriana’s 26. Mother of the girl born 8 February 1909 — four and a half months after he married the other one. The register names her plainly and this archive does no more than repeat it.

Godfather at both Indwe fonts. A Cornelis de Klerk Roodt, 21, is number 29 in the same 1907 confirmation class; whether they are the same man is not established here.

SIXTEEN when she married at Indwe on 21 September 1908, with her parents consenting, and already the mother of a son born on 31 May. She outlived her husband by thirty-six years and was buried in his grave — number 6889, Johannesburg — on 29 August 1968.

Her only daughter, and the only one of the six step-children whose marriage the notice records: married IN COMMUNITY OF PROPERTY to GERT JOHANNES LAUBESCHAGNE.

Eldest of her four children by Matthys Roos. His sister married a GERT JOHANNES Laubeschagne, so the name stands twice on one page.

Third of the Roos children, and he carries SYBERT — the same name as his mother's van Staden son by her first husband. A name crossing between two marriages of one woman.

Named for his father. Second of the four Roos children on the 1902 notice.

Her second husband, and the reason the 1892 marriage register writes her in as CHARLOTTA ELIZABETH ROOS, GEBOREN DORMEHL. Four children. The date of his death is entered unknown.

Eighth on the list, married to James Ross.

Eldest on his father’s 1908 notice, and already dead when it was written; eldest of the seven on his mother’s 1891 notice too. The fourth Petrus Jacobus in the male line. Confirmed at Rustenburg on 3 April 1869, aged seventeen, on the same day as his brother Ockert.

Daughter; married out of community of property to John William Schmidt.

The Schoeman who married into the Barrys — and the reason the 1924 marriage was between cousins.

Plaasboer of Caerlaverock, tried as a Cape Rebel in June 1901 — the month before the family married in his house, where he signed the register.

Of Barkly Oost. Father of Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman.

Baptised at Aberdeen, 13 April 1902 — four years after the first of the name died. She married Hendrik Stefanus Palm, and a granddaughter born in 1920 carries the name again. FROM THE INDEX.

Daughter; married out of community of property to Douglas Gilmore Shooter.

Lived to ninety-eight. Married James Montjoy 9 Mar 1817 at Graaff-Reinet, having first been the widow of a Pietersen. 15 SEPTEMBER 2026 — SHE HAS PARENTS, A BAPTISM AND THREE SIBLINGS. De Villiers's volume 3, entry 876: “WILLEM SLIER, VAN HAMBURG, gehuwd 19 November 1780 met ANNA CATHARINA FORTMAN — (b) 1 ANNA CATHARINA, GEDOOPT 14 OCTOBER 1787, GEHUWD MET HERMANUS PIETERSE; 2 Wilhelmina Christina, gedoopt 27 December 1789, gehuwd 5 Januari 1811 met Jan Abraham van Wijk, van Amsterdam; 3 Geertruida Johanna, gedoopt 2 Juli 1791; 4 Wilhelmus Josephus, gedoopt 5 Maart 1797.” AND THE FIVE SPELLINGS STOP BEING A MYSTERY: a Hamburg name — Schlier, Schleer — written down by Cape clerks who had never seen it. She married Hermanus Pietersen on 5 APRIL 1807 at nineteen, was a widow by March 1817, a widow again by September 1827, and lived until 1885. FIFTY-EIGHT YEARS A WIDOW.

HER FATHER, AND HALF OF A NAME THIS ARCHIVE HAS BEEN TRACKING FOR WEEKS. Of Hamburg; married ANNA CATHARINA FORTMAN on 19 NOVEMBER 1780 at the Cape; four children baptised between 1787 and 1797. His grandson, baptised in 1809, is WILLEM Hermanus Pietersen — Willem for this man and Hermanus for the boy's own father — and that is the whole derivation of a name two Booyzens in the direct line would later carry. HALF OF IT IS GERMAN AND NONE OF IT IS BOOYZEN BLOOD.

Her second son by Jacob van Staden, a major by 1902. SYBERT recurs in the next marriage — a Johannes Sybert Roos — which is unusual enough to be worth noticing across two husbands.

Her elder son by her first marriage, a major by 1902. Named on her death notice under a brace of his own, separated from the four Roos children below — question nine asks for the children “stating separately those born of different marriages”, and her husband did as he was told.

Her first husband, named on her 1902 death notice with the date of his death given as unknown. Two sons, Jacob Alewyn and Coenrad Sybert.

His second wife, married at Pretoria on 27 November 1905 — she 51 and a WIDOW LOWIES of Skinners Court, he 56 and a widower of Goede Hoop. Her first husband was CHARLES PETRUS BAREND LOWIES, born in the district of Cradock about 1849 and dead at Pretoria on 5 JUNE 1905 — FIVE MONTHS AND TWENTY-TWO DAYS before she married again. Estate 7081, which the marriage register cites beside his 4795. TWELVE children by Lowies, SIX OF THEM STILL MINORS when he died — and her second husband lived at the same address, GOEDEHOOP. She signed her first husband’s death notice on 27 October 1905 and married her second on 27 November.

His wife, named on the Free State Dutch Reformed marriage register — he 27, residence WAKKERSTROOM — and on the Wakkerstroom stone beside him, born the same year as her husband to within three weeks. The Transvaal probate index also holds a SUSANNA MARGARETHA DOWNING KOLBE, unattached, which would make a second carrier of the London surname; this archive cannot yet say whether that is her daughter or another woman.

FREDERIK FORTUNATUS KOLBE'S WIFE, and the mother of the Settler's Colesberg grandchildren — a woman this archive did not know existed until the index was asked for a relationship rather than a person. She is named at eight fonts across eighteen years and three churches, and her name holds steady at every one but Hopetown. NOT YET FOUND: her marriage and her parents. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — HER DEATH IS FOUND, AND SO IS A BIRTHPLACE NOBODY HAD. Pietermaritzburg estate files: “ELIZABETHA JOHANNA DU TOIT KOLBE, BORN 1845 BREDARSDORP K PROVINSIE, DIED 12 JULY 1923, SAXONY UTRECHT NATAL”, probate 1923 — FamilySearch 1:1:QLRL-HRQV. SHE DIED ON A FARM ON THE NATAL BORDER, six years before her husband, SEVEN HUNDRED MILES FROM THE BREDASDORP SHE WAS BORN IN. Her estate names the same nine children as his. THE FILE ITSELF IS NOT READ.

Married in community of property to Stephanus Andries Venter.

His wife, married at CRADOCK on 3 November 1828—FROM WIKITREE, NOT FROM A DOCUMENT THIS ARCHIVE HAS READ—and named with him on their daughter Anna Maria's baptism of 13 September 1835 — a daughter called after his mother, which is how this archive knows the naming ran that way in this generation too. AND SHE WAS PROBABLY HIS FIRST COUSIN. De Villiers, volume 3, under VILLION, thans VILJOEN: “(e) 12 HERCULES ALBERTUS, gedoopt 30 Maart 1777, burger te Graaff-Reinet, GEHUWD 26 FEBRUARI 1797 MET MAGDALENA BOOIJSEN”, and their seventh child is “ADRIANA CHRISTINA, GEDOOPT 19 AUGUSTUS 1810”. Magdalena Booijsen is b3c4d6, the SISTER of Petrus Jacobus — David Schalk's own father. That makes Adriana Christina eighteen in 1828 and makes him her first cousin. NOT PROVED: de Villiers records her baptism and GIVES HER NO HUSBAND, and the 1828 Cradock date is itself only on WikiTree. Right name, right age, right district, and a family already tied twice — but the weak join is the marriage record this archive has never seen.

A WOMAN THIS ARCHIVE DID NOT HOLD UNTIL THE LAST 214 IMAGES OF THE BURGERSDORP REGISTER WERE READ. She is named as the mother at three fonts in one book: GEORGE AUGUSTUS, born 2 October 1861, baptised 12 January 1862; ANNA JOHANNA, born 29 December 1863, baptised 28 February 1864; PETRUS JACOBUS, born 11 August 1865, baptised 8 October 1865. Her husband is entered as “G A Kolbe” at the first and “George Augustus Kolbe” at the other two. HER ELDEST SON IS THE MAN ON THE WAKKERSTROOM STONE AND THE PRISONER OF WO 108/368. Nothing else of her is known — no marriage, no parents, no death. VILJOEN IS A NAME THIS ARCHIVE ALREADY CARRIES, through Adriana Christina Viljoen, and no connection is claimed.

Named on her mother's 1900 death notice, already married. She carries the name that comes down from Magdalena Elisabeth de Beer.

THE SETTLER'S GRANDSON, CARRYING HIS NAME ENTIRE, and the man the Wakkerstroom Kolbes descend from. Baptised at Colesberg in the year of his uncle Frederick Fortunatus Barry's birth. Married MARTHA SOPHIA KLOPPER, who was seventeen, about 1885; their eldest, Maria Johanna, was born at Wakkerstroom in 1886. AND HIS STONE SETTLES THE IDENTIFICATION BEYOND ARGUMENT: “VADER — GEORGE AUGUSTUS — GEB. 29 JULIE 1863 — OORL. 28 SEPT. 1954”, which is the COLESBERG FONT DATE TO THE DAY. The 1902 POW record with residence Wakkerstroom is NOT HIS: the other George Augustus Kolbe of that town was born 2 October 1861 and was exactly forty through ten months of 1902, where this one was thirty-nine. Died at Wakkerstroom on 28 September 1954, aged 91, which counts EXACTLY from the Colesberg font: born 29 July 1863, dead 28 September 1954. He outlived two of his sons by thirty-six years.

“MARTINEAU — WERDMULLER — On July 31 [1909], at EAST LONDON, HORACE ROBERT MARTINEAU, V.C., of Durban, to AMY WERDMULLER, SECOND DAUGHTER OF CHARLES WERDMULLER, J.P. OF HOOPSTAD, O.R.C.” One of the two little girls her mother left in 1891. IF THE CHAIN HOLDS — and it has one unproved link, her grandmother’s name — she is a GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTER OF THE 1820 SETTLER, and she married a holder of the VICTORIA CROSS. This archive prints the two letters as the journal printed them and has NOT gone looking for which action he won it for.

THE DATES NOW CLOSE AROUND HIM, THOUGH NO DOCUMENT YET NAMES HIS MOTHER. His father’s first wife, AUGUSTA LOUISA KOLBE, MADE A WILL IN 1868 AND DIED IN 1873 — KAB MOOC 7/1/332 no. 205, “KOLBE, AUGUSTA LOUISA, WIFE OF COENRAAD JOHANNES OTTO WERDMULLER VAN ELGG”, filed 1873 — and his father remarried on 7 JULY 1874. IN 1882 CHARLES ANDREW WAS IN BUSINESS WITH HIS FATHER as C.A. Werdmuller and Company, and in February 1884 he married. A SON OF THE 1874 MARRIAGE WOULD HAVE BEEN SEVEN AND NINE. He can only be a child of the first marriage, and the first wife is the Settler’s daughter. THE ONE LOOPHOLE LEFT is an earlier wife before Augusta Louisa, and his father’s 1882 DEATH NOTICE would close it by naming the children. SECOND SON OF THE LATE C.J.O. WERDMULLER OF BURGHERSDORP, married at Wesley Church, Queenstown, on 13 FEBRUARY 1884 to CHARLOTTE ANNE CALLAGHAN, eldest daughter of Hugh Callaghan of Ashby Manor. Of STEYNSBURG then, and by 1909 CHARLES WERDMULLER, J.P., OF HOOPSTAD in the Orange River Colony — the town his wife died in. HIS MOTHER IS NOT NAMED ON ANYTHING READ HERE. If he is the child born 14 February 1857 at Burgersdorp he is AUGUSTA LOUISA KOLBE’S SON and a grandson of the 1820 Settler; if he belongs to his father’s 1874 marriage he is no relation at all, and a man marrying in 1884 as a second son cannot be. THE DATES FAVOUR KOLBE AND THE DOCUMENTS DO NOT SAY IT.

HE IS IN THE CAPE ARCHIVES FROM 1854 TO 1882 AND HE DIED IN 1882, not merely “before February 1884”. Motions in the Supreme Court in 1854, 1855, 1872 and 1873; a trustee in other men’s insolvent estates; and in 1882, GSC 2/1/1/41 no. 60, “CHARLES ANDREW WERDMULLER AND COENRAAD JOHANNES OTTO WERDMULLER TRADING AS C.A. WERDMULLER AND COMPANY” — FATHER AND SON IN BUSINESS TOGETHER, in the year he died. His own death notice and will are both filed and neither is read. THE MAN THE SETTLER’S FOURTH DAUGHTER MARRIED, and until today a bracket after her name. He is at BURGERSDORP in April 1857, standing at a font with AUGUSTA LOUISA KOLBE. He is at Burgersdorp again on 7 JULY 1874, married BY SPECIAL LICENCE by the Rev. William Cromar to ELIZABETH JOHANNA CATHARINE VORSTER — and the Eastern Province Herald prints his name in full as COENRAAD JOHANNES OTTO WERDMULLER D’ELGG, which is the first time this archive has seen the von Elgg written by anyone but a genealogist. He is DEAD by February 1884, when his second son marries as the son of “the late C.J.O. Werdmuller of Burghersdorp”. WHETHER AUGUSTA LOUISA WAS DEAD BEFORE 1874 THIS ARCHIVE DOES NOT KNOW.

THE FORTUNATUS NAME IN A FOURTH SURNAME. “PETITION OF FREDERICK FORTUNATUS WERDMULLER OF MALMESBURY”, Cape Supreme Court, 1907, twice in one year, both times in other men's insolvent estates; and an estate of his own in 1953. This archive has already followed FREDERIK FORTUNATUS from Kolbe (1839) to Barry (1863) to Booÿsen (1899); here it is again, on a Werdmuller — and Augusta Louisa Kolbe married a Werdmuller. 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 — HE IS SHOWN TO BE HER SON, AND THE SENTENCE ABOVE IS WITHDRAWN. The last 214 images of the Burgersdorp baptism register hold his font: FREDRIK FORTUNATUS STEENKAMP WERDMULLER, BORN 25 APRIL 1861, BAPTISED 19 MAY 1861 AT BURGERSDORP, FATHER COENRAAD JOHANNES OTTO WERDMULLER, MOTHER AUGUSTA LOUISA KOLBE — FamilySearch 1:1:6FW6-WXGS, image 673. THE SETTLER’S FOURTH DAUGHTER GAVE HER CHILD HER BROTHER’S NAME, which is how Frederik Fortunatus reached a fourth surname. AND IT DATES AUGUSTA LOUISA: she was bearing her husband’s children in 1861, thirteen years before he married again at Burgersdorp in 1874 — which bears directly on whether Charles Andrew was her son. THE ONE STEP NOT TAKEN: that the child of 1861 is the man of the 1907 petition and the 1953 estate. Both are Frederick Fortunatus Werdmuller at the Cape and the name is rare; the 1907 man is of MALMESBURY and the child was baptised at BURGERSDORP, and no document read here joins them.

Father John, mother Mary. AND SHE MARRIED: Westminster Marriages, 1817, ST CLEMENT DANES — ELIZABETH KOLBE AND JOHN MILNE, both of that parish. She was twenty-one. 20 SEPTEMBER 2026 — AND HER FATHER SAYS WHERE SHE WENT, AND WHAT SHE WAS CALLED. MSB 751, 23 August 1830: “MILNE with ELIZABETH & family had transferred their residence to EDINBURGH; Milne has just come to London on the way of his business, he says that BETSEY likes the situation very well, & they think that they will settle there rather than in London; Milne & Betsey desire their best to you.” THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER THE WEDDING, A MARRIED WOMAN WITH A FAMILY IN SCOTLAND — and a nickname, which no register ever gives. An Elizabeth Kolbe died in the Strand district in 1852, which is the parish next to St Clement Danes; the connection is not made here.

Named on her mother's 1900 death notice, already married. Rachel is a name that appears nowhere else in six generations of this family.

Youngest on his mother's 1900 notice, fifteen years old when his father filed it in March 1904. The third David Schalk this archive holds.

The second of the name — son of the man who died in 1937, and a major heir in his estate. His own estate is KAB MOOC 6/9/15220: 3786/48.

Fourth on the list, and his father's namesake.

A major on her mother's 1905 death notice, estate 7081. Named for her mother. The only daughter among the six majors. Step-child of David Schalk Booysen, who married their widowed mother a month after she signed that notice.

THE FIRST OF THE TWELVE THIS ARCHIVE CAN PUT A HAND ON. The Free State criminal court, October 1868: a horse thief drove off three animals from the farm SPRINGFIELD, ward Upper Modder-river, district Bloemfontein — a black mare and foal belonging to “ANNA JACOBA VAN DER MERWE, WIDOW OF LATE J.G.E. KOLBE”, a blue schimmel mare and foal belonging to “JOHN KOLBE, JUN.”, and a chestnut riding horse belonging to a man named Jephts. SIX MONTHS AFTER HIS FATHER DIED HE IS HOLDING STOCK IN HIS OWN RIGHT BESIDE HIS MOTHER. He is named by initial and suffix only, and nothing else about him is known — but AN EIGHTH OF THE OBITUARY'S “EIGHT SONS” NOW HAS A DOCUMENT. In 1884 The Friend reported that the eldest son of “Mr. John KOLBE”, a boy of ten called LITTLE JANNIE, was struck dead by lightning on his father's farm five hours north of Bloemfontein; the Natal Witness index carries the same death and names the father GEORGE. Two papers, two fathers, and this archive will not choose.

THE SECOND MARY. TNA RG 4/4631 folio 81: died 15 August 1824, AGED 36 — born about 1788, twenty years younger than the wife she followed. She is the Mary named as mother at the 1819 baptism of Jane Day Kolbe, five years after the first Mary was buried. Her surname before marriage is not known.

Youngest of the four, and named for his father entire — which is the same habit that put OCKERT JOHANNES STEPHANUS on a Booysen grandson in the Transvaal a generation later.

FANIE ON THE SILVERTON PILLAR. “BOOYZEN STEPHANUS FRANCOIS 1918–1991 & ELENA JACOBA HORN 1921–1989”, Silverton main cemetery — his parents’ ground, his father’s name entire, and a birth thirteen years into the marriage. A MATCH, NOT A DOCUMENT. FROM THE INDEX; no image read. Named for his father.

Named for his father. Second of the eight.