66 places, 34 regions

Places

Every place this archive can put a named person in, with the document that puts them there. Farms, villages, churches, hospitals and cemeteries — not a gazetteer, a list of where the evidence actually lands.

Where the evidence lands

66 places · everything is listed; the filters only narrow it

66 places holding 181 people between them. The atlas draws where the family was; this says how much of it each place actually holds.

Place	Dated events	Kind	Region	What it is
Graaff-Reinet	4	Town, Cape Colony	Karoo	Where this family is oldest. Johanna Catharina Montjoy was born here on 30 April 1819 and James Montjoy married Anna Catharina Slier here on 9 March 1817. The Dutch Reformed baptism registers here carry the family from 1788 to 1857.
Cradock	5	Town, Cape Colony	Karoo	A saddler's town, and the top of the Mountjoy line. James Montjoy died here in September 1827 owning a house and erf worth £90; his son George learned his trade here and married here in 1848.
Achter Sneeuwberg	1	Farming district	Karoo	“Behind the Sneeuberg.” The place column of the 1851 baptism register, which tells us the family was farming out beyond the mountain rather than living in Cradock town.
Zevenfontein	2	Farm	Brak River, later Middelburg district	The family farm across two death notices twenty-one years apart — and the district boundary moved under it. Johanna Catharina died here in 1863 when it was reckoned Brak River, Port Elizabeth; her husband died here in 1884 when it was Middelburg.
Barkly East	8	Town and district	North-eastern Cape	The district the family belongs to for two generations, and the most rebellious corner of the Colony in 1899–1902. Its Doop Register holds the Booyzen and Mountjoy baptisms on facing pages. It is also the only place in this archive where an estate is itemised: a retired builder's savings-bank deposit, a house on Lot 380 let at fifty shillings a month, and a village's worth of unpaid accounts — two butchers, a doctor and a burial society.
Manorowen	3	Farm	Barkly East	The Barry farm, and now documented as John Barry's own house rather than only his son's. The 1903 registration of his death gives his residence and his place of death as MANOR OWEN, WARD IV, with his son Richard Barry living at the same address and signing as “son present at death”. Margaretha Kolbe died here in 1915. Harriet Louisa Barry, eighteen, lived here and was buried here in 1912. Three deaths in this family on one farm in twelve years.
Jerpoint	1	Farm	Cape Colony	Named for an abbey in County Kilkenny — the first Irish place name this archive has found anywhere near the Barrys, whose Irish origin it has never been able to place. A Richard Peter Barry, plaasboer of Jerpoint, is on the Cape Rebel roll.
Ivanhoe	1	Farm	Barkly East / Wodehouse	Fred J. Barry farmed here and was tried as a Cape Rebel in June 1901 — the same district and the same month as Schoeman of Caerlaverock.
Caerlaverock	2	Farm	Wodehouse / Barkly East	Named for a castle in Dumfriesshire. The family married in this house in July 1901 — five weeks after its owner, Daniel Willem Schoeman, was tried as a Cape Rebel. He signed the register.
Dordrecht	3	Town	Wodehouse	Where this side of the family married, and where its in-laws lived. Hercules Johannes Mountjoy married Maria Sophia van Niekerk here on 8 October 1888, aged 22 — a year before the 1889 font at Barkly Oost. James John Mountjoy and Maria Louisa Bertha Kumm gave Dordrecht as their place of last marriage too, on two death notices filed at Barkly East fifty years later. And it is where Maria Sophia’s mother died, at her own house, in December 1902.
Indwe	9	Colliery town	North-eastern Cape	A COLLIERY TOWN, and this archive took three passes to notice that the word matters. Willem Hermanus Booyzen died at Doorn Street, Indwe, on 13 September 1905 of an ulcer of the stomach. His daughter Catharina Maria Sophia married Joseph Heinrich Daschner here. And his son — a son this archive did not know it had — was confirmed here in 1907 at twenty-one, married here in 1908 as a MIJNWERKER of DUGMORE MIJN, and had two children baptised here in 1908 and 1910, both entered ONECHT. Their grandmother Kathleen Barry stood godmother at the first font, three years after she was widowed in this town. Indwe is where the family testimony's last line turns out to be true, in the wrong province.
Lady Grey	1	Town	North-eastern Cape	He is entered as a boer — farmer — of Lady Grey at his marriage in 1879, and a mason at his death in 1905. Something took the land away in between, and the 1884 estate says it may already have been gone.
Wodehouse	1	District	North-eastern Cape	Hercules Johannes Mountjoy died here on 12 May 1941, aged 74 — and the Cape Town Archives hold no estate file for him under any spelling.
Colesberg	4	Town	Northern Cape midlands	George Augustus Kolbe, the 1820 Settler, died on the farm “Wurtemburg” in this district on 1 December 1844. His widow signed the death notice here in January 1845, and the 1840 Montjoy notice was signed here too. AND HE WAS THERE BEFORE THE TOWN WAS. John Montgomery, founder of Burgersdorp, writing in The Friend of the Free State in 1869 about a journey made about 1824, passed “by KOOLSKOP, WHERE THE FATHER OF THE LATE LAMENTED COMMANDANT KOLBE CONDUCTED A BUSHMEN MISSION SCHOOL, AND WHICH IS NOW COLESBERG”. Colesberg was laid out in 1830. If Montgomery is right — and he is recalling forty-five years back, and names the man only as the father of a Commandant who had died the year before — then the Settler was keeping a mission school for Bushmen on this ground six years before there was a town on it, and twenty years before he died in the district.
Burgersdorp	2	Town	North-eastern Cape	George Augustus Kolbe and Margaret Downing lie under a cut-stone monument in the old cemetery here — names, London birthplaces, farm and dates carved on it, about forty miles from where their grandson wrote that he could not name them.
Johannesburg	5	City	Witwatersrand	Where the family arrives with nothing and where the archive's starting point was born. Forest Hill, Mayfair, Fordsburg and Germiston all appear on its certificates.
West Park Cemetery	5	Cemetery	Johannesburg	Anna Pretorius was buried here in 1944 and her husband three years later, three days after he died.
Brixton Cemetery	7	Cemetery	Johannesburg	Kathleen Barry's intended place of burial on her 1940 death form — a mile and a half from the Mayfair house, and a long way from Barkly East.
Vereeniging	1	Town	Transvaal	Where George Downing Mountjoy Booyzen married Anna Johanna Maria Pretorius on 30 December 1924 — she aged eighteen, with her father's written consent.
Rustenburg	4	Town	Transvaal	Where the male line's oldest documented man died. Petrus Jacobus Booysen, born at Graaff-Reinet about 1788, died in this district on 1 September 1876, eighty-eight years old, a widower, with nothing to leave — "Niets nagelaten. Niets bekend." His Sterfkennis was written at the farm Brakfontein on 14 September and signed by his son Hendrik Stefanus. It is the single most important place on this map, because it destroys the idea that this family reached the Transvaal by railway in the twentieth century.
Soho, London	2	Parish	Middlesex	St Anne's, Soho, where George Augustus Kolbe was baptised on 2 February 1803, son of John Gottlob and Mary. The register notes 410 baptisms for the year 1802.
Shoreditch	1	Parish	London	St Leonard's, where George Augustus Kolbe married Margaret Downing in 1819 on a sworn falsehood — both swore they were twenty-one; he was sixteen and she fifteen. She signed with a mark.
Conduit Street	3	Street	Mayfair, London	34 Conduit Street, where Johan Gottlieb Kolbe the tailor died in 1845 — not Lamb's Conduit Street, which is where the family tree put him and where its photograph shows the wrong building.
German Savoy Church	1	Church	Strand, London	Where Johan Gottlieb Kolbe was actually buried on 26 November 1845, entry 55, grave 7 — not St John the Baptist, Leamington, Warwickshire, as the tree has it. The correction makes the family more coherent, not less: they are German Lutherans of the Savoy. THE REGISTERS ARE AT THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, series RG 4 — deaths and burials in RG 4/4625, 4626, 4628 and 4631, births and baptisms in RG 4/4627 and 4629. The 1845 burial entry this archive cites sits in one of those four, and can now be checked against the original rather than taken on trust.
Heilbron	1	Town	Orange Free State	Where the only Booysen in the whole joiners register comes from — J. J. Booysen, four hundred miles from Barkly East and in a different country at the time. It matters because the family's account of the name change rests on there having been Booysen joiners.
Middelburg	2	Town and district	Cape Colony	Zevenfontein fell in this district by 1884. And a P. J. Booyzen — spelled with the z — was a police constable at the Middelburg police office in 1904, 1905 and 1907, with mortgage bonds in 1904 and 1906. Not shown to be a relative.
Stutterheim	2	Town	Eastern Cape	Ferdinand Kumm died here on 20 October 1903 — and his death notice is the document an external source mistook for James Jonathan Mountjoy's. The town returned to this archive from a different direction entirely: Joseph Heinrich Daschner, who married a Booyzen daughter at Indwe, was born here about November 1883.
Brisbane	1	City	Queensland, Australia	Where the line reaches now. The sixteen Booyzens recorded in Australia are likely a separate migration; this family arrived through the Lerena and Defranceski marriages rather than under the Booyzen name.
Pretoria	2	City	Transvaal	Where the Transvaal Master of the Supreme Court sat, and so where this family's later estates were filed — the depot this archive spent its whole life not searching. Stephanus Francois Booyzen died at East Lynne, on its eastern edge, in 1940.
Marico	6	District	Western Transvaal	A substantial Booyzen farming district — and this archive can no longer say whose. Seven Booyzen claims for compensation as burghers were filed here in 1903–04, and the Booyzen children who died in the Johannesburg and Vereeniging camps came from farms in this district. This entry used to call them "emphatically someone else's". That judgement rested on the belief that this family was in the Cape until about 1907 — and the 1876 Sterfkennis at Rustenburg, one district east, shows it was not. No document links this family to any of the seven claims. No document rules it out either. Unresolved is the honest word. 13 SEPTEMBER 2026: and now a documented Booysen marriage IN the district. Hendrik Stephanus Booysen — seventh child on the 1876 Sterfkennis, son of the direct ancestor — married Charlotta Elizabetha Dormehl at ZEERUST, the principal town of Marico. It still links this family to none of the seven compensation claims. It does mean the last of the three districts has had one of these people standing in it, and the sentence this archive withdrew was wronger than it knew. 15 SEPTEMBER 2026: the seven claims were pulled in full and the index line is the whole record — no farm, no forename, no amount. The same search turned up something nobody asked for: a JGL BOOYZEN countersigning the subsidy application, the book orders and all four quarterly returns of a FARM SCHOOL AT KWAGGAFONTEIN in this district, 1898–1899. He is not identified. He is a candidate for the Jan Gerhardus Lodewicus born 4 December 1855, of whom this archive has said for months that nothing is known.
Kwaggafontein	6	Farm	District Marico, Transvaal	A farm with a school on it, and the whole of its correspondence with the government survives. Forty-eight files in TAB source OD, from 4 October 1897, when G.E. ter Haar of Kafferskraal asked for a teacher, to April 1900, when the teacher asked for his money to be sent to the landdrost and the war closed the file. The teacher was H. de Vries, fetched by wagon in December 1897. A JGL BOOYZEN is on eight of the forty-eight — the subsidy application, the book orders, all four quarterly returns, the explanation of a £61-6-0 deficit, and a letter of May 1899 arguing that £8 too little subsidy had been paid. He is the school's money man, and he is not identified.
Mossel Bay	1	Town	Southern Cape	Where Stephanus Francois Booyzen married Beatrix Magdalena Catharina Boshoff — six hundred miles from where he was born and eight hundred from where he died.
Potchefstroom	2	Town	Transvaal	A Booyzen presence from at least 1860, when Jan Booyzen paid his marriage fee to the government here. Whether the line connects to this family is unproven.
Booysens	1	Suburb, Johannesburg	Witwatersrand	Not a family place — a trap. Booysens is a mining suburb south of the Johannesburg city centre, a couple of miles from Forest Hill and Kenilworth where this family actually lived in the 1940s. It means every name-index search for Booysen in Johannesburg returns people whose only connection to the word is an address. The archive met it head-on: a death notice indexed under the surname Daschner turned out to belong to Charles Bruce Rennie, a miner of Booysens, and nothing else about him touches this family at all.
Brakfontein	4	Farm	District Rustenburg, Transvaal	The farm where the oldest document in this archive was written. On 14 September 1876, thirteen days after the death, somebody at Brakfontein filled in Sterfkennis No. 678 for Petrus Jacobus Booijsen, aged 88, and wrote the names of his parents on line 3. Fifteen years later it takes two more: his son's wife on 9 May 1891 and their son five days after her. And in 1892 Hendrik Stefanus, marrying again at Zeerust, still gives Brakfontein as his home — sixteen years on the same ground. The coordinates are approximate: the district is certain, the farm is not yet placed.
Lichtenburg	3	District	Western Transvaal	Where this family's western Transvaal branch is, and it is a branch rather than a lead now. Jan Gerthardus Lodewikus Booijsen — fifth of the eight children on the 1876 Sterfkennis, born district Graaff-Reinet about 1818 — died on the farm Vaalbank in this district on 25 May 1885, estate TAB MHG O/2899. His daughter Magdalena Susanna Maria died on the same farm on 1 May 1920, and her Sterfkennis names him. Lichtenburg is one district west of Rustenburg, where his father died in 1876, and one district east of Marico.
Dugmore Mine	1	Colliery	Indwe, district Wodehouse	Where a Booyzen worked underground. The Indwe marriage register of 21 September 1908 gives both bride and groom's dwelling place as “Dugmore Mijn” and the groom's trade as “Mijnwerker”. It is the only mine anywhere in this archive attached to a named member of this family, and it is coal in the Cape rather than gold on the Rand. The coordinates are approximate — the workings were at Indwe and the exact site is not yet fixed.
Vaalbank	4	Farm	District Lichtenburg, Transvaal	One farm, two deaths, thirty-five years apart, and the same family on it both times. Jan Gerthardus Lodewikus Booijsen — born district Graaff-Reinet about 1818, fifth child on the 1876 Sterfkennis — died here on 25 May 1885. His daughter Magdalena Susanna Maria, born about 1860, died here on 1 May 1920. It is the clearest evidence this archive has that the family did not merely pass through the western Transvaal but settled in it, two generations before anyone reached Johannesburg. The coordinates are approximate: the district is certain, the farm is not yet placed. AND A SCHOOL ON IT. The education files of the South African Republic hold a school at Vaalbank, district Lichtenburg, post office Rietkuil, teacher J.P. Louw, running through 1898 and 1899 — and the man beside the teacher on its money papers is written DS. BOOYSEN and DS BOOIJSEN. In February 1899 he wrote to the government to ask how school materials could be provided TO ORPHANS, arising from a case among them. Whether DS. is a David Schalk or the Dutch abbreviation for a minister cannot be read off an index line, and six weeks earlier the same school wrote “DS VAN ROOJEN” in the same slot.
Cherryville	1	Farm	District Barkly East	The third named Barry farm, after Manorowen and Jerpoint. Harriet Louisa Barry, eighteen, died here of typhoid on 7 September 1912 after thirty days' illness and was carried back to Manorowen to be buried. Her father, who signed the form, gave his own residence as Manorowen — so Cherryville is somewhere the family worked rather than lived, or another Barry household entirely. The coordinates are approximate.
Slang River	1	Locality	North-eastern Cape	Where Dorothea Regina Barry, daughter of Hendrik Nicholaas Barry and Anna Johanna Maria Schoeman, was baptised on 3 April 1892. From the index rather than the register, and placed only approximately.
Koedoesfontein	1	Farm	District Rustenburg, Transvaal	Where Hendrik Stephanus Booysen died on 11 May 1908, aged seventy-nine, in the house of his son-in-law Willem Grobelaar. A farmer with no movable property, some land, and mutual wills with both of his dead wives. Thirty-two years earlier he had signed his own father's Sterfkennis at Brakfontein, one district over. The coordinates are approximate.
Zeerust	2	Town, district Marico	Transvaal	The principal town of Marico, and the district this archive spent weeks holding at arm's length with the sentence “they are not this family, who were Cape”. Hendrik Stefanus Booijzen married here on 14 April 1892 — 63, a widower of Brakfontein — and signed his second wife's death notice here in August 1902. The sentence is withdrawn.
Driefontein	2	Farm, Groot Marico	District Marico, Transvaal	Charlotta Elizabeth Dormehl's own place. She gave it as her home when she married at Zeerust in April 1892, and she died there on 6 February 1902 — three months before the peace, and ten years into a marriage to a man who farmed a hundred miles away at Brakfontein. She never moved to him. The coordinates are approximate: the district is certain, the farm is not placed.
Zwartruggens	2	Town	Transvaal	Where Diederik Arnoldus Booysen was born about August 1887 and lived as a KARWEIER — a transport rider. His 1935 Sterfkennis is the first document in this archive printed in Afrikaans rather than Dutch or English, and it names his parents: Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen and Elizabeth Johanna Sophia Myburgh, both by then dead.
Voorbedacht No. 401	1	Farm	District Rustenburg, Transvaal	Where Diederik Arnoldus Booysen died on 1 March 1935, aged 47 years 7 months, with an estate over £300 and a will — the largest Booysen estate this archive has read. A numbered farm, which is how the Transvaal registered land. Coordinates approximate.
Klerksdorp	1	Town	Transvaal	Where Ockert Johannes Stephanus Booysen died on 16 January 1921, aged 69 — the man who signed his father's death notice in 1908 and who carried his mother's father's name out of the district of Cradock and into the western Transvaal. It is a CIVIL registration and it names no parents, which is why this archive keeps going back to Sterfkennisse. He has no estate file of his own.
Market Street, Pretoria	4	Street	Pretoria, Transvaal	Elizabetha Margaretha Booijzen, born Marais, died in A ZINC BUILDING IN MARKET STREET on 1 JUNE 1900 — the capital's main street, four days before Lord Roberts entered the town. Her husband David Schalk Booijzen, the direct ancestor's brother, did not file her death notice for three years and nine months, and against the question about movable property he wrote “none. Compensation claim filed.”
Turffontein	2	Suburb	Johannesburg, Transvaal	18 Anderson Street. Richard Peter Booyzen, twenty-four, married, a sawyer, died here of influenza and pneumonia on 25 October 1918 after eleven days — the centre of Black October, which killed some fourteen thousand people on the Rand in six weeks. He was buried at Brixton two days later. His birthplace on the form is the Cape of Good Hope: born in the north-eastern Cape, dead in a Johannesburg mining suburb at twenty-four.
Mayfair	3	Suburb	Johannesburg, Transvaal	This archive has had Mayfair as a word on two pages and never as an address. Kathleen Barry died here in 1940. Her great-granddaughter Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen was married at ST JOSEPH'S, MAYFAIR on 15 January 1949 — the hinge into the Lerena archive. And her son HENRY JAMES BOOYZEN was living at 3 15TH AVENUE when he died in 1956. Three generations in one suburb, and the cemetery register is what finally gave it a street number.
Roodepoort	1	Town	West Rand, Transvaal	HENDRIK STEPHANUS NICOLAAS BOOYSEN — baptised at Rustenburg in 1882, dead at Kempton Park in 1959 — was buried in the Central Cemetery of the Municipality of Roodepoort–Maraisburg on 12 October 1959, section I D.R., entry 96. This archive published him as buried at Johannesburg for an afternoon because the FamilySearch collection carries that title for every register inside it.
Goedehoop	2	Place	Pretoria, Transvaal	Two men of this story lived here. CHARLES PETRUS BAREND LOWIES, a hawker born in the district of Cradock about October 1848, is “of Goedehoop, Pretoria” on his 1905 death notice — he died in the Pretoria Lunatic Asylum on 5 June that year, leaving twelve children, six still minors. And DAVID SCHALK BOOIJZEN, born in the district of Cradock in June 1848, gives GOEDE HOOP, PRETORIA as his home on the register when he marries Lowies's widow on 27 November, five months and twenty-two days later. This archive read that register first and wrote the address down without knowing what it meant. Coordinates approximate.
Tolosberg	2	Hill, place of capture	Eastern Transvaal	WHERE THREE BOOYZENS WERE TAKEN, AND THE ONLY PLACE ON THIS MAP WHOSE POSITION THIS ARCHIVE CANNOT VOUCH FOR. Stefanus Francois, Petrus Jacobus and David Schalk Booysen — prisoners 18463, 18464 and 18465, all of Pretoria and all of the Pretoria commando — were captured here on 25 April 1901, among FORTY-TWO Boers taken with two guns and much stock. Six weeks later they sailed from Cape Town on the City of Cambridge. THE HILL ITSELF IS NOT ON ANY MAP THIS ARCHIVE HAS FOUND. It is in no gazetteer reachable by search, in no battle list, and in no day-by-day war diary of 1901; the single source for the name gives only “Tolosberg in the Waterval Valley, Eastern Transvaal”. The pin is therefore placed at WATERVAL BOVEN, in the Elands River valley — the Waterval valley of the Eastern Transvaal, and twenty kilometres from Dalmanutha, where the same man had fought the previous August. THAT PLACEMENT IS THIS ARCHIVE'S INFERENCE AND NOT THE SOURCE'S. There is more than one Waterval in the Transvaal, including one in the Lydenburg district north of here, and the hill could as easily be there. JEPPE'S MAP OF 1899 HAS NOW BEEN READ AND IT DOES NOT CARRY THE NAME. Sheet 6 of the six-sheet map — the definitive survey of the South African Republic, finished the year the war began — was examined over about twenty-five kilometres of the Elands River valley either side of this pin, at full resolution. It names EVERY FARM with its number: Waterval 161, Kindergoed, Elandshoek, Eerste Geluk, Groot Geluk, Nooitgedacht, Vlakplaats, Kaalbosch, Schoonspruit, Kietspruit, Weltevreden, Treurfontein, Uitkomst — and Waterval Boven and Waterval Onder stations on the Delagoa Bay line, with Godwaan station east of them. IT ALSO NAMES HILLS, in the form Jeppe used: Mauch Bg., Spitskop, Tafel Kop, Peerds Kop, Zwart Kop, Zuikerboschkop, Silverkop, Vaalkop. THERE IS NO TOLOSBERG AMONG THEM. That does not move the pin and it does not prove the source wrong; it means the name was local, or was spelt otherwise, or was never a surveyed feature. THE PIN IS STILL AN INFERENCE — but it is now a tested one.
Knap Daar	1	Farm	District Colesberg	THE KOLBE FARM BEFORE WURTEMBURG. A land memorial of 1839 — Cape Town Archives Repository, LG 552, reference 664 — records “REVEREND G KOLBE” asking that government ground adjoining his farm KNAP DAAR, in the district of Colesberg, be surveyed and auctioned. This archive has George Augustus Kolbe dying at the farm Wurtemburg in the same district on 1 December 1844, and knows he preached across the Orange River; the memorial styles him Reverend five years earlier and gives him land. The identification rests on an initial and a district, not on a full name, and the pin is placed at Colesberg because the farm itself is not on any map read here.
Wakkerstroom	9	Town and district	Eastern Transvaal	WHERE THE SETTLER'S FAMILY ENDED UP, four hundred miles from the font. George Augustus Kolbe the 1820 Settler died at Colesberg in 1844 and is buried at Burgersdorp; his son Frederik Fortunatus baptised eight children at Colesberg, Hopetown and Bethulie between 1863 and 1881; and THREE OF THOSE EIGHT marry or are found at Wakkerstroom in the eastern Transvaal. The eldest, another George Augustus, was born at Colesberg on 29 July 1863 and died here on 28 September 1954, aged ninety-one — a man whose life spans the whole of this archive's South African century. TWO MEN NAMED GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE LIVED AND ARE BURIED HERE, born two years apart — 2 October 1861 and 29 July 1863 — and the older of them was the prisoner of war of 1902. Two of his sons died here in 1918 four months apart, which is the influenza, and one of them carried the London surname DOWNING into the eastern Transvaal, which is what proved the connection. A woman named ANGELINE KOLBE died here on 15 November 1900, aged 28, and this archive cannot say who she was.
Volksrust	1	Town, and a camp	Eastern Transvaal	TWENTY MILES FROM WAKKERSTROOM, ON THE NATAL BORDER. Frederik Fortunatus Downing Kolbe married here. THIS ARCHIVE ALSO PUT A CHILD'S GRAVE HERE FOR HALF A DAY AND HAS TAKEN IT BACK: Martha Angeline Kolbe, sixty days old, is buried at WAKKERSTROOM, and the index that said Volksrust was naming the DISTRICT, which Wakkerstroom lies inside. Volksrust held one of the concentration camps, and the NAAIRS index holds a camp grave for a G.E. KOLBE, aged 35 — which is NOT the Angeline Kolbe who died at Wakkerstroom in 1900, a different age in a different year in a different town. NO PERSON IN THIS ARCHIVE IS YET SHOWN TO HAVE BEEN IN THAT CAMP.
Bloemfontein	7	Town, capital of the Orange Free State	Orange Free State	THE TOWN THE COMMANDANT'S WHOLE PUBLIC LIFE WAS ATTACHED TO, and it took this archive until today to give it a pin. John Gerson Eliezar Kolbe was a DIRECTOR OF THE BLOEMFONTEIN BANK, a Justice of the Peace, Commandant of this district and a deacon of its Dutch Reformed Church; he advertised a lost promissory note for £154 sterling on its MARKET SQUARE in March 1864; he sat as FOREMAN OF THE JURY in a forgery trial here in 1866, before Mr van Soelen. His farm lay about two hours' ride away. AND THE MAN THE FREE STATE ESTATE INDEX HIDES HIS WIDOW BEHIND WAS THIS TOWN'S OWN LANDDROST. Francis McCabe, born at a frontier military post on 29 September 1817, son of Dr Patrick McCabe of the British Army on the Cape Frontier, married Anna Jacoba van der Merwe about April 1871 and was dead by 23 February 1872, of heart disease on the Modder River road after a cart went into a sluit in the moonlight. He was buried here on the Sunday afternoon at six o'clock, the coffin carried from the house by the resident members of the Volksraad and the principal government officers, with the State President and upwards of two hundred people walking behind. AND A DEATH IN THIS DISTRICT, ADDED 13 OCTOBER 2026. WILLEM JOHANNES KOLBE — the Panfontein prisoner this archive argues is General W. J. Kolbe — died at MERIBA in this district on 23 APRIL 1941, aged 93, by his civil death registration. That registration is also the best thing the identification has: it enters him born 1848 at PHILIPPOLIS, which is the birthplace the Afrikaans sources give for the general, reached independently by a registrar who had never read them. MERIBA ITSELF IS NOT PLOTTED — no coordinate has been established for it, and none is invented here, so the fact sits at the district town until the farm can be located.
Philippolis	3	Mission station, later town	Southern Orange Free State	WHERE THE SETTLER'S CHILDREN GREW UP, on the word of a man writing in 1868 who knew them. The obituary of Commandant John Gerson Eliezar Kolbe says his father “became a MISSIONARY TO THE GRIQUAS AT PHILIPPOLIS, and most of his family, we believe, GREW UP THERE”. This archive had reached the same conclusion from the children's baptism places — Harriet Hachilah Machilah born here in 1831 — and this is a fourth, independent source for it. Philippolis was the London Missionary Society's Griqua station; George Augustus Kolbe was an L.M.S. missionary. AND THERE IS A PICTURE OF IT. On Dr Andrew Smith’s expedition CHARLES BELL painted a church service here with Kolbe preaching — catalogued as the original at MuseumAfrica and as a photographic copy at the University of Edinburgh, CSWC 60 item 3. NEITHER HAS BEEN SEEN, and it would be the only likeness of anybody in this archive born before 1850.
Bethulie	4	Mission station, later town	Southern Orange Free State	AND THE FAMILY WAS HERE ELEVEN YEARS EARLIER THAN THIS ENTRY USED TO SAY. The station was BOESMANSKOOL when GEORGE AUGUSTUS KOLBE was placed at it, among the San, with JAMES CLARK. He gives the date himself in a letter printed in the Society’s monthly for 1831: “When I arrived, in April, 1828, with my colleague, in the Bushman country”, having resided “nearly three years among the Bushmen previous to my removal to this station”. Clark says it from the other side, writing from the Bushman Station on 31 December 1828: “brother Kolbe and myself removed to this station, and arrived here in the beginning of May last.” Added 13 October 2026 — until then this place began the Kolbe story at 1839, because the 1828 evidence was only found on 11 October. THE OTHER MISSION ON THE CIRCUIT, and a font this family came back to. FREDERIK FORTUNATUS KOLBE was born here in 1839 — the source of a forename that has since crossed into four surnames — and JOHAN CASIMIR in 1844, the year his father died. FORTY-TWO YEARS LATER Frederik Fortunatus brought his own youngest daughter, ADRIANA HENRIETTA JOHANNA, back to be baptised here on 23 October 1881.
Uitenhage	1	Town	Eastern Cape	THE FIRST STOP AFTER THE LANDING. George Augustus Kolbe came ashore at Algoa Bay on 14 April 1820, and his eldest child — JOHN GERSON ELIEZAR, born 7 JULY 1822 — was born here, forty miles inland. The family is at Graaff-Reinet by 1825.
Leeuwberg	6	Farm	District Bloemfontein, Orange Free State	WHERE COMMANDANT KOLBE DIED, on the night of Friday 3 April 1868, of typhus caught on commando. THE PIN WAS AT FAURESMITH AND IT WAS WRONG. It rested on a 1903 Free State land file recording a “LEEUWBERG NO 465, DIST. FAURISMITH” — a farm of the right name in the right province thirty-five years later, and nothing more — and it was published with its own objection attached, that Fauresmith is a hundred and thirty kilometres from Kaalspruit while the obituary says he died at the one and lies at the other. THE OBJECTION HAS BEEN ANSWERED AGAINST THE PIN. The Friend of the Free State of 13 January 1870 advertises for sale “the farm, WILDEBEESTKOOI, ADJOINING THE FARM LEEUBERG, THE PROPERTY OF THE LATE J.G.E. KOLBE, ABOUT TWO HOURS RIDE FROM THE TOWN OF BLOEMFONTEIN”. Fifteen or twenty kilometres, not a hundred and thirty. The Fauresmith farm is a different farm of the same name, and the two-farm contradiction this archive could not reconcile was never a contradiction — Leeuberg and Kaalspruit are neighbours. A MAN NAMED JEPHTS, described by the court as a man of colour, was living here in 1868 and owned a chestnut riding horse; it was stolen with two of the family's, and his name is in the record beside theirs. 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 — THE FARM IS NOW A RESIDENCE AND NOT ONLY A DEATHBED. Two Free State civil marriage entries name it as where people lived: the Commandant's widow in July 1871, and Jan Hendrik Kolbe, veeboer, with his bride in June 1872, hers written “Dito” under his. THAT IS THREE DOCUMENTS ON ONE FARM IN FOUR YEARS and the strongest reason yet to think the Bloemfontein-district Leeuwberg, not the Fauresmith one, is the place. THE PIN IS STILL NOT MOVED ON IT, because a residence in a register names a farm and not a coordinate.
Kaalspruit	4	Farm	District Bloemfontein, Orange Free State	HIS OWN ADDRESS, IN HIS OWN ADVERTISEMENT. The Friend of the Free State, 9 March 1864: a lost promissory note, £154 sterling, signed “J.G.E. KOLBE, Kafferberg, Kaalspruit”. The obituary of 1868 says he settled here about 1850 and lies buried here. THE PIN IS AT BLOEMFONTEIN and it is an inference: a Free State soil-conservation district is registered as “KAALSPRUIT – KAFFERRIVIER (BLOEMFONTEIN)”, which pairs the same two names the advertisement pairs, in the district whose bank he was a director of and whose paper he advertised in. A NAME PAIR IS NOT A SURVEY BEACON. The Friend's own transcriber read this farm as “[Randspruit]”, bracketed and doubtful; the advertisement is why this archive reads Kaalspruit. 15 SEPTEMBER 2026 — THE GUESS NOW HAS THREE DOCUMENTS BEHIND IT. The obituary of his second wife's husband calls him “the late Commandant J.G.E. KOLBE, OF KAFIRBERG, NEAR THIS TOWN”, the town being Bloemfontein. An 1870 auction advertisement puts the neighbouring farm Leeuberg “about two hours ride from the town of Bloemfontein”. And his widow was living at SPRINGFIELD, WARD UPPER MODDER-RIVER, DISTRICT BLOEMFONTEIN in October 1868. Kafferberg, Kaalspruit, Leeuberg, Wildebeestkooi and Springfield are one neighbourhood, and it is not at Fauresmith.
Piet Retief	3	Town	Eastern Transvaal	TWO KOLBE STONES, thirty years apart, in a town forty miles from Wakkerstroom. “G.A. KOLBE, GEB. 23 FEB. 1836, OVERL. 7 JAN. 1913” with “A.M. KOLBE, GEB. 4 MEI 1843, OVERL. 21 SEP. 1907”, raised VAN HUN KINDERS; and “P.J. KOLBE, GEB. 1_ AUG. 1865, OORL. 28 NOV. 1919”. 1836 IS THE YEAR THE SETTLER'S TWINS WERE BORN AT BURGERSDORP, and if that is him the stone dates a birth this archive has only ever had as a year.
Hoopstad	2	Town	Orange River Colony	WHERE THE WERDMULLER LINE ENDS UP. CHARLES ANDREW WERDMULLER — second son of the man who married the Settler's fourth daughter — is “CHARLES WERDMULLER, J.P. OF HOOPSTAD” by 1909. His wife CHARLOTTE ANNE, born Callaghan, died here on 17 FEBRUARY 1891 aged thirty-two, “after a long illness”, having arrived “only a few months ago, in rather indifferent health”, of a disorder of the heart that proved organic. She left “a husband and TWO LITTLE GIRLS”, and one of those girls married a holder of the Victoria Cross.
Steynsburg	1	Town	North-eastern Cape	WHERE CHARLES ANDREW WERDMULLER WAS LIVING WHEN HE MARRIED, on 13 February 1884 — “CHARLES ANDREW WERDMULLER, OF STEYNSBURG. SECOND SON OF THE LATE C.J.O. WERDMULLER, OF BURGHERSDORP”. Thirty miles from Burgersdorp, where his father had been, and a long way from Hoopstad, where he ended.
Queenstown	1	Town	Eastern Cape	THE WESLEY CHURCH, 13 FEBRUARY 1884, where Charles Andrew Werdmuller married CHARLOTTE ANNE CALLAGHAN, “eldest daughter of HUGH CALLAGHAN, ESQ., OF ASHBY MANOR, QUEENSTOWN”. The Queenstown Free Press carried the marriage, and seven years later carried her death at Hoopstad and an obituary written by a correspondent there.
Panfontein	1	Farm	District Bloemfontein, Orange Free State	WHERE THE LINE IN THE PRISONER LIST WAS STANDING. Williem Johannes Kolbe was taken here in 1901, aged 54, and recorded as a Free Stater — TNA WO 108/368 folio 603 — then sent to Natal. The Afrikaans sources make him GENERAL WILLEM JOHANNES KOLBE of the Bloemfontein commando, born 9 July 1847 in the district of Philippolis, where his grandfather preached. THE TWO MEN ARE NOT PROVED TO BE ONE: a name, a year and a district agreeing is strong and is not a register.