Sources

The primary tree

MyHeritage — Defranceski Family Site (23andMe), the family tree "Defranceski, Lerena, Taylor, Barry, Blazevic, Booyzen", 15,643 people. Read 9 September 2026 from David Defranceski's account.

The tree is private and its profile pages are not publicly linkable. Everything taken from it is reproduced here with its own citation where it carries one, and marked as uncited where it does not. MyHeritage interface marks — confirmed Smart Matches, direct-ancestor stars — are not treated as sources. Method →

The services this archive searches, and what each one is for

A sources page that lists documents and never names the places they were looked for is half a page. These are the hosts this archive's own data links to — a gate counts them, and until today five of them appeared in the research and nowhere here.

• familysearch.org — free, account required. The Cape and Free State Dutch Reformed registers, South African civil marriage and death registration, and the images behind most of what is read here.
• findmypast.com.au and findmypast.co.uk — paid. The British and Irish half: London parish registers, War Office series, Irish Roman Catholic parish registers. A one-month subscription runs to 16 October 2026.
• nationalarchives.gov.za — free index, the file ordered from the depot. Two databases since the 2026 migration and only one is complete: NARSSA says in writing that the new full-text search will not display all the records, so a nil from it is not a nil.
• www.national.archsrch.gov.za — the old NAAIRS Search Manager, which is the complete one. It answered 503 on 27 September and again on 7 October, and naairs.htm is now 404. Linked to in this archive's data and currently dead.
• billiongraves.com — partly free, partly paid, and the split matters: the search, the transcription with full dates and the per-stone GPS are free, and the full-resolution photograph is behind a paid account. A transcription taken from here cannot be checked against the stone without paying.
• archive.org — free. Where Sibree's register and the 1829 Mirror of Literature were read.

Records cited within that tree

Each of these is a FamilySearch ark or a FindMyPast transcript recorded against a specific fact. They are listed so that anyone can go and look at the image rather than take this archive's word for it. None has yet been independently re-read by this archive.

FamilySearch arks resolve at familysearch.org/ark:/61903/<reference>. Collections citing the State Archives, Cape Province and Pietermaritzburg Archives are named as FamilySearch gives them.

Original documents read by this archive

Extracted at full resolution from the MyHeritage photo store on 9 September 2026 and transcribed directly. Images and transcriptions are on The documents; originals are kept in sources/booyzen-photos/.

Printed works read here, and what each one carries

Books, not manuscripts — but every one of them was read from the page image and not from a transcript, and the pages that matter are published on The documents. Six are out of copyright and were taken whole; three are lending-restricted and were read a page at a time through the Internet Archive's search-inside, which needs no account and is not a way round the restriction.

Estate and archival references in hand

The Transvaal, before anyone thought this family was there

Three notices found by reading a surname rather than chasing a reference. The first of them is the oldest document in this archive.

How they were found matters more than what they say. The nine references below came from NAAIRS, one search at a time, and this archive spent days working through them. These three came from asking FamilySearch's Transvaal probate collection for every indexed BOOYSEN and BOOYZEN at once and reading the list. That took minutes. The lesson is recorded on What was searched, because it is the method that failed, not the archive.

The Transvaal estates — located, and mostly still unread

Found only after this archive noticed it had spent its life searching the Cape depot alone. Every reference below is in hand; three have been read, and one of the three arrived unlooked-for.

11 references — 4 read, 4 blocked, 1 located, 1 held elsewhere, 1 with no status recorded.

The Transvaal probate collection is digitised, so these are readable rather than orderable — each should carry a Sterfkennis naming the deceased's parents, occupation and children. Between them they would settle what the men of this family did for a living in Johannesburg, which is the last untested line of the family testimony.

Reading them is rate-limited rather than blocked: FamilySearch began refusing requests partway through this work and recovers after a rest. The references are recorded here so the job resumes rather than restarts.

And one thing learned about the route in. The whole indexed surname can be pulled from one collection at a time — BOOYZEN, exact, collection 2520237 returns 150 people — which is how the 1942 Daschner file was found without knowing it existed. It also settles a negative: the 1946 to 1957 estates in this table are not in that index at all. They exist on film and were never keyed, so the remaining six have to be reached by browsing images rather than by searching names, and that is a different and slower job. What was searched →

Indexes searched, including where they returned nothing

A negative result is only worth recording if the search behind it is stated.

What the zeros mean here. There is no estate file for Hercules Johannes Mountjoy (d. 12 May 1941, Wodehouse) in the Cape Town Archives under any spelling. The estates around him run 1938, 1939, 1943, 1946 and 1948 — an unbroken sequence — so this is an absence, not a hole in the index. His parentage is instead carried by his 1866 baptism register entry, which is better evidence than a death notice would have been.

One correction to an external source. The FamilySearch ark cited by 1820settlers.com for James Jonathan Mountjoy (3:1:3Q9M-CSQ8-S3QM-6) is not him. It is the death notice of Ferdinand Kumm, d. 20 October 1903 at Stutterheim — his father-in-law.

Published and reference sources

Other trees holding this family

Recorded on the MyHeritage profiles as saved records. They are leads, not sources — listed here because they are where corroboration or contradiction is most likely to come from.

WikiTree, opened for the first time

Asked on 13 September 2026 whether it had ever been looked at, this archive had to answer no — the word appears nowhere in the project. Thirteen Booyzen profiles were then read. It is a user-contributed tree and therefore a lead and not a source, exactly like the eleven above it in that table. But it differs from them in one way that matters: profiles carry a Sources section, and several of these cite documents by reference.

A library is not an archive, and this archive did not know that mattered

Seven kinds of shut door, and the differences matter

Whether a host answers is a mechanical question, and the table below it answers that. This is the other one: why a source is out of reach. Seven of them are, for seven different reasons, and treating them as one thing — “not available online” — would throw away everything useful about them.

Put together they are an argument, and it is not the obvious one. Almost nothing on this list is anybody refusing anything. Two are technical boundaries nobody thought to publish, one is a physical property of old paper, one is a library defending itself from robots, one is a price, and one is a server having an afternoon. The single biggest obstacle to this archive is not access. It is that the edges of collections are undocumented — and an undocumented edge is indistinguishable, from a distance, from an empty archive. This site has made that mistake four times in a week and caught it four times, which is not a ratio anybody should rely on.

Are these sources still there?

Checked 2026-10-11. Every external host this archive points at — linked, or merely named in a sentence — asked whether it still answers.

40 further hosts answer normally and are not listed.

The check was wrong before it was right, and the way it was wrong is worth keeping. Its first run called three live government domains dead, because it asked for an address record and a department can be perfectly alive with nothing but mail. dsac.gov.za — where every letter to Pretoria has gone, cited twenty-five times on this site — has no website at all. On the strength of that first answer this archive was one edit from publishing that the Pietermaritzburg addresses were dead. They accept mail. The check now asks for the MX before it says dark.

And on 20 September it was wrong the same way a second time, which is worse, because the lesson had already been written above. An end-to-end audit found this table asserting that www.familysearch.org was down — cited 7,275 times on this site — along with The National Archives at Kew, the University of Edinburgh and Google’s font CDN. All four answer an ordinary request perfectly well. FamilySearch returns 403, which is a bot check and which this check already knows how to record as guarded; it never saw the code, because the connection was refused before HTTP to a user-agent that says TheBooyzenArchive.

The fix is not to dress up as a browser. This archive identifies itself and will go on doing so. The fix is to stop calling a silence a death. There is now a state called unverified — no answer at all — and it is kept apart from dark, which means does not resolve in DNS and is the only state here that means gone. A nil return is worthless without a control, and a refused connection is a nil return with no control. The rule was on /method/ the whole time.

It is deliberately not part of the build. A network probe inside a build fails when a government website is having an afternoon, which has nothing to do with the change being built — and a check that fails for the wrong reason is a check people learn to ignore. It runs on demand and writes what it finds here. One published address was wrong →

Testimony

Tersia Booyzen, recorded on the MyHeritage profile of Willem Hermanus Booyzen — the name-change and Anglo-Boer War account, given as told to her by her father. Quoted in full →

An unattributed earlier researcher, recorded on the profiles of John Augustus Barry I and Margaretha Kolbe — the account of the three conflicting birth records, the "Neagle" maiden name, and the anti-English reputation. The Barrys →

David Defranceski, September 2026 — the brief for this archive and the identification of Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen as its starting point.