Our line, drawn
An ancestor chart for Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen, who is where this archive starts and works backwards from. Every box is a person a document names. A WALL is a place where the archive knows a person existed and cannot name their parents — and the reasons differ. Where a man married twice, only the mother of the next box can stand in the chart; the other marriage is noted against him, because in this family it is usually the second marriage that explains the children. Siblings are drawn from kin.js, which records each household and the document that places every child in it — only the dead, and where a forename is carried by more than one person in this archive the sibling is drawn without dates rather than with somebody else's.
Each box is a person a document names; click one for everything the archive holds on them. Dashed boxes are where the line stops, and each one says which kind of stop it is. A man who married more than once has one slot here and the rest are set out below, with the couples the line reaches twice.
“Not Known” — James Montjoy, 1840
The strongest wall, because it is not a gap in the archive but a gap in the family. His death notice was completed thirteen years after he died by a relative who knew his trade, his house, its value and his wife's first husband — and wrote Not Known where it asked for his parents. His 1817 marriage records no origin either. The notice →
The male line stops — Gerthardus Lodewikus Booysen
No birth date, no death date, no father, no mother. Six generations up the surname simply ends, and the tree offers buttons with nothing behind them. Open question 0 →
Searched and empty — Magdelena Elisabeth de Beer
The one named lead at the top of that line was her 1843 estate. The Cape archives were searched under eight forms of both surnames. There is no file for her, and none for him. The searches →
A wall, not a knot — John Barry, died 1853
The knot was untied on 14 September 2026 and this panel said otherwise for three weeks. One profile held two men. The Yorkshire one is a ship owner at Ruswarp, Whitby in the 1851 census — the only John Barry of that age in the county — with Whitby deaths registered in 1858 and 1860, so he outlived the Cape man by at least five years; and the Bilsdale burial he was supposed to have is not among the 5,934 Bilsdale burials indexed. 1796 was his year, not this man's. What is left above this point is an absence rather than a contradiction: no birth, no arrival, no burial, and a son registered in 1903 as an Irishman, born in Ireland. Disputed →
Disputed — Anna Maria van der Merwe, 1785–bef. 1825
Corrected the day it was built. This wall first read “only a family tree puts her here”, and that was wrong. 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 on the 1876 Sterfkennis. She is a documented wife and a documented mother. What is missing is the link to the box below her. No document names the mother of Petrus Jacobus Booysen of 1812; the 1876 notice names eight children and no mother for any of them; and a second van der Merwe wife bore a ninth about 1828. The 1806 baptism →
Not a wall — the boxes that simply stop
Johan Gottlieb Kolbe, John Paul Downing, Ruben Schoeman, Magdalena Johanna Botha, Petrus Jacobus Pretorius. Each is the last named box on their branch, and none has been worked properly yet. They are ends of the search, not ends of the family. What is still to ask →
The second marriages
An ancestor chart has one slot for a mother, and this family kept filling it twice. Each of these women is documented; none of them is an ancestor of the woman at the root; and in every case it is the second marriage that explains a child the archive could not otherwise place.
Johanna Margaritha Pretorius
also married Petrus Jacobus Booysen (1812 – 1884)
His second marriage, unnamed on his own 1884 death notice and named at last by a christening — the 1870 Doop Register enters the parents as “Petrus Jacobus Booyzen en Johanna Margaritha Pretorius”. Two more sons, neither of them in this chart.
Elizabetha van der Merwe
also married Petrus Jacobus Booysen (1788 – 1876)
A second marriage, and a second van der Merwe — named as the mother on their son Hendrik Stephanus's 1908 death notice, whose age puts his birth about June 1828. She is not the mother of the box below her. She is the reason the eight children on the 1876 Sterfkennis cannot all share one.
Willem Hermanus Pieterzen
also married Anna Catharina Sleer (1787 – 1885)
Her first husband, dead before 1817. The relative who completed James Montjoy's death notice could name him — and still could not name Montjoy's own parents.
Where the line folds back
Hendrik Nicholaas Barry — His parents are John Augustus Barry I and Margaretha Kolbe — two boxes already standing on the father's side of this chart. The line folds back on itself here, and that fold is the cousin marriage. The cousin marriage →
The chart draws his box and stops. Drawing his parents would mean drawing John Augustus Barry I and Margaretha Kolbe a second time, which is true but would make the chart lie about its own arithmetic: the woman at the root does not have thirty-two ancestors five generations back, she has thirty.
The chart is lopsided on purpose. The Booyzen male line runs six generations and stops at a man with no dates. The Kolbe and Downing lines reach London — a Soho font, a Shoreditch wedding, a Bond Street tailor's will. The Mountjoy line stops hardest of all, at a saddler born in “Europe” whose own family could not name his parents. And the whole mother's side is two boxes deep and then finished, because the Pretorius branch has never been searched at all.
The right-hand side is thin for the same reason throughout: this family did not keep records, it appeared in other people's. Almost everything here was recovered from civil registration, church registers and the Master's Office — not from anything handed down.
The line in full → · All 372 people → · The cousin marriage → · The timeline →
A chart is only as good as the documents that fix its joins. These four carry most of them.
The full bibliography, with what each source gave and where it is weak →