The house enters the record in 1847, when Fennie Johanna Carr married at Tulbagh. Where her family came from before the Cape, nobody has yet traced — even the spelling of her name on the family Bible's page is still to be settled by a careful reading. In 2026 the record asked the old English books of arms about the name.
What was asked
Do the old English books record arms for the family of Fennie Johanna Carr — a coat this house could call its own?
Where we looked
The great English register was asked — the book that gathers every family of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales known to bear arms — and both pages of its Carr entries were brought up and read by eye, name by name.
Burke’s General Armory, 1884
the book that gathers every family in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales known to bear arms, and lists them by name
It holds some two dozen Carr and Carre families, from Bristol to Newcastle to Ireland, and points besides to the Scottish Kers, who carry the same name in another spelling. None of them can be tied to this house.
The book holds some two dozen Carr coats, and not one of them can be tied to this house. There are Carrs of Bristol and of Newcastle, of Durham, Lincoln and Suffolk, of Scotland and of Ireland — even a Carr who was made an earl in 1613 — each family with its own coat. Nothing connects any of them to a bride at Tulbagh in 1847, because nobody yet knows where her people came from.
So the record chooses none of them. A coat picked from a list because the surname matches would be a guess dressed up as an inheritance — and one wrong turn is already known: the book’s “Worcester” Carrs are of Worcestershire in England, while every Worcester in this family's story is the town in the Cape.
What would settle it
- The one question that unlocks the rest: where Fennie Johanna’s people came from. If they were Cape Dutch all along, the English books were never theirs; if they came from an English county, the book's list shrinks to at most one family.
- If her people turn out to be Scottish, the question is asked again under another spelling — the book itself says the Scottish Carrs are written Ker.
- Something in the family’s own hands — a ring, a seal, a bookplate, or a story that there were arms.
- The state’s own register of arms in South Africa, where a coat granted or registered in the last century would be written down.
What we would like from the family
Anything real: a ring, a seal, a bookplate, a letterhead, something painted or carved — or simply a story that the family had arms, and what they looked like. If there is nothing, that is an answer too, and the record will say so plainly.
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