Married at Tulbagh, Cape Colony, 29 June 1847. The two houses on one shield; what the record holds of them, and what only the family can still tell.
The husband's house takes the dexter half, the wife's the sinister — the marshalling of a marriage. Where the record holds a house's arms as established they are painted in their colours. Until then they are drawn, not painted — the heralds' own working register, with each colour written in the heralds' short letters (or · gold, ar · silver, gu · red, az · blue, sa · black) — and a creature is named in writing where its drawing has not yet been taken from a period plate. A plain field with no arms named is open by design, not empty by neglect.
Willem Johannes and Fennie Johanna had written a careful clause into their joint will: if the survivor of them ever remarried, the estate must first be divided among the children. He died in May 1889. That December the estate was divided — unusually fast — and the papers show why: the widow's permission to remarry is dated the seventeenth of December 1890, twelve days before the final account closed. The clause they had written together decades earlier did exactly the work they meant it to do.
The family Bible's register of children lists a Jacobus Petrus born in 1848 — and another Jacobus Petrus born in 1859. In the old Cape families a name given twice usually means the first child died young and the name was given again, so that it would live. The record writes down only what the page shows, and lets the page say what it says.