Married at Tulbagh, Cape Colony, 7 July 1811 — the year held open, see below. 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.
A century before the Jooste and Theron houses married, they had already stood together once. When Jacob, the only son of Frans and Maria to reach manhood, was baptised at Stellenbosch in March 1710, one of the witnesses at the font was Jaques Teron — the very forefather of the Theron family. One hundred and one years later, in 1811, Jacob's grandson married that man's descendant, Alida Susanna Theron.
Jacobus Petrus came to his 1811 wedding a widower, not yet twenty-six. He had married Christina Visser around 1808; their one little girl, Christina Martha Helena, was born the next year and lived only to twelve. The church clerk wrote it plainly into the banns entry — 'weduwenaar', widower — and the record has now read that word at the page with its own eyes. The union this whole line descends from was also a second beginning.
When the boy who would make the 1811 union was baptised at Tulbagh in July 1785, the witnesses who stood for him included Willem Janssen van Rensburg and Hester Burger — his own grandmother's parents. Three generations of the line stood in the church that day around one child: the family the record traces was, in that moment, simply a family.
An 1830 survey map of the farms around the old Tulbagh Drostdy names one of the neighbours, at the farm Kruisvallei, simply as 'Jacobus Petrus Joosten, Pieters son.' Nineteen years after his wedding, that is how the district knew him — by his father's name, on the land beside the magistracy. The record now knows where to stand to be near him.
On the page where the banns of Jacobus Petrus and Alida Susanna were entered, the very next line belongs to Johannis Paulus Mouton, a young man of the town, and his bride Martha Jacoba Lubbe — banns called the same Sunday, the seventh of July 1811. The record's oldest wife-house and the house being joined that day stand one above the other in the clerk's hand, a century after the first Mouton married into the line.
On the last day of July 1785, two Joosten babies were baptised at Tulbagh, one entry after the other: Anna Maria, daughter of Johannes Jasper and his wife Anna Magdalena Theron, and Jacobus Petrus, son of Pieter and Helena Jacoba. The witnesses who stood for them that day were the family itself — a Theron for one child, and for the other his grandmother's parents, and his grandmother. The record went to that page for one date and came away with a family standing together in church.