Married at the Cape Colony (the town is not written in the record's sources), 1784. 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.
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.
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.