Married at Drakenstein, Cape Colony (the Dutch Reformed Church at Drakenstein — the register's own page), 11 October 1739 — 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.
For nearly three hundred years the printed family books said Jacob married Magdalena Rooy in 1739 — and the church book never did. The record followed the doubt to the page itself: the clerk's letters, read one by one, spell Magdalena RAATS, a family from Utrecht; a careful modern copy of the same page agrees letter for letter; and at her grandson's baptism in 1785 another clerk wrote her Raats again. One misread line of handwriting, printed in 1894, carried into the family's own 1945 newspaper column, reprinted in 1966 — and corrected at last by the only witness that never changes its story: the page.