Ewald Johannes Jooste & Charmeon Theresa Fish · 23 August 1986

  1. The year on the Bible page. The workbook says your grandparents married on 14 December 1914; the hand-written page reads 1916 or 1918 at the last digit. Which is it, and who wrote the page?
  2. Your father's baptism certificate. The record reads it as Potchefstroom, 8 January 1929, mother Hermina Elizabeth Cronje. Is that right, and is the child on it Ewald Cronjé himself?
  3. Charmeon's family — the half of the 1986 union the record cannot reach. The lineage page you saved carries the Fish line through Stogursey, Cutcombe and Bridgwater in Somerset, to Bristol, and out to Cape Town with Joe Fish, born 1873. It stops before your generation, and everything between that page and you is the one part of this record no book holds. Your father's name and your grandfather's, where each was born and where they lived; whether Joe Fish of Bristol is your great-grandfather, or whether that is a guess the record has been making from a surname and a span of years; who found the page, and what was already known in the family before it turned up.you've told us about this — thank you. Anything more still helps.
  4. Did the Fish family ever have arms of its own? We have now looked properly. The English armorial lists four Fish families — of Yorkshire, of Middlesex, of Coventry and of Cavan in Ireland — and not one of them is from Somerset, where your family is. The heralds' own visitation of Somerset records no Fish family at all. So the record will not hand you someone else's coat and call it yours. What we would rather have is 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.
  5. The Lombard and Cronje parents. Maria Magdalena Lombard's father is written as 'Paul(us)…' and Hermina Elizabeth Cronje's parents are blank. Their names, their places, anything kept from their side.
  6. Anything else you remember. The gate, the wall, the album the design came from, the story that the Joostes came from Italy. The record grows from what you tell it.

Ewald Cronje Jooste & Maria Magdalena Lombard · 16 April 1955

  1. Lombard's parents. The record holds Maria Magdalena Lombard's birth and marriage; her parents, their places and anything kept from her side are not yet in it.
  2. The estate. Ewald Cronjé died on 21 October 2005: his estate file is with the Master's office and is not online; anything the family holds from it is the record's source.

Willem Johannes Jooste & Hermina Elizabeth Cronje · 14 December 1914

  1. The year of the marriage. The workbook says 14 December 1914; the family Bible's hand-written page gives the same day and month with a final digit that reads 1916 or 1918. One look at the original settles it.
  2. Willem Johannes Jooste's birth date. The family Bible's hand-written page gives Willem Johannes's birth as 11 June 1886 and the workbook agrees; his father's 1906 death notice lists him as born 14 April 1886. The record has read both. What it lacks: which birthday the family kept for him, and his 1886 baptism entry at Potchefstroom.
  3. Cronje's parents. The record holds Hermina Elizabeth Cronje's birth and marriage; her parents, their places and anything kept from her side are not yet in it.

Each question is keyed to the claim it would settle in the family register; what is said here is written into the record by the family, in the family's words, and every card redraws itself from it. Print this page if a pen is easier than a screen.