The Lerena Archive
The spine, generation by generation

The Spine

The descent from Pablo Armando is closed and documented, with no inferred link left in it. And as of 10 September 2026 the line runs one generation higher: an Argentine army card names his father and mother.

Two things shape this page. Living people are omitted from the build, which removes the most recent generations. And the top of the line changed on 10 September 2026: an Argentine army enrolment card, filled in at the consulate in Cape Town, names Pablo Armando’s father and mother. For months there was nothing above him. There is now one generation, and it is documented rather than inferred. The card → · Method → · What has been searched →

The line

  1. Generation0

    Juan Carlos Lerena and María Lerena

    Documented

    Argentina South Africa
    So written on the card; her maiden name is not yet known. Presumed Rosario de Santa Fe; nothing else yet known of him. Named as the father on his son’s 1908 ficha de enrolamiento. Corroborated from outside Argentina: Pablo Armando’s eldest son was Ricardo Juan Carlos Lerena, b. 6 Jan 1920, Cape Town.

  2. Generation1

    Pablo Armando Lerena and Mary Septima Taylor

    born22 Feb 1882, Rosario de Santa Fe, Argentinadied19 Mar 1950, Newlands, Cape TownDocumented

    Argentina South Africa
    In South Africa Robert Paul Lerena; his wife died Nov 1935 aged 51. Argentine passport, 1940: born Rosario, Trainer. Death certificate A 214036: Race Horse Owner. Named as father in the 1911 Corpus Christi baptism of his son Roque.

  3. Generation2

    Nuno Fernando Lerena and Catherine Mary Sophia Booyzen (1924–2013)

    born6 Oct 1924, Cape Towndied1 Jul 1971, Germiston, TransvaalDocumented

    joinsThe Booyzen Archive ↗

    South Africa
    Married at Johannesburg. Named with this exact birth date as a residuary heir in his father's 1950 estate; own death notice 6746/71. A salesman.

  4. Generation3

    Cheryl Anne Lerena

    living — named only

Documented Every step of this line now rests on a record. Nuno Fernando's birth date appears in his father's estate papers and again on his own death notice; Cheryl is named in that death notice as his daughter. There is no inferred link left in the descent. The estate →

Her line goes back further than his

Documented Pablo Armando's wife was Mary Septima Taylor (17 September 1884 – 15 November 1935), and her family can be traced three generations above her, to a James Taylor born about 1796 — still further back than the Lerena side, where Pablo Armando's parents are now named but nothing beyond their names is known.

Her name is a count that does not come out. Septima means seventh; the registers make her the sixth daughter of nine children, and this page said otherwise until 8 October 2026. The Taylors → What was corrected →

The Chappell–Forbes knot

A correction to this archive’s own record, and an arrangement that reads strangely until the dates are put in order.

This archive recorded Roque’s first wife as “Rosalina Wilhelmina Chappell”, taken from a marriage index, and Ricardo’s wife as “Doreen ?”, taken from the family chart. Both were wrong in the same way, and one document fixes them.

Roseline Wilhelmina FORBES married Frederick Christian Chappell on 1 November 1920 at Woodstock, Cape Town — an event recorded twice over, in the South African civil marriage records and in the Anglican parish registers, and confirmed again by Frederick’s own Western Cape estate file. So Chappell was her married name, not her maiden name. She was a Forbes.

Frederick Chappell died in 1933. Three years later his widow married Roque Luis Armando Lerena, which is why the 1936 register calls her Rosaline Wilhermina Forbes Chappell — exactly what a remarrying widow would be called. And her eldest daughter by Chappell, Doreen May, born 1921, married Roque’s brother Ricardo Juan Carlos Lerena.

Two Lerena brothers married a mother and her daughter. Ricardo’s wife was his brother’s stepdaughter; Roque’s wife was his brother’s mother-in-law. Doreen’s three siblings became Roque’s stepchildren in 1936.

Inferred What is not proved: that this Doreen May Chappell is that Doreen. The relationships come from the FamilySearch Family Tree, which is user-contributed and is not evidence on its own. Every surrounding fact checks out against records; the link itself rests on the tree plus the surname appearing in both marriages. Strong, but not a document, and marked as such.

A discrepancy left standing. Doreen’s death is 17 November 1993 in the tree, and the Johannesburg cemetery register agrees exactly on day and month — but this archive’s own Government Gazette sweep found her estate advertised on 23 February 2001. Either the year is 1999, or the estate sat unadvertised for six years. Not resolved.

Generation 1's other children

Pablo Armando Lerena and Mary Septima Taylor had at least three sons, all born at the Cape.

SonBornNote
Roque Luis Armando Lerena25 Nov 1905, Cape Town Baptised at Corpus Christi, Wynberg, 12 June 1911. Retired railwayman; d. Johannesburg 29 Jan 1973. The "Louis" of the 1950 will. His baptism and his death notice between them identify generation 1 — and prove that Pablo Armando and Robert Paul are one man. His death notice gives 6 Dec 1905; the register, 25 Nov.
Ricardo Juan Carlos Lerena6 Jan 1920 Residuary heir with Nuno. His descendants are the largest branch on the family chart.
Nuno Fernando Lerena6 Oct 1924, Cape Town David Defranceski's grandfather.

Cheryl's own brothers and sisters — Jeannette Marie, Paul Raymond, Catherine Tertia and Patricia Carmen — are named in their father's 1971 death notice and are all now deceased. Note Paul descending from generation 1, and Carmen surviving as a given name into 1958.

Gavin Lerena

Family chart This archive earlier recorded the South African jockey Gavin Lerena as a public figure and expressly claimed no relationship. The family's own descendant chart now places him: son of Carlos "Tex" Lerena, son of Ricardo, son of Pablo Armando — which would make him Cheryl's first cousin once removed, and David's second cousin.

Recorded as the family holds it, and not yet verified against a public record. It is, however, exactly what this archive predicted before any of it was known: that the sixty-one South African Lerenas are one kindred, and that a rare surname plus a shared trade is a strong signal.

Where it joins the other archives

Cheryl Anne Lerena married into the Defranceski family. That marriage is the hinge between this archive and the Defranceski archive, whose line runs back through Johannesburg to Gračišće and the Istrian peninsula. Their son married into the Falco line of Arienzo in Campania.

Three archives, three continents of origin, meeting in Brisbane: Lerena from the River Plate by way of South Africa, Defranceski from Istria, Falco from Campania.

What is still missing

The line is solid downward from Pablo Armando Lerena, and his own birth is fixed to a city and a day by his own passport — Rosario de Santa Fe, 22 February 1882. Above him there is one generation and no more. His enrolment card names Juan Carlos Lerena and María Lerena, and that is the whole of it: two names, given by their son, and not a single other record of either of them anywhere in Argentina or Uruguay.

And the obvious way to supply them has now been closed. The Rosario cathedral baptism index has been read letter by letter, under any surname, for 1881, 1882 and 1883 — twenty-six sections in each year, the cathedral being the city’s only parish until 1888 — and he is in none of it. The marriage registers are clear from 1868 to 1891. Uruguayan civil registration, which began in 1879, does not hold him either; nor do the indexed Spanish parish records. The full record of what has been searched →

So the hope has moved off birth records altogether, onto three letters now with archives: his military enrolment in Buenos Aires, which would name his parents outright; the consular file behind his 1940 passport, which would show what he produced to prove he was Argentine; and the anarchist press in Amsterdam, which named the men deported from Argentina in the years he left.

Open questions →

The name above him, tested

The 1908 enrolment card names Pablo Armando's parents — Juan Carlos Lerena and Maria Lerena — and it is the only document in this archive that names them. On 17 September 2026 that name was put to every indexed record FamilySearch holds.

The control was run before the zeroes were written down. The same query form, with Gilberto Lerena and Julia Salvanach substituted, returns eleven records. The form works, so the zeroes below are the corpus and not the search.

QueryResultVerdict
THE CORPUS MOVED UNDER A PUBLISHED NULL - 21 September 2026 0 -> 2 TWO OF THE FOUR ANSWERS ABOVE ARE NO LONGER TRUE, and nothing was wrong with the searches. They were run on 17 September and the ARGENTINA MILITARY RECORDS index has since gained the enrolment card - the FamilySearch citation on that record reads 16 September 2026. WHAT CHANGED: JUAN CARLOS LERENA is now an indexed person, with spouse MARIA LERENA and child PABLO ARMANDO LERENA. WHAT DID NOT: he still has no record OF HIS OWN - no birth, no marriage, no death. The new hit is his son's record naming him as a father, which is the card this archive already had. AND THE INDEX CARRIES THE SALTA ERROR: it gives the birthplace as "Rosario de Lerma, Salta", which this archive corrected on 13 September. Anyone searching will find him in the wrong province. THE LESSON IS NOT ABOUT THE SEARCH. A null is true on the day it is run, against the corpus of that day, and an index that grows can falsify one without anybody making a mistake. A published null needs a DATE, and this archive's now say so.
Father exactly 'Juan Carlos', surname Lerena, mother's surname Lerena 0 No indexed child anywhere of that couple. The mother sharing the father's surname is the unusual part and the easiest thing to search on, and it returns nothing.
Father exactly 'Juan Carlos Lerena', mother unconstrained 0 on 17 Sep, 2 on 21 Sep No indexed child of ANY man recorded exactly as Juan Carlos Lerena. Dropping the mother did not loosen it at all. RE-RUN 21 SEPTEMBER 2026 AND IT IS NO LONGER ZERO. The same query now returns TWO, and one of them is PABLO ARMANDO HIMSELF, on the Argentine military record this archive has cited since it found the card - ark 1:1:6TH8-DVXH.
Juan Carlos Lerena as a named person, any role, any country, any collection 1 on 17 Sep, 2 on 21 Sep And it is not him. Uruguay, Civil Registration - an infant, Lerena Caraballo, died 21 February 1983 at Montevideo, aged 0, certificate 177, father Juan Carlos Lerena, mother Gabriela Caraballo (ark 1:1:XSBJ-RWG1). A man of that name in 1983 is a century adrift of a father whose son was born in 1882. AND THE SECOND ONE IS HIM. Re-run 21 September: "Juan Carlos Lerena, Father, Argentina Military Records 1911-1936, spouse MARIA LERENA, child PABLO ARMANDO LERENA." FamilySearch now indexes the enrolment card, so the man this archive could not find in any index is in one - as the father on his own son's record.
CONTROL: father exactly 'Gilberto' Lerena, mother Salvanach 11 The query form is sound. Argentine military records, Uruguayan civil registration, the children named one by one. Run before the zeroes were written down, not after.
WHAT THIS DOES AND DOES NOT MEAN - IT MEANS: the man named on the card is absent from FamilySearch's INDEXED corpus, and so is the marriage that would name him. The route to Pablo Armando's parents does not run through the indexes, and further index searching is not where the next hour should go. IT DOES NOT MEAN he did not exist, and it does not exclude him from the records themselves. This tests the exact string 'Juan Carlos'. A record indexed as 'Juan C.', 'J. C.', or plain 'Juan' would not match - and the fuzzy form of this search returns 47, among them the children of a Juan Lerena and Eduviges Pelaez at Trinidad, Flores, whom this archive already holds. And it tests INDEXED records only. Unindexed images are a separate corpus with its own search.
WHERE THIS POINTS NEXT - Away from indexes and towards registers read by eye. The 1882 Rosario walk already proved the index complete across 750 consecutive acts, February to July, with no Lerena - so he was not baptised at the Catedral. Between them, those two results say the parents' generation is not in any indexed corpus this archive can reach, and the remaining routes are unindexed images, Argentine civil registration, and the other Rosario parishes.

Related: The Enrolment Card · Argentina · Open questions