South Africa

A substring search for this surname in South African indexes throws up two things that look like early Lerenas and are not. Both were run down and both are dead ends, and an exclusion that is not written down gets made again.

Documented A 1928 criminal case names a “Lerenani Matchubani”. Lerenani is a Tswana given name — not this surname, and not a surname at all.

Documented A notarial protocol has “Johannes Smook transferring the slave Jek of Ceylon to Goris Janse Lerenaar” (ZA KAB NCD 1/37, 112). Lerenaar is a different surname — a Dutch Cape one — and the document is an eighteenth-century slave transfer that predates any Lerena arrival in South Africa by a century.

They belong with the 1921 East London marriage where Lerena turns out to be the bride’s given name, already excluded in the register. All three are index noise from substring matching, and all three cost an hour each to dismiss the first time.

On 15 September 2026 this archive re-sourced its South African dates from gazettes.africa — free, official, and fuller than the commercial index it replaces. A Form J193 estate notice prints the estate number, the forenames, the date of birth, the identity number, the address, the date of death, the surviving spouse and the executor. The index gave years; the gazette gives days.

The three sons of the 1950 estate. “19962/95 — Lerena, Ricardo Juan Carlos, 6 January 1920, 2001065053080, 6 Barbeque Agricultural Holdings, Randburg, 21 December 1994; Doreen May Lerena.” The identity number confirms the birth date out of its own first six digits. “6746/71 — LERENA Nuno Fernando born on 6 October 1924… of 24 Leiden Road, Gerdview, Germiston, who died on 1 July 1971, and surviving spouse Catherine Mary Sophia Lerena, born 25 March 1929.” And “1518/73 — LERENA, Rogue Luis Armando, 6/12/05, 331/402089, 20 Park Lane, Florida, 29/1/73.”

Two of those change the shape of the family. The 1950 liquidation account made Nuno Fernando’s capital payable when he “attains the age of thirty years — i.e. 6 October 1954”, which implies a birth on 6 October 1924: two unrelated documents, twenty-one years apart, agreeing to the day. And Rogue Luis Armando was born in 1905, which makes him the eldest of the three by fifteen years, and forty-four when his father died — raising a question this archive had not asked, since Pablo Armando was born at Rosario in 1882 and the eight years between Northam and the Cape are still unaccounted for. A son born in 1905 may not have been born in South Africa at all.

Anton Armando Lerena’s death is no longer a tree’s word. “15127/2013 — Lerena, Anton Armando, 05-05-1952, 5206055175085, 158 London Lane, Knoppieslaagte, Centurion, 3 April 2003.” His estate was advertised ten years after he died, which is how this archive came to file him under 2013 and briefly believe two records described two men. One field is internally inconsistent and is not smoothed here: the typed birth date reads 05-05-1952 while the identity number encodes 1952-06-05, and every other entry on that page agrees with its own number. The year is certain and the day is not.

And the man himself is described by the state. “1847/50/754 — Robert Paul Lerena, racehorse trainer, of Newlands, Cape.” This archive had “Trainer” from his own 1940 passport; the gazette is an independent statement made after his death, and it is more specific. A notice of 1986 lists P. R. Lerena Racing Stables, P.O. Box 425, Randburg — the same trade, thirty-five years later, in the town where Ricardo Juan Carlos lived and died.

A grave kerb at Maitland, Woltemade Cemetery — poured concrete edging, not a headstone — with one word cut into its face in inset lettering:

Maitland Woltemade is where both of them are buried. Mary Septima in November 1935, grave 7719A, Roman Catholic, Cemetery no. 1, from the interment register; and Pablo Armando on 19 March 1950 — “intended place of burial: Maitland Cemetery no 1” on his death certificate.

And it is the only Lerena grave in the entire eGGSA Western Cape collection. The variants were checked the same afternoon: LERIN — which would catch Lerina and Lerini — returns nothing; Lerena as a substring also covers Llerena, with no separate hit; LAREN returns thirty-nine records, every one of them Clarence or its like.

It cannot be assigned to a person. A surname on a kerb, with no dates and no forename, is equally consistent with her grave, with his, or with a family plot holding both — and this archive does not turn consistent with into is. What would settle it is the grave number: hers is recorded as 7719A, and the municipal cemetery office holds the Woltemade register.

That test has now been run, and it came back a match. On 8 October 2026 David sent a photograph of one opening of the Maitland Road Cemetery Record of Interments, and page 4706, entry 423 reads: Lerena, female, age 2 wks, late residence ending …Victoria R[oa]d, allotment Roman Catholic, Cons. No. 1, grave 7719, three and a half feet down. That is the infant Careen Maria, who died 27 June 1947 — and it is the same cemetery, the same allotment and the same plot number as Mary Septima's 7719A.

So the third reading was the right one. This page offered three: her grave, his grave, or “a family plot holding both”. Two Lerena burials twelve years apart at one plot number, in one allotment, is a family plot — which means the kerb is most likely the plot's, and that is why it carries a surname and no forename. A kerb with no given name on it is what you pour over a plot you intend to use again.

And then the whole grave was read, the same afternoon. David signed back in to FamilySearch, which holds this register as image group 102346234 (“Maitland Cemetery Volume 19”) — the supplied scan turned out to be its image, black redaction bars and all. At 4,863 pixels across the opening instead of about 1,100, three things settled at once.

The grave is 7719 B. Not 7719. The suffix that the morning’s scan could not resolve is plainly a B — and B is only interesting because Mary Septima is A. The name is Careen, not Carmen: the letter in dispute is the pointed r this clerk writes in Frederick two lines below, and is not the three-arch m he writes in mary one line below. Carmen was the likelier name and it is not what the page says. And the infant’s last residence is 42 Victoria Road, Bellville — not Newlands.

Then the 1950 volume gave up the last of it. Nothing under LERENA had ever found him, because FamilySearch indexes him as Robert Paul LESINA — the seventh machine misreading of this surname on record here. He was found by not searching the surname at all: given name Robert Paul, death year 1950, this collection, 663 results, first row. Volume 21, page 339, entry 327:

So the plot was his own, and it holds three people. 7719 A Mary Septima, buried 16 November 1935. 7719 B the infant Careen Maria, 1947. 7719 C Pablo Armando himself, 19 March 1950. Not a space allotted at need: a grave held in his name, which his wife went into fifteen years before him and a two-week-old child three years before him.

Which means the family were right about the grave and wrong about the cemetery. Cheryl was told — by a cemetery office, through her sister Patricia — that an unmarked grave carrying only the word LERENA held three people: Pablo Armando, Mary Septima, and an infant. Every part of that is in the register. The one thing that is not is Newlands. Newlands is where he died, at 7 Forth Road; the grave is at Maitland, which is what his own death certificate said all along. Intended place of burial is now proved actual. What was corrected →

And the kerb at the top of this section is almost certainly it. A plot holding three people, with a surname cut into the edging and no forename, no dates and no epitaph, is what 7719 should look like from above. Almost is the right word: nothing yet ties the photographed kerb to plot 7719 by position. That is one visit with the section and row markers in frame. Photograph these →

One small thing it does say. The stone reads LERENA — which runs, lightly, against the hypothesis raised from the DNA that the name might be nearer Lerina, the spelling on his death certificate. Not decisive: a kerb may postdate the burial, and a mason cuts what he is given. But it is evidence, and it points the other way. The DNA →

Roque Luis Armando Lerena’s death notice of 1973 names two daughters — Juanita Ramond Hutson and Panola Maria. A death notice lists the living. Searching the surname across the whole of South Africa returns 413 records, and exactly three carry an indexed parent. All three are his, and all three are children who were already gone.

The 1932 boy moves the family. He was born and died at Bloemfontein, which no record in this archive had put any Lerena in — it sits between the Cape where Roque was born and the Transvaal where he died. And the register says male, where this archive has carried him as an unnamed infant from a tree.

Rieta Maria had no death date at all until today. She was graded “birth only — a floor, not an attestation” on a bare 1936 taken from a tree. She died 28 August 1937 at 6a Robinson Street, Mayfair, Johannesburg.

And one field in these indexes had to be thrown away. Both infant entries give “Age: 0 days”, which would mean each was born on the day it died. The tree has one at five days and the other at four. Two independent dates disagreeing with the index in the same direction is an unfilled form field, not two coincidences — so the age is not used here, and the near miss is written down. Method →

And the question that started this is still open. Careen Maria Lerena has no civil birth or death record indexed anywhere in South Africa — her only record is the Maitland cemetery entry. Work-list row 106 wants a Cape registration to name her parents, and FamilySearch cannot supply one; the Cape civil registers are held by Home Affairs and the Western Cape Archives.

A commercial index carried five members of this family with the year 1999, among them a married couple and two children aged thirteen and eight. Either something terrible happened, or the index has a default-year artefact, and a summary row cannot tell you which.

The free Government Gazette was used to test it. The artefact reading is dead for three of the five. But the absences prove nothing, and the row that decides how the whole table reads is the control at the top of it.

This archive published on 8 October that South Africa was not in the full-text corpus. It was wrong: a place written into the URL errors, where the facet opened inside the page works. The correction opened a route, three hits were read that day, and these are the other six. The corpus has nothing more for this surname.

And it never held what the archive most wants. There is no Cape civil registration in it — so Careen Maria’s parents and Pablo Armando’s own father stay out of reach by this route, and both still need Home Affairs or the Western Cape Archives. What it gave instead was two sons’ lives.

Roque at twenty-two. Voter 1399 of polling district 770: 14 Florence Villas, Fireman, sole tenant. His father was a horse-dealer in 1911 and a trainer by 1940; the eldest son went to the railway. That “Fireman” means a locomotive fireman is an inference from the company he keeps on the page — Loco. Cleaner, Engine-driver, Signalman, Guard, Shunter — and not from the word, which alone could mean a fire brigade.

And the district has a name. One line of the same roll carries “Louis Botha Hostel, Observatory”, and the street column runs Lower Main Rd, Trill Rd, Scott Rd and Salt River. District 770 is Observatory and Salt River, Cape Town — said by the roll itself, not by an atlas.

Two families of one name. A Transvaal deeds folio names “late Lucas Lerena” and his wife “Rachel, born Maleka” — the second record, after a mission congregation at Kranspoort, to show a South African family carrying this surname and unconnected to this one. It is recorded because an exclusion is evidence: anyone meeting “Lerena” in a Transvaal record should know there are two.

The target was Paul Raymond Lerena's 2001 estate notice. It was not reached. But the control query run first — the one that proves the search works before any zero is believed — returned forty-two documents, and three of them this archive did not hold.

All three are snippet only. The search index is open; the document viewer sits behind a bot challenge that was not worked around, so nothing below has been read on the page itself. And gazette OCR reads across the gutter of a two-column notice, so names that appear adjacent in a snippet are not necessarily adjacent on the page.

A commercial index carried five members of this family with the year 1999, and this archive refused to say which it was — either something terrible happened, or the index has a default-year artefact, and a summary row cannot tell you which. The Government Gazette narrowed it but could not reach the wife or the children.

The Johannesburg cemetery register reaches all of them, and it is free. Pierre Frederick and Richard both died on 12 November 1999; Gayle and Jeffrey were buried with them on 22 November; and all four share a burial registration of 18 November 1999. Their four record identifiers are consecutive — four sequential entries, one family, entered in a single act of registration.

It also does something row 17 has been waiting for: Doreen May Lerena was the last person here whose dates rested on the commercial index, and she is now free-sourced with a day — died 17 November 1999, five days after the others.