About this site

This is the Retief family genealogy — a living, evolving record kept by Attie Retief of the documented family lines: the eleven-generation Huguenot Retief spine and the married-in Laker, Saayman, Van Zyl, Fuller / Frost, du Plessis and Tait families.

How to read the certainty badges

Every person and every source carries a small badge that says how settled the claim is:

• primary source — confirmed by the original document itself (a death notice, a baptism register, etc.).
• church register — confirmed by an indexed Dutch Reformed Church or parish register.
• civil record — confirmed by an indexed civil marriage, birth or death record.
• family-confirmed — confirmed verbally by a living family member.
• family tree — taken from the FamilySearch shared tree, not independently verified.
• unproven — plausible but not yet established.

Open threads

• The Van Zyl line dead-ends at Jacobus Lodewyk van Zyl (b. 1879). The bridge up to the stamvader Willem van Zyl of Vrede en Lust (1668 Delft → 1699 Cape) is not yet built in the public tree.
• The Fuller surname dead-ends at Charles Henry Fuller (1828–1872). The England-born immigrant Fuller above him has not yet been found.
• The Saayman line is two generations deep on the church-register side. Whether this branch joins the Daniel Zaaijman / Krotoa root or a separate progenitor is the open question.
• The du Plessis middle generations between Jopie du Plessis (~1915) and the Huguenot stamvader Jean Prieur (1638) are untraced.

Sources

Most source images on this site are screenshots of FamilySearch record viewers, captured in Attie's signed-in session. Where a collection's terms restrict republishing, the site shows a link to the source instead of embedding the raw image (depending on the build mode).

Two family documents — Johan Wilhelm Albertus van Zyl's 1942 Johannesburg driver's licence and 1955 South African identity card — are personal-family papers and are embedded freely.

How the site grows

Adding a newly-confirmed person or a new source = adding one content file or dropping one image into the repository, then rebuilding. There is no database. The intent is that this site is edited by hand over time, as the family record grows.

Soli Deo gloria.