Family records and tree records sometimes drift apart. They sometimes don’t agree. The cleanest way to tether one to the other is a piece of paper in someone’s drawer.
Attie’s maternal grandfather, Johan Wilhelm Albertus van Zyl, has two such pieces of paper: his 1942 Johannesburg driver’s licence and his 1955 South African identity card, both of which the family has kept. Both match the FamilySearch profile (GLMV-MXY) exactly — name, photograph, dates — and place him in Johannesburg by 1942, which is exactly where the public tree says he was. Two real-world artefacts, independent of any online tree, agreeing with the tree across a decade. That is as solid as 20th-century genealogy gets without a parish register.