This tree comes from the Brynard family register that my grandfather, Gert Mathys Brynard, put together after he retired. He never found out where the first Brynard came from. The family story was that he came to the Cape from France, by way of Belgium.
In 2026 Claude found the answer for me in the marriage register of St Paul’s church in Rondebosch. On 27 May 1839 Jeremiah Brenan, a servant “of London” with an Irish surname, married Johanna Catherina Kannemeyer, who was born at the Cape. Their children grew up speaking Dutch, and over the next twenty years the name was written Brenen, then Brijnard, and by the 1860s Brynard.
The tree has a curious shape because Jeremiah and Johanna’s son, also Jeremiah, married twice. A grandson from his first marriage married a granddaughter from his second, and they were my grandfather’s parents.