Ivone de Figueiredo

She is filed under six spellings, and the indexes carry the worst of them 16 Sep 2026

IVONE, YVONNE, IVONNE. FIGUEIREDO, DE FIGUEIREDO, MOTA FIGUEIREDO, DE FIGUERIDO, DE FIGUEREDO, FIGARETTO. DE WITT, LUWINSKI, LUWINSKY, LUWENSKI, SALKOW. Fourteen forms of one woman’s name, each taken from a record that names her.

It is not a curiosity. The one file in which she is the plaintiff rather than the defendant — TAB WLD 2545/1950, in which she sued Kurt — is indexed as IVONE LUWENSKI, born FIGARETTO, and was invisible for months to every search run on her actual name. Neither word is a spelling anyone would choose.

Every form, with the record it comes from and whether it is a document variant or an index corruption, is set out on her names.

Her name is Mota Figueiredo — or Mata, and her own birth entry says Mata Disputed 27 September 2026

The family tree calls her Ivone / Mota “Yvonne” Figueiredo, and everyone — this archive included, until the South African national archives index was read properly — took Mota for a stray nickname sitting next to the anglicised Yvonne.

It is not a nickname. It is half her surname. The Transvaal Supreme Court, 1948:

Illiquid case divorce. Kurt Luwinsky versus Ivone (born Mota Figueiredo).
— National Archives of South Africa, Transvaal depot, Witwatersrand Local Division, WLD 1950/1948

She was born Ivone Mota Figueiredo, in all likelihood Ivone da Mota Figueiredo.

That was written before her birth registration was in the room, and it now has a rival that outranks the court index. The assento Derrick supplied on 27 September 2026 spells it MATA twice: her mother is Leonia dos Santos Mata, and averbamento 3 is a deliberate legal act rectifying her full name to Ivone Mata de Figueiredo. The 2010 death certificate spells it MOTA twice, typed, with the mother as Leónia dos Santos Mota.

Two Portuguese civil documents disagree, and this archive is not picking one quietly. What can be said: a rectification averbamento on the birth entry is the registrar of record correcting the register on purpose, and a death certificate typed sixty years later is derivative of whatever was in front of the typist. That favours Mata. It is not being adopted across the site on that reasoning alone, because the South African court index of 1948 independently reads Mota and three documents are not two. The name stays as published and is flagged as disputed until a third Portuguese record is read.

Her son's name gives up her father's Inferred

Her first son was Henrique Figueiredo Pinto da Rocha. Portuguese naming puts the mother's surname before the father's. So Figueiredo is hers, and Pinto da Rocha is the father's — the man the tree can only call “Unknown da Rocha”.

Which makes Pinto da Rocha, not da Rocha, the name to search on.

The 1951 divorce was granted Documented

The index lists the actions; it does not say how they ended. That is now settled from outside the court. When Kurt married again on 29 February 1956, the registrar entered his personal status as Divorcee and noted in the Remarks that an order had been filed — the decree he had to produce before a marriage officer would proceed. A registrar in Johannesburg saw the document that ended this marriage and wrote that he had seen it.

Which also dates the end of Ivone's second marriage to somewhere between 1951 and February 1956, and she had already remarried inside that window — Morris Isaac Salkow, 13 February 1953. See Kurt for the register entry in full.

The Germiston register, read at last Documented

It was attached to the family tree as a photograph and never opened. Register no. 34 of 1948, Germiston, 2 February 1948:

Married by special licence no. 156884, dated the same day, without antenuptial contract. Witnesses B. Green and E. E. Naude; marriage officer A. J. Rossouw, Magistrate's Office, Germiston. Both parties signed: J.A.O. de Witt and Y. Figueiredo — so the Y-spelling is not only what officials wrote about her, it is what she wrote herself.

Read again at full resolution. The first reading of this frame was made from the 1,195-pixel copy the website serves; the original is 4,931 × 3,929. Five cells came out differently and have been corrected here: the register number (34, not 54), the licence number, both witnesses, and the husband's address. Self-corrected The words read the same at either size — spinster, Lourenço Marques and the age of 22 all read the same at either size.

The da Rocha marriage, and what she declared at Germiston Documented

The family tree records “Marriage to: Unknown Da Rocha, before 1941”, and her own birth registration names him and dates it. Ivone married FREDERICO PINTO DA ROCHA on 18 November 1939 at the 1.ª Conservatória do Registo Civil de Lourenço Marques. The marriage was dissolved by divorce, by a sentence of 6 December 1945. Both facts are marginal notes on the assento, added in 1987.

So at Germiston in February 1948 she was not a spinster but a divorcée of two years — and the register there understates more than her status. It gives her age as 22; born on 4 March 1922 she was 25, a fortnight short of 26. A woman remarrying in another country, with a six-year-old son left behind in Mozambique, gave an office the version of herself she wanted on the page. The Portuguese state was not consulted and went on recording her as divorciado until she died.

Henrique was born on 11 March 1941, sixteen months after that wedding and four years before the divorce. He carries Pinto da Rocha because his parents were married to each other when he was born — which is a plainer reason than a father acknowledging him by surname. His father has a forename now, and it is not an inference: Frederico.

A husband at the date of birth is a legal presumption and not a certificate, and nothing here excludes another man. What it changes is the search. His birth registration at Lourenço Marques is no longer the only document likely to name his father, because the marriage entry of 18 November 1939 exists too.

And the gap is four months and seventeen days Unexplained

2 February 1948: spinster, marries de Witt.
19 June 1948: divorced, marries Kurt Luwinski.

Both are on official registers, both signed by her. A divorce granted inside four and a half months was not ordinary in South Africa in 1948, and this archive does not understand how it was done — annulment, a void marriage, or a court moving faster than courts moved. The Germiston divorce file is the next document. And the pattern then repeats at once: Kurt filed against her within weeks of their own wedding.

And what became of the first husband Documented

He has always ended mid-sentence on this page: a miner of 77 Browning Street, Fairview, who married her in February and is never heard of again. Two records found on 20 September 2026 finish him.

He remarried on 25 February 1950 — Johannes Antonie Oelofse Dewitt and Elsie Marie Geyer, in the national civil marriage index, he aged 27 and she born about 1930. And he died on 2 April 1963 at Sasolburg in the Orange Free State, aged 40, in the civil death register, which gives his birthplace as Pretoria.

That last date matters beyond him. The family tree holds this man twice — once as himself with no date of death, and once as his own son with the date — and neither record carries a citation. A government death register now says what the uncited duplicate said, which is what turns a tidy inference into a fact. The correction, and what it still does not settle →

One loose thread it pulls. Three officials wrote down his age — 25 in February 1948, 27 in February 1950, 40 in April 1963 — and the three ranges overlap at April 1922 to February 1923. The tree’s “December 1923, Johannesburg” is outside all three, and the death register says Pretoria. Declared ages are not proof of anything on their own. Three of them agreeing is worth writing down.

They were in the same trade Inferred

She was a dress maker. Kurt, on his 1933 emigration record, was a dress designer — his mother's trade — and by 1948 a shop keeper. Two people in the Johannesburg rag trade, four months apart on the same page of her life. It is the first plausible account of how they met, and it is pleasingly ordinary.

What the two registers showed about the dates Resolved

The archive previously called these dates a contradiction and guessed the February one was wrong. It was not. Both marriages are real, both registers have been read, and the four-and-a-half-month gap is exactly what it looks like. What was wrong was the assumption that no divorce could fit inside it.

The Luwinski date is solid: it is on the certificate, number 858, with her age given as 24. The February date carries the same citation as the June one, which means it was never independently sourced. The likeliest reading is that the de Witt marriage was earlier and the February 1948 date belongs to something else — its dissolution, most obviously. But she was already Mrs de Witt when she married Kurt, so the de Witt marriage is real and came first. The Germiston register settles it.

What the closer one implies Inferred

If the second-cousin's-son reading holds, then Derrick and that match's mother — born 1952, died 2018 — are second cousins, sharing one set of great-grandparents. Derrick's Portuguese great-grandparents are Ivone's grandparents. So Ivone's grandparents should sit among the forebears of that family, whose recorded surnames are Jorge, Silvestre and Conde.

The second match's line adds Gaspar and Matos, through a father born 1902 and dead in 1962.

Five surnames to take to the Portuguese registers, where before there were none.

The last marriage lasted months 16 September

This archive has carried Morris Isaac Salkow as the man in the house through Derrick’s childhood. A sweep of the National Archives index found the file that ends that reading:

TAB · WLD 2225/1953 — Illiquid case. Divorce. MORRIS ISAAC SALKOW versus IVONNE (born de Figueirido).

They married on 13 February 1953 and he sued her for divorce in the same year. The archive already knew the marriage ended — he married again in 1960 — but not that it ended almost at once. Johannesburg case numbers ran to five figures by the 1970s; 2225 of 1953 is not a December filing.

It explains the silence rather than deepening it. Nobody has been able to say where Ivone was between 1953 and her death at Porto, and that has been treated here as a failure of searching. It is more likely a fact about her life: the marriage that was supposed to settle her collapsed within the year, and after it she has no South African anchor at all. Next

And one name, from a passport register Candidate only

Her father must be a Figueiredo. Searched across every Portuguese archive indexed on Digitarq, exactly one Figueiredo took a passport for Lourenço Marques before she was born: Augusto Pereira de Figueiredo, 21, of Eixo in Aveiro, on 22 October 1904. It may well be nothing — Figueiredo is among the commonest names in Portugal and the index is a fraction of the whole. The case for and against him →

And the DNA page has been standing next to it for weeks Inferred

The DNA page records, as an explicitly loose thread, that the two Portuguese matches opened both trace to the Viseu district — “Treixedo in Santa Comba Dão, and Tondela and Castro Daire” — and judges it “worth noting; not worth believing”. Nagozela and Treixedo were merged into a single freguesia in 2013, which is to say they adjoin. Her mother came from the parish that match’s parish was merged with.

Every caution there survives: the matches are distant, one has no documented link to Ivone at all, and the closest Portuguese match still gives no place more specific than “Portugal”. What changed is the size of the coincidence, not its status. It was a district — Viseu has twenty-four municipalities and half a million people. It is now one concelho of eleven thousand and two adjoining parishes inside it, arrived at from a register that knows nothing about DNA. A coincidence that got smaller is not a relative.

Two of her people are already catalogued at the Torre do Tombo To order

Both appear in the same series: Direção-Geral da Administração Pública, Processos de Funcionários do Ultramar — personnel files of overseas civil servants.

Such a file carries what the service required of a man: birth date and place, parents, marital status and dependants. Four answers in one document, and for the father it would confirm or destroy the Vimieiro reading in a line.

It also reframes her. A daughter born in the colony in 1922 to a man with an overseas service file from 1922, married at seventeen to another overseas functionary. This is a colonial civil service family — not settlers, not traders — and that is a different world from the one this archive had been imagining for her.

Neither is confirmed. Neither catalogue entry gives a parish, a birth date or a parent, and both names are ordinary Portuguese ones. The dates are the whole of the argument, and dates are the commonest coincidence there is. They are candidates to be ordered and read.

What can be reached, and what cannot Measured

The parish registers of Santa Comba Dão are not online. The Arquivo Distrital de Viseu’s holdings on Digitarq are judicial and civil-government series only; searches on Nagozela, Treixedo and Vimieiro return no parish-register fonds at all, while other districts’ come back readily. So her grandparents — António Júlio de Figueiredo and Ana Pereira de Figueiredo, Augusto Mata and Júlia Durães Mata — are out of reach from a desk. That is a finding, not a failure to look: the books exist, at Viseu and on FamilySearch microfilm.

What is online, free and indexed by individual name is the Governo Civil de Viseu’s passport applications — “Pedido de passaporte de…”, PT/ADVIS/AC/GCVIS/H-D/001 — digitised, with image counts against them. That is the emigration itself, the event that produced every Portuguese person in this archive. The Santa Comba Dão court records are there too, and a Portuguese inventário por óbito names the heirs.

And there are two Vimieiros. One in Santa Comba Dão and one in Arraiolos, district of Évora — and it is the Évora one whose parish registers are digitised, so a search on the name returns the wrong parish first every time. What settles it is the mother: Negozela exists in Santa Comba Dão and not in Évora, and couples emigrated from one concelho together. The father’s Vimieiro is a reasoned preference until his own record says so.

Her line is the one part of this family the DNA confirms outright Documented

Three of Derrick's ten closest matches are in Portugal, sharing 133, 111 and 109 centimorgans, all three flagged by the testing service as having Portugal in common with him. Against 60.6% Portuguese in the ethnicity estimate. Whatever else is in doubt — and a great deal is — Ivone is not.

Why she is not simply looked up Tested

A search of MyHeritage's birth, marriage and death collections for Ivone Figueiredo returns nine results: eight Brazilian, one Floridian. Portuguese and Portuguese-colonial civil registration is not in these indexes at all. Her records exist — in Porto, in Maputo, in Lisbon — and none of them can be reached from a desk. This is not a search done badly; it is a search that cannot succeed, and knowing which is worth something.

Two Johannesburg files: WLD 1467/1971, a divorce — Margaret Figueiredo (born Harrison) v. Estácio Figueiredo — and WLD 506/1970, an ex parte application by the same woman.

Derrick's single closest DNA match, at 333.9 cM, is a Harrison in the United Kingdom, on the paternal side.

Be careful with this. A woman marrying into a Figueiredo family is no blood relation of Ivone's, so this is not a link between the two surnames in any genetic sense. What it is: evidence that an English Harrison family was in Johannesburg in exactly these years, in the same Portuguese-Johannesburg world Ivone lived in — and Derrick's paternal cluster is English with a South African connection. Harrison is also a very common name. Speculation, recorded so it is not lost