The names she is filed under

Why this page exists

Ivone is recorded under six spellings of her maiden surname across five documents, three forenames and four married surnames. That is not unusual for a Portuguese woman in an English-and-Afrikaans record system. What is unusual is how much has turned on it.

TAB WLD 2545/1950 is the only file in which she is the plaintiff — the one in which she sued Kurt rather than being sued. It went unfound through months of searching because the index carries her as IVONE LUWENSKI, born FIGARETTO. Neither word is a spelling a person would choose. A search on the correct name could never have found it, and did not.

Every form below is given with the record it comes from. Where a spelling appears only in an index and in no document, that is said plainly — the difference matters, because an index corruption tells you about the cataloguer and a document variant tells you about the family.

Ivone de Figueiredo b. Lourenço Marques, 4 March 1922

Her parents' given names were the oldest unsolved question in this archive, and every route to them ran through an index that could only be searched on a spelling. THEY ARE NOW KNOWN — Joaquim Júlio de Figueiredo and Leónia dos Santos Mota — from her own birth registration and death certificate, photographed from the family's papers in September 2026. No index was involved. The spellings still matter, because the two documents disagree between MATA and MOTA.

The rule this archive now works to

No surname search counts as done until every recorded spelling has been tried. Applied to the Union Gazette on 16 September 2026, that rule turned a three-spelling sweep into a six-spelling one and made the resulting negative worth stating. Applied to NAAIRS, it shows that FIGARETTO, LUWENSKI and LUWINSKY each return exactly one record — and each of those records is invisible to the correct spelling.

It also cuts the other way, which is the part worth remembering. FIGARETTO and LUWENSKI appear nowhere in any African gazette at all. They exist only inside the archival index. So a spelling that finds a file can still be a spelling nobody ever wrote — useful for searching, useless as evidence about the family.

What each spelling actually returns 16 Sep 2026

Every form put to every index that could be reached, 16 September 2026. The column that matters is the last one.

Forty-one spellings were put to the indexes — twenty-one ways of writing Figueiredo and twenty of writing Luwinski, including many that appear in no record and were invented on purpose to see whether a clerk had ever made the same slip.

Corrected within the hour of first publishing. The first version of this table listed LAWINSKI and LUBINSKI among the spellings that returned nothing. They return three records each. Both turn out to be other families, which is what the table now says — but “nothing found” and “found, and not ours” are different claims, and writing the first when the second was true is precisely the error this page exists to prevent.

A dash means the spelling was not put to that index rather than that it returned nothing. The distinction is the whole point of this archive’s negatives and it is not going to be blurred here.

Where the Portuguese are actually filed 16 Sep 2026

Across every Figueiredo, Fiqueiredo, Figueredo, Figuerido and Figueira search run on 16 September 2026, the immigration records cluster in one place: KAB — the Cape Town Archives Repository — in the PIO and IRC series. PIO is the Principal Immigration Officer; IRC the immigration control files. Sixteen of forty Figueira records are there; so are JG de Fiqueiredo, HA Figueired, Juonet Figuere​do, Maria T Figueredo and five more Figueiredos. NOT ONE OF THEM IS IVONE. What the pattern is worth is a corrected assumption: this archive had been treating naturalisation and alien files as central-government records at SAB in Pretoria. THE INDEXED IMMIGRATION SERIES FOR PORTUGUESE ARRIVALS IS AT CAPE TOWN, and a request pointed at the wrong depot would have come back empty for the wrong reason.

What the exercise was actually worth

One genuinely new record, and it is a good one. Estate TAB MHG 7029/54 belongs to a Portuguese man who died in Johannesburg in 1954. The Union Gazette advertises him as FIGUEIREDO, Agostinho Vicente Sebastiao. NAAIRS files him as FIQUEIREDO. Two indexes, two spellings, one man — and until 16 September 2026 nobody had ever typed the one with a Q.

He is not claimed as a relative. Figueiredo is a common Portuguese surname and nothing connects him to Ivone but a city and a decade. What his file carries is a death notice, and a death notice names parents — which is the one thing this archive cannot get for her.

And one real exclusion. Kurt came out of East Prussia, and the slide from Luwinski to Lewinski is exactly the slide a clerk makes. There is a Lewinski and a Lewinsky family in Johannesburg in the same decades — Erwin, Bella born Berman, Meinhard, Ingeborg Ursula born Leske. They are not this family. That is worth as much as a find, and it is recorded here so that it is never re-opened as a hopeful possibility.

The same problem in the other lines