Bringing together van Rooyens

Welcome to the van Rooyen website. This site serves to provide information on the South African progenitor of the van Rooyen family, Cornelis van Rooijen, and his descendants.

My name is Gina Shepherd, and my maternal family were van Rooyens. I have been working on the family research for around two decades. I started with my own van Rooyens, primarily hailing from KwaZulu-Natal, but this soon expanded to include all the descendants of Cornelis.

In the Van Rooyen Voortrekker series you may find the articles so far interesting:

Gerrit Reynier van Rooyen – Trek leader

Andries Ignatius Marthinus van Rooyen

If you’d like me to feature your family, please get in touch to provide information and photographs about your family, via the contact page or email.

The database has had an upgrade and includes new functionality. For example, where causes of death are available you can now see them in the death information and photos will be added regularly.

If you click on the link to the database, it will redirect you to the site where I host this. This database contains my van Rooyen (and other) research, which is ongoing, so please check back regularly.

The database is updated roughly monthly.
Last database update: Monday 5 January 2026.

When using the data on this site and in the database, please properly cite the source. A tremendous amount of time and money is put into getting the data together.