With all the eulogies on Margaret Thatcher, remember this

The Right got it so wrong on Nelson Mandela – Telegraph Blogs: It’s easy with the passage of time to forget how the Conservative Right in Britain got it so badly wrong on South Africa, and today how long it has been since the British Left got it so right.

Where does the time go?

I've sometimes downloaded time tracking software to see how much time I spend on various projects, but most if it is so complex that you spend more time on the tracking than on the project. But here is one that looks simple enough even for me Where does the time go?:

Back in November, I decided I wanted to track the time I spent on various genealogy projects. One reason for this was to be able to better plan my monthly to-do lists (I have a tendency to overbook myself). I knew I wanted a web-based system (preferably one that was free). There are several available, but Toggl appealed to me as soon as I saw it, so I decided to give it a test run. I’ve been using Toggl for three months now and I don’t know how I lived without it. (Note that this is toggl – no e.) Everything about Toggl is so easy and intuitive. To get started, you can either sign up by entering your email address and a password or simply log in with your Google account. It doesn’t get any easier than that!

Where on earth is the Shoshongo Dum?

Edward C. Tabler, in his book Pioneers of South West Africa & Ngamiland makes quite frequent reference to the Shoshongo Dum. It does not, however, appear on modern maps of Namibia or Botswana (the area covered by Tabler's book). Nor does it appear on any ancient maps that I've been able to look at. So where on earth is the Shoshongo Dum?

Tabler says, on page 36, of the trader Axel Wilhelm Eriksson (who married Fanny Stewardson, a relative of my wife), that "Eriksson's party trekked down the Shoshongo Dum in October 1878, travelled up the Okavango to the Omuramba Ombongo, and returned to Omaruru by way of eastern Ovamboland."

Several books with the writings of 19th-century travellers have been printed or reprinted in the last 30 years, and they often provide a "Register" giving a summary of information about the people and places mentioned in the book. But none of those I have seen gives any explanation of the Shoshongo Dum.

Tabler's text suggests that the Shoshongo Dum might be a river, and might possibly be a tributary of the Okavango. But the Okavango is a pretty big river, and flows through three countries -- Angola, Namibia and Botswana, so, if the Shoshongo Dum is a river, where does it join the Okavango? And what is its modern name, so one can find it on a map?

Nowadays such things should be easy to find. We have the World Wide Web which has accumulated a huge amount of information since it started 20 years ago, and there are search engines to help you find it.

So I did a Google search for Shoshongo Dum, and when I had managed to convince Google that I was not looking for "Shoshone Dam" or "Shoshone Drum" it spat out just one reference: Oxen or Onions? The Search for Trade (and Truth) in the Kalahari, an article in Current Anthropology published in 1991. Other search engines returned nothing at all, so Google is still the top search engine on the Web.

There was nothing on Wikipedia, so I thought I'd put a stub of an article there, just in case anyone else should be looking for the Shoshongo Dum and wondering what it was. But Wikipedia would not let me link to the one article Google found that contained the term (and even there, only in a footnote). Wikipedia had blacklisted it.

Still, I suppose if I'd tried to look for it in the 19th century it would have taken me several months, if not years, instead of a few hours.

So if anyone is looking for the Shoshongo Dum, and Wikipedia continues to block the article, maybe this blog post can help people to find it.

And if anyone knows the modern name for it, or why it was called Shoshongo Dum in the first place, I hope they will let me know.

Resources for the Online Genealogist

Here's a useful list of online resources. I knew about some of them, of course, but there are others I did not know about. I think the "must have" applies only to genealogists in North America, and that people in other places might add a few that aren't there, and leave out a few that are not really essential. But it's still useful to have: 88 Must Have Resources for the Online Genealogist | Free People Search:

This collection of resources can help you uncover nearly all of the missing leaves on your family tree. Included are searchable databases of vital records, helpful guides, genealogical communities, unique tools, regionally targeted articles with a global reach. The first portion is entirely free. Those that require payment are listed at the end. While not every record is available online through every service, it is possible to use database searches to uncover local records you require, then community based organizations to share labor and access what you normally would be unable to all from the comfort of your own home.

Hat-tip to Randy Seaver, whose blog Genea-Musings: What are the Must-Have Resources for Genealogists? is one of the resources mentioned. Randy regrets that his name was not mentioned in the list, so I have mentioned it here.

Racism in South African genealogy

About a week ago someone remarked, on a South African genealogical mailing list, that he had found that some people were compiling "indexes" to some civil registers that had been made available for browsing online, But he had found that those indexes were not complete, and appeared to exclude those with obviously African names, and even those judged to be coloured. He queried this practice, and asked why an index should not be a complete index.

I had not consulted either the indexes or the records themselves, so I cannot say that I know for certain that indexers have been excluding entries on the grounds of perceived race, but I did say that, as a matter of principle, I thought that partial indexes would be worse than useless, particularly if there was no indication that they were partial, and no indication given of the criteria for inclusion or exclusion.

I was rather surprised by the the vehement response on the part of some participants, who saw this as an unfair attack on those who had so unselfishly given their time and energy to providing indexes for the use of researchers, and praised them for what they were doing, and said that they should not be deterred by those who questioned the exclusionary practices. Those who questioned these practices were labelled "grumpies", which seemed to be regarded as a sufficent defence of the practices themselves. It was basically an attempt to evade the issue, thus making it clear that there is a great deal of racism in South African genealogical circles.

The racism has been there for a long ntime.

When I first became seriously interested in genealogy, when I got married in 1974, I joined the Genealogical Society of South Africa (GSSA). It soon became apparent that the main focus of the society was was the genealogy of white Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. That was the genealogy of "the South African nation". English-speaking South Africans were very much second-class citizens, and the attitude towards them was rather condescending. Including black South Africans was unthought of and probably unthinkable to those who ran the show. And it seems that those attitudes persist in some genealogical circles in South Africa even today, and they try to justify them by calling those who question them "grumpies".

Perhaps someone could write a doctoral thesis on racism in South African genealogy, and maybe do a comparison with the Nazi Sippenbucher in Germany.

Quite apart from the question or racism, however, there is the problem of being honest (or dishonest) with the historical record. Omitting records in a public index is a form of falsification, as is adding false records, in the way this article describes.


There has been some discussion of that article in the soc.genealogy.britain newsgroup, and one poster there said it didn't matter if the records were falsified because genealogy is "only a hobby".

It may be "only a hobby" to some people, but genealogy is also an ancilliary science of history, and the study of genealogy can reveal a great deal about political, economic and religious history. You want to know why such-and-such a firm in Port Elizabeth exported the products of such and such a town in the Karroo? Because the biggest shopkeeper in that town was the brother-in-law of the owner of the firm in Port Elizabeth. In politics, nepotism is rife and always has been. In religion, you can see missionaries go to a place and start a church, and as it grows, many of the new members are relatives of the first members.

The role of the Msimang family in the growth of Methodism in both Natal and Swaziland is of interest to church historians, and their activities had political and economic repercussions as well. Now if someone decides, on the basis of a personal whim, or racism, to omit members of the Msimang family from a public index, they could mislead historians who are interested in more than just genealogy for its own sake. It's more than "just a hobby".

I once, in the course of a historical research project, interviewed a lot of black Anglican clergy in Zululand, and I asked them about their family history. One of them said to me, "We Zulus think we know a lot about this, but we don't."

I would like to see more South Africans, of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, become interested in genealogy and see that "the South African nation" is indeed a rainbow nation, and if that makes me a "grumpy", then long live grumpiness.

South African archives computers down for a week

Researchers trying to consult the computers that hold the indexes to the South African archives have been greeted with this message since last week:

SITA Inverse Web Proxy Server

The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL:
http://www.national.archsrch.gov.za/sm300cv/smws/sm300dl
The following error was encountered:

Connection Failed

The system returned:

(60) Operation timed out

The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.
Your cache administrator is sitasc@sita.co.za. 

The computer systems are used by the archives staff, and by researchers in such topics as history and genealogy, either remotely via the web, or at the archives themselves.

When researchers began reporting that the system was inaccessible last weekend, there were some jokes about civil servants not working at weekends, and people expected the system to be up and running again by Monday or Tuesday at the latest.

When it wasn't, people began looking a bit more closely at this "SITA", and discovered that it is not run by civil servants at all. It seems that a lot of the state's information and computer services have been privatised. SITA's web site tells us

SITA is committed to leveraging Information Technology as a strategic resource for government

SITA was established in 1999 to consolidate and coordinate the State’s information technology resources in order to achieve cost savings through scale, increase delivery capabilities and enhance interoperability.

It also tells us that it is SITA (Pty) Ltd, which means that it has been wholly privatised.

Perhaps it is time for some investigative journalists to start looking into SITA and how it operates, who it is responsible/accountable to, if anyone. Privatising an important strategic resource for government somehow doesn't seem like a good idea.

Computers and genealogy -- some pitfalls

When we started on genealogy soon after we were married, back in 1974, we didn't have a computer. Nobody we knew had a computer either. The only computers we encountered were in building societies (remember them?). Even the banks that later took over the building societies didn't have computers, but entered transactions manually in savings passbooks.

I kept hoping that somewhere, somehow, a computer would become available where one could enter information once, and instead of labouriously writing out family group sheets by hand to send to distant relatives by snail mail, one could just print them out. And when the reply came that great uncle Joe was born on 3 November and not 3 July, one could just correct it once.

Well, within ten years the dream came true, and we could do just that.

We had an Osborne portable computer (not a laptop, it was the size of a small suitcase, or a large briefcase). It came woith a word processor (Wordstar) a spreadsheet (Supercalc) and a database (Personal Pearl). It stored its programs and data on two 185k floppy disks. We bought a genealogy program, Roots/M, which cost $US49.00, which, in the days before the Rubicon Rand, was quite affordable.

And so we enjoyed all the things we had only dreamed of before. We began typing in the family tree, and could print out family group sheets to send to relatives (still by snail mail, but it was a lot easier than writing them by hand). We also discovered limitations. Roots/M loaded all its data into memory, and the Osborne computer only had 128k of memory. The disks, with 185k, were also rather small. But we began typing some of the paper documents we had -- wills and the like. The handwriting was often hard to read, so typing them up made it easer to find things.

Fast-forward to 2013.

A relative of a relative of a relative (don't ask!) writes from Montreal to say he can look up information for us about John Gray, the founder and firs tpresident of the Bank of Montreal. He wanted to know the source of the information we already had, so he could know where to start looking.

Ah, yes, we had typed out the will of John Gray in 1987, on the Osborne Executive, in WordStar, running under the CP/M operating system.

And, when we had got an MS DOS computer later that year (with a hard disk with all of 20 megabytes) I had taken the precaution of using a disk conversion program, called UniForm, to copy the Osborne data files over to disks in MS DOS format. . 

So yes, there is a copy of the will on my hard disk in an archive somewhere. But it is in WordStar, and I no longer have a copy of WordStar on my disk, and even if I did, I doubt that I could remember how to use it.

But what I do have on my disk is a word processor conversion program, called Word for Word. It also dates from about 1987, when there were about 20 or more different word processors on the market, each using a different format. But not one of them can be read by the word processors in common use today, LibreOffice and Microsoft Word.

So I convert it into XyWrite III+, which I do still have on my computer. But XyWrite III+ was designed for publishing, and all publishers' typesetters knew that you set underlined text (typed on a typewriter) as italics. So you used Mode Underline, and set the printer to print it as italics (laser printers were versatile in those days). You could typeset a book in XyWrite, no problem. That's what it was designed for. As a word processor, MS Word still hasn't caught up, 25 years later. Word has more bells and whistles, yes, but not as many pistons and cylinders as XyWrite.

The trouble is, XyWrite is a DOS program, and modern dumbed-down printers can't cope. So I convert it to XyWrite 4.0, and make one change. I type "ch /MDUL/MDIT/" that converts all the underlines to italics, which modern printers can understand.

Then I save the XyWrite 4.0 document as an RTF file (Rich Text Format), and import it into LibreOffice or MS Word, and print it as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file, which I send to the guy in Montreal.

So now I have these copies of John Gray's will on my computer: GRAYWILL.TXT (WordStar), GRAYWILL.XY3, GRAYWILL.XY4, GRAYWILL.RTF, GRAYWILL.ODT and finally GRAYWILL.PDF.

Six copies, where there was only one before. Am I going to delete any of them, as "surplus to requirements"?

Not a chance. Who knows when some "advance" in computer technology might make it impossible to read one or more of them? The workaround was cumbersome, but it was a lot easier than retyping the will of John Gray.

And the lesson for genealogists is this: when you "upgrade" to a new computer, don't be conned by some glib salesman into just buying the latest and greatest.

First make sure that you can use it to access and work with the data you have spent hours and hours and days and days typing in. You might find that Gee-Whiz graphics and amazing surround sound are a poor compensation for all that lost labour.

Can Clooz replace the Research Data Filer to keep track of paper files?

For a long time now (about 20 years) I have been using the Research Data Filer program to keep track of paper files in my genealogical research.

As you might guess, a 20 year-old-computer program is getting close to retirement age, ready to hand over to a younger and more vigorous successor, and take a well-earned rest.

The trouble is that there is no successor anywhere in sight. There is no program that I know of that can do what the Research Data Filer (RDF) did (and for me, still does).

In 38 years of genealogical research one accumulares a lot of paper -- notes, letters, family trees sent by other people, notes from books and other published sources. How do you keep track of this stuff? How do you remember where you put that note or letter?

Using the ResearchData Filer (RDF) you give every document a number, and you file the documents in numerical order, like this:

There is no need to file them in any order but numerical, in the order in which they are filed (the KISS principle -- Keep It Simple, Stupid).

Then you use the Research Data Filer to write a description of each document, like this:

(Sorry that the reduced functionality of Blogger makes the screenshot small and hard to read - that's one of the reasons I've moved my other blogs to Wordpress)

If you look hard you can see that item 3, DOC 00003 is a printed book. No, I did not put the printed book in the file. What I put in the file was a piece of paper with biblographgical information about the book, and extracts of relevant information from it. When I want to see what I put in those notes again, and want to remember where I put them, RDF tells me that it is filed as Document 3, which I filed between Document 2 and Document 4. Simple, isn't it?

If I'm not sure which document has the relevant information, I can search the document descriptions. RDF has a "focus" capability. I can focus on all document descriptions that contain the word "death", for example, and then I can focus again on only those that contain the word "Beningfield"

But that's not all.

In addition to the "Document" file, RDF also has a "Data" file, which indexes the data within documents. Because we're doing genealogy, we're interested in people, and that's what it indexes.

That screen shows a "focus" search on Id 14952, which happens to be the RIN of Adam Cottam in my main fata file. It shows references to one document on this screen, but could also show references to him in many documents. The fields shown are Name, Sex, ID, Event, Event Date, Event Place, Relations, Ids of Relations, Comments, and of course the Document number.  And one can sort the results of a "focus" by name, Id, date, place or relations, and print them out, or save them to another file.

There's more about RDF and how tt helps me to keep track of my paper files here.

RDF used to come with early editions of PAF, the Personal Ancestral File program distributed by the Church of Jesus Chrtist of Latter-Day Saints. PAF itself has been updated to a Windows version, but RDF hasn't. It is more difficult to use in Windows, because most Windows printers won't print output from DOS programs directly, and you have to resort to clumsy workarounds that take longer.

Also, RDF was designed in the days when most genealogists who used computers had computers with 360k floppy disks and no hard disks at all, so one of the important design considerations was to take up as little disk space as possible. My GENERAL.DAT file is about 1,2 Megabytes, which would be reaching the limits of a high-density floppy disk of the late 1980s.

Nowdays, with hard disk capacities being measured in terabytes rather than kilobytes, it would be nice to have an updated version that would give a little more room for additional information.

And there's the rub, because there isn't an updated version. RDF was designed in 1989 or earlier. But it still hasn't been surpassed. I know of no other program that can do what it does, as well as it does it. I can think of lots of ways in which it could be improved, but it still does what it does better than any other program out there.

  I've looked at some other programs that I thought might be possible replacements. There were Genota and Genforms being developed by Dennis Allsopp in Australia, which didn't do quite the same thing, and there was Clooz. I bought Clooz 2.0 to test as a possible replacement, but found it too clunky and awkward to use, and entering information was too time-consuming.

Clooz 3 is now available -- an updating and streamlining of Clooz 2. But they are now working on Clooz 4.0, which will be a complete redesign and rewiting of Clooz 3 from the ground up, rather than a mere tweak. So I'm now hoping that, whatever else it includes, it will include the functionality and capability of RDF, enhanced, rather than diminished.

Yes, you could keep the information in RDF .DOC and .DAT files in a spreadsheet, but most spreadsheets still can't handle dates before 1900, nor can they handle partial or fuzzy dates like "ABT May 1832" or "AFT Sep 1856".

I wish I knew who wrote RDF. It was a work of genius, making the most of the capabilities of computers of its time. If it were updated to make use of today's computers, it would be very powerful indeed.

Technorati verification

It seems that Technorati had lost this blog's RSS feed, so am attempting to reapply it:

Technorati will need to verify that you are an author of the blog by looking for a unique code. Please put the following short code 527CQC975QC5 within a new blog post and publish it. This code must appear in the published post and it must also appear in your corresponding RSS feed once published. 

I wonder if that will work 
 

Rising costs of travel to the UK makes Ancestry.com look like a bargain

Seven years ago my wife and I travelled from South Africa to the UK for a holiday. It was the first time I had visited the UK for nearly 40 years, and it was only after I had been there the first time that I had become interested in family history, and discovered where many of my ancestors had lived. We hired a car and drove around for three weeks, visiting living relatives and some old friends, and visiting places where our dead ancestors had lived. You can see some of the places we visited here.

We have thought of doing the same thing once more before we die, but rising costs make it seem impossible. Seven years ago, the cost of a subscription to Ancestry.com looked exorbitant. Now a single visa to visit the UK costs more -- before thinking of paying plane fares, airport taxes and all the rest. In 2005 we did not need visas at all.

Permira to Buy Ancestry.com for $1.6 Billion - NYTimes.com:

A consortium led by the European private equity firm Permira has agreed to buy Ancestry.com for around $1.6 billion. Under the terms of the deal, Permira and its partners will pay $32 a share for Ancestry.com, a genealogy Web site. The agreement represents a 40 percent premium to the company’s closing share price in June, when the potential acquisition was first reported. Permira, which will retain majority control, is partnering with Spectrum Equity, a venture capital firm and an early backer of Ancestry.com, and several of the European private equity firm’s direct investors. The Web site’s management also will invest in the deal.

But if the recession has affected the cost of travel, it has also affected Ancestry.com, because further on in the article we read:

After hitting a $45 high in 2011, its stock price has tumbled to around $29 on concerns that consumers are reducing their spending because of the economic crisis.

The company was started in the 1990s, and has remained profitable despite concerns about the revenue growth of other Internet businesses. Last year, Ancestry.com’s net profit roughly doubled, to $62.9 million, on revenue of $400 million. It has more than two million subscribers who pay up to $34.95 a month to use the service.

But, recession or no recession, that still looks like a very healthy profit margin to me.

I wonder how much the UK government is making on its visas.

Continental Civil Registration conference

This news item nearly slipped beneath my radar, and I haven't seen much discussion on it in genealogical circles, perhaps because we have our noses so deeply buried in the past that we don't notice the future creeping up on us, but this could have important implications for future genealogists. allAfrica.com: Africa: Experts At CRVs Conference in Critical Talks:

Experts meeting at the 2nd Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Conference are currently locked in critical discussions and debates on how to improve the field on the African continent.The experts are meeting in Durban until Wednesday and are expected to set the tone for the ministerial meeting and to a large extent, influence the shape of its outcomes, said Dimitri Sanga, Director at the African Centre for Statistics at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa."It is extremely crucial that in the next three days, experts discuss and debate all technical issues related to the improvement of civil registration in Africa... in order to help your ministers provide clear policy guidelines in the improvement of these systems," he told the delegates at the start of the conference on Monday.

Clooz 3.0 is on the way

Clooz is a genealogical research tool that enables you to analyse your data in various ways, and possibly open up new avenues for research.

Development of the program was recently taken over by Ancestral Systems, and they are now offering a free trial of Clooz 3.0, which is due to be released soon.

As they say, Clooz:

Clooz is NOT just another genealogy program. It is THE database for systematically organizing and storing the clues to your ancestry discovered through years of research. Clooz functions as a sophisticated research assistance tool and electronic filing cabinet. Clooz enhances your research with search and retrieval of important facts that you find during the hunt for your ancestors. Clooz interfaces with certain established family tree programs, depending on the producers allowing us access to your data stored in their program.

At the moment users are trying out the new version, reporting problems, and suggesting improvements to the program.

Check the Clooz web site to learn more.

Growing cities face a grave problem

There's been quite a bit of discussion in the South African Genealogy Mailing List recently about the problems of growing cities and lack of cemetery space. The latest round was sparked off by the news that Buffalo City (East London) Municipality is considering re-using graves because of shortage of cemetery space. And as people have contributed to the discussion, there are various stories about other cities thinking of doing the same.

But there's nothing new in this. In the very same week, this news story surfaced in San Francisco - Tombstones from long ago surfacing on S.F. beach:

Strong winds and shifting sands have uncovered an eerie reminder of San Francisco's past: discarded gravestones and broken tomb markers used decades ago to shore up the Ocean Beach seawall.The tombstones became visible this week, including bits and pieces of marble and granite that once marked the final resting places of citizens long dead.One of them is the nearly intact marble tombstone of Delia Presby Oliver, who died at the age of 26 on Apr. 9, 1890.

Her remains were removed and reburied when San Francisco authorities closed nearly all the city cemeteries and moved the bodies to Colma in the early 20th century - part of a move to make space for the growing city. Oliver's original tombstone and thousands like it were used as landfill or in other ways throughout San Francisco.

Some were used as breakwaters. Pieces of others were used to line the gutters of Haight-Ashbury's Buena Vista Park. Some gravestones were used to build the seawall along the Great Highway. Large tombs and crypts were dumped into San Francisco Bay.

I wonder if the inscriptions on these tombstones were recorded before they were dumped?

In the UK burials often took place in churchyards, but as villages were swallowed up in urban sprawl, cemeteries were established, and many of the churchyards have been cleared of graves. One solution has been to put all the old gravestones around the walls of the churchyard. I must admit I hadn't thought of them being dumped into the sea.

I also wonder about the culture clash in South Africa. There have been some claims to land restitution on the grounds that people's ancestors are buried in such and such a place. And in the past there was a lot of resistance to people being forcibly moved in the ethnic cleansing that took place under apartheid, on the grounds that they did not want to be moved from the places where their ancestors were buried. I wonder how well the Buffalo City Municipality's plans will sit with people who see things in that light?

Popularity of names

One of the things that can sometimes help genealogists is to know the popularity of names at different periods and in different places. Names can very often date people, sometimes quite precisely.

One of the most spectacular examples in recent times is Nevaeh ("heaven" backwards), which in England and Wales at least has grown spectacularly in popularity for girls, thought not at all among boys.



You can find this, and other information on the popularity of names in England and Wales here Babies called Nevaeh in England & Wales since 1996.

One of the things I find slightly odd about these sites is that they are almost always called "Baby names", but those before 2000 are now teenager names, not baby names.

Another thing to watch out for is the way names change sex. That does not seem to have happened to Nevaeh yet, at least not in the UK, where it seems to be strictly a girl's name.

But when I was growing up, for example, anyone called "eslie was invariably male, and the feminine form of the name was Lesley. More recently, however, I've come across some female Leslies, and some male Lesleys. With some names, like Ashley/Ashleigh, it's impossible to tell.

That's OK when you know the people concerned, but when you are entering the names of relatives you've just discovered into a genealogy program it often wants to know their sex, and sometimes you just don't know.

Deceased estates, probate records and missing persons

The South African method of dealing with the estates of dead persons is different from, and much fuller than that in most English-speaking countries, and can often reveal a surprising amount of information about people who were never physically in South Africa.

The main advantage of the South African system is the Death Notice, which gives much more information than the normal death certificate, with which it should not be confused.

The easiest way of seeing how the system works is to see what happens when a person dies. The nearest relative or connection of the deceased should complete a death notice, which is sent to the Master of the High Court (the South African equivalent of a probate court). The information given in the death notice varies at different periods, but generally one may expect to find the following:

• full names of the deceased
• names and addresses of parents, and whether they are alive or dead
• names of surviving and predeceased spouses of the deceased, and places of marriage
• date and place of death
• normal residence of the deceased, and occupation
• names of all children of the deceased, and whether major or minor
• if there are no children, names of brothers and sisters of the deceased
• whether the deceased owned movable or immovable property
• whether the property was over a certain value
• whether the deceased left a will
• name of the informant, and whether the informant was present at the death

The death notice, the will (if any) and an inventory of the deceased's property should be sent to the Master of the High Court within fourteen days of the death. If executors are appointed in the will, and the will is accepted, the executors will be given Letters of Executorship to deal with the estate. Without such letters, the executors will not be able to deal in any of the property of the deceased -- banks, for example, will not release funds held in the name of the deceased. Therefore even a person who had only a few cents in a savings account would be likely to have some record at the Master's Office.

A person who owned nothing more than their personal effects, or whose property consisted only of cash or cattle, might not be recorded. The family would simply divide up the estate among themselves as amicably or otherwise as they saw fit, so not everyone who died has a death notice on file.

If the person died intestate, or if no executors were appointed in the will, the Master will convene a meeting of interested persons to appoint an Executor Dative to administer the deceased's estate in accordance with the laws of intestate succession, or the will if there was one.

The executor then has to submit a second inventory, advertise in the newspapers to call on creditors to submit claims, and on debtors to pay what they owe. After paying the debts and legacies, the estate accounts have to be open to public inspection in the area where the deceased lived, and at the Master's office, for three weeks. If there are no objections, the accounts are accepted and filed in the Master's Office. If the executor is not a child, spouse or parent of the deceased, he also has to lodge security with the Master equal to the value of the estate - this is usually done by means of fidelity insurance.

The estate files may be seen in the Master's office, which makes them a very valuable genealogical source. They are indexed alphabetically for each year.

What makes them even more valuable is that the older estate files (usually those more than twenty years old) have been removed to the archives of the Province in which the Master's office is situated. These have now been indexed on the Archives computer system (NAAIRS), and this indexing has been completed to the end of 1986, so the indexes for all the estate files in the Provincial Archives have now been printed out in alphabetical order for the whole period. Researchers may either look at the printouts, or search using a computer terminal at one of the archives depots, or search on the Web.

If you're searching on the Web for the first time, it is best to go to the main NAAIRS site here National Automated Archival Information Retrieval System.

If you've already done searches and know how to use the system, you can go directly to the databases here National Archives of South Africa (NASA) Database Selection.

It is better to use the computer terminal or web search than the printed indexes, because the person one is looking for may be found in records other than those of deceased estates. Several million archival documents are in the computer index, and the number is continually being added to. A second advantage of using the computer is that one may easily find a name which would not be found in the alphabetical printout - the maiden surname of a married woman, for example.

Search is by key word, and various combinations of keywords may be used to narrow the search. One may enter the name ``green'', and look at a list of all the documents in which that word occurs. To narrow it, one may enter "green and thomas" which would find the documents in which both names occur. Or one may enter "thomas adj green", which would find the documents containing the words "Thomas Green" or "Green, Thomas". Entering "thomas and green", however, would also find a document such as "ANDREWS, Thomas William; predeceased spouse Edith Mary Andrews, formerly Brown, born Green", but might also bring up lots of references to the colour green.

This system of recording deceased estates had its origin in the early days of the Cape Colony, when it was ruled by the Dutch East India Company. An "Orphan Chamber" was set up to look after the interests of widows and orphans, and to see that they were not cheated of their inheritance, and to protect the interests of creditors in deceased or insolvent estates. In 1827 the "Master of the Orphan Chamber" or "Orphan Master" (Dutch: Weesheer) became known as the "Master of the Supreme Court", and more recently Master of the High Court.

There are now Master's offices in Cape Town, Grahamstown, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, Tshwane, and Pietermaritzburg. Namibia and Zimbabwe follow a similar system, with Master's offices in Windhoek and Harare respectively (though their indexes are not on the South African NAAIRS computer index).

The Provincial Archives, to which the earlier estate files have been removed, are in Cape Town, Pietermaritzburg, Bloemfontein and Tshwane. The Namibian Archives are in Windhoek, and those of Zimbabwe in Harare.

In some of the earlier Cape Town estates, the death notices, estate accounts and wills were filed separately when they were transferred to the archives, which makes searching more difficult. Fortunately, it was realised that the other estate papers, such as the correspondence and the liquidation and distribution accounts, contained much additional genealogical and historical information, and these are now kept together with the death notices and wills, as they always have been in the other provinces. From the estate accounts, for example, it is sometimes possible to find where the heirs were living, and if they had married since the will was made. If they had died, their children are often shown as inheriting. Sometimes there are birth or baptism certificates of heirs (particularly if they were minors) to prove that they were entitled to inherit, or that their guardians were entitled to receive the inheritance on their behalf.

RE BEAGLEHOLE

There is even information about people died outside South Africa, or who never lived in South Africa at all, but who may have inherited property from people who owned a few shares in a South African company. A couple of examples show the kind of information that may be found in these records, which may be of interest to people who are searching for families which have only very tenuous connections with South Africa.

The case of Absalom Henry Beaglehole

All South African law students are familiar with RE BEAGLEHOLE, a case that made legal history and is the basis of the South African law of missing persons.

On 3 March 1904 William Richard Beaglehole died intestate at Leydsdorp, Transvaal. He was unmarried, and his estate was divided between his brothers and sisters. One brother, Absalom Henry Beaglehole, could not be found, and the executor paid his share in to the Guardians Fund of the Master of the Supreme Court.

In 1908 two of his sisters made an application to the Supreme Court for Absalom Henry Beaglehole to be presumed dead, and for his share to be divided among the remaining heirs. He had last been heard of fifteen years before his brother's death in 1904, and had been a miller working in Somerset, England. The plaintiffs argued that in English law there was a rebuttable presumption that a person was dead if he had been missing for seven years, and that therefore the money should never have been paid into the Guardians Fund in the first place.

The judge disagreed, and would not grant an order.

He said it was undesirable to divide the estates of missing persons unless exhaustive enquiries had been made. At the time of his disappearance A.H. Beaglehole would have been only 31 years old, and at the time of the application he would have been only 46. He did not work at a particularly dangerous occupation, and so it could not be presumed that he was dead. The application was dismissed.

That, for most lawyers, is the end of the story of Absalom Henry Beaglehole. For the family historian, however, the story continues in Deceased Estate file No 23343 in the Transvaal Archives, the file of Absalom Henry Beaglehole.

His whole estate in South Africa was the 100 pounds in the Guardians Fund from the estate of his brother. He had never visited South Africa. He died at the workhouse infirmary in Newmarket, Cambridgeshire, England on 8 July 1913.

In his death notice, the names of his parents were simply recorded as "deceased", but there was a death certificate, showing the death of Absalom Henry Beaglehole, also known as Harry Richardson. There was a sworn declaration from someone who had known him for ten years as Harry or Henry Richardson, and who said he travelled around Eastern England from place to place, wherever he could get work as a millstone dresser. Another sworn declaration, from Ernest Stephen Heasman, in charge of the workhouse, said that the deceased had come from eight miles away to the workhouse infirmary, and that, just before he died, he had revealed that his real name was Absalom Henry Beaglehole, that his father was John Beaglehole, a farmer of Menheniot, Cornwall, and that he had a brother and sister still living there. He had gone under the name of Henry Richardson for some fifteen years past because he had "come down in the world".

There was another sworn declaration by his brother-in-law, William Kelly, to say that his deceased wife Emma was the sister of Absalom Henry Beaglehole, that his three children, Phyllis Mary Kelly, aged 15, John Beaglehole Kelly, aged 10, and Frederick Cowling Kelly, aged 8, were the heirs.

Another sister, Catherine Jane Beaglehole, died in Johannesburg some years later, in 1922. She was unmarried, and in her will she left her property to her nephews and nieces, whose names were all recorded. The final liquidation and distribution account revealed that one of the nieces, Phyllis Mary Kelly, had married six months before her aunt had died, and there was a sworn declaration to that effect, giving the name of her husband as William Henry Mortimer Roberts of Haye Barton in the Parish of St Ive in the County of Cornwall and the date of marriage as 25 January 1922.

Thus from two estate files and a law report it is possible to build up a fairly comprehensive picture of three generations of a large family, most of whom were living in England.

I wonder what might have happened if he had been found and received the 100 pounds from his brother's estate in 1908. It might have enabled him to "come up in the world" again. 

Frederick Thomas Green

In contrast to Absalom Henry Beaglehole, there is a good deal of published information about Frederick Thomas Green. The problem here is that much of it is inaccurate.

He appears in the Dictionary of South African Biography as Frederick Joseph Green, and was well-known as an elephant hunter and explorer in what is now Botswana and Namibia. Several published sources describe his father as "Robert" Green. His father was, in fact, William John Green, who was born in Quebec in 1790, and came to the Cape Colony as Deputy Assistant Commissary General in about 1846.

William John Green and his wife Margaret Gray had fifteen children, and their descendants are scattered all over the world. One son, Henry, was British Resident of the Orange River Sovereignty in 1854, while another, Edward Lister Green, saw military service in India, China and Ireland, and eventually settled in New Zealnand.

Frederick Thomas Green went to the Lake Ngami area of of what is now Botswana, and then to Damaraland (now part of Namibia). He married Catherine Anne Agnes Stewardson, and had seven children, four of whom died young. He died near Walvis Bay in 1876. In those days Namibia was not one country, but had several independent rulers who were sometimes at war with each other. Most of these rulers kept no written records at all.

With the computerised index, however, it was a simple task to find the record of the estate of Frederick Thomas Green, in the Free State Archives in Bloemfontein. Shortly before setting off for Lake Ngami, Frederick Green had worked as a clerk in the Commissariat in Bloemfontein. When he died, some 25 years later, his widow did not file a death notice. His property consisted of his cattle, wagons and hunting equipment, and there was no system of probate where he was living. She soon remarried, to George Robb, and they went to Cape Town.

Some ten years later, it was discovered that Frederick Green had owned a plot of land in Bloemfontein. A death notice was filed, but as there was no will, the Master in Bloemfontein wanted the names of all the children, and proof of their age. So in the estate papers are baptism certificates for the surviving Green children, showing that they were baptised in Damaraland by German missionaries of the Rhenish Mission Society. As each of the children reached the age of 21, they were able to claim their share of the proceeds of the sale of the land from the Guardians Fund, which was all documented in the Estate File. This showed that by the time the youngest child had turned 21, the family had moved to Johannesburg.

In this way, family tradition and dubious published material was confirmed or corrected. The life of a Canadian hunter, who lived a wandering life in the wilderness of South West Africa, passing through the territories of several independent African states, was documented in the records of the Orange Free State Republic (Oranje-Vrijstaat).

Though Absalom Henry Beaglehole was no relation of ours, Frederick Thomas Green was my wife Val's great-great grandfather, and if you are interested you can read more of his story at In the steps of Fred Green | Hayes & Greene family history.

Searching from overseas

Since the computer indexes to the South African estate files are available on the Web, it is simple for a researcher in England, for example, to find a reference. Unfortunately it is no longer possible to get photocopies of most of these records, as the many of the estate files are bound into books, and putting them in a photocopier damages the binding. But there is a South African genealogy mailing list, and many people there are willing to do a couple of lookups in the archives.

For more information, including how to join the South Africa genealogy mailing list, see Conrod Mercer's South African Genealogy pages.
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This article originally appeared in the September 1989 issue of Family Tree magazine (Vol 5, No 11, p. 28). Since it was a long time ago, many people may not have read it, I'm posting an updated version here.