Back to Basics in SA Family History: the Death Notice

If you’re just starting out in South African family history research and getting to grips with Deceased Estate files, you will have heard about the significance of the legal document known as the Death Notice. This forms part of the contents of a Deceased Estate file and, theoretically, should offer the following details:

Full name of deceased, deceased’s birthplace, parents’ names, deceased’s age at death (or date of birth), occupation, place of residence, marital status, place of last marriage, names of surviving and pre-deceased spouses, date and place of death and names of major and minor children. If the children are minors their dates of birth are included; if daughters their married surnames, where relevant, may appear.

There would also be information regarding any assets in the estate, movable and immovable, whether these assets exceeded a certain value and whether the deceased left a will. The informant’s signature appears at the end of the document with some indication as to whether the informant was present at the time and place of death.

The fullness and accuracy of the details appearing on the Death Notice are in direct proportion to the knowledge of the informant. This informant is usually but not always the next-of-kin. Below is an example of a reasonably legible handwritten Death Notice (click on the image to zoom in).

click to zoom

From an information point of view this Notice is not perfect: instead of the deceased’s parents’ names offering an avenue for further research, the word ‘Dead’ presents a cul de sac. For birthplace at least the county name appears, rather than simply ‘England’ as is often the case. The informant in this instance is the widow of the deceased. Death Notices were – and are – completed under stress of bereavement, which may affect accuracy. A son of the deceased may not remember, or perhaps never knew, the names of his overseas grandparents (particularly in the early days of the colony) or the date and location of his parents’ marriage.

The Death Certificate is an entirely different document, usually signed by a doctor, and the only piece of information given in the Death Certificate which does not appear in the Death Notice is Cause of Death.

South African Ancestry Research Q and A

Q  Why can’t I find a reference to my ancestor on NAAIRS?

A  Should no reference emerge it doesn’t necessarily mean that your ancestor did not spend some time in South Africa. It could be that his activities weren’t a matter for public record, or that his sojourn was brief. It is perfectly possible for an individual to pass through South Africa invisibly - as far as records are concerned.

A deceased estate file was not opened for everyone who died in SA. Reasons for this vary e.g. minimal assets at date of death would imply literally no ‘estate’. If the ancestor died comparatively recently (say within the past 20-30 years) his deceased estate file, presuming there is one, would not be referenced on NAAIRS. In such an instance, the records would be held by the Master of the Supreme Court in the area where the death took place.  

Despite what your family might believe, your ancestor might not have died in SA but moved on elsewhere, to another colony perhaps, or even returned to his place of origin. The name you believe was his may not be correct – it wasn’t unknown for an emigrant to change his name when starting afresh in the colonies. The spelling of his surname may differ from the version you have accepted.

If you don’t immediately find a reference to your ancestor on the index, don’t give up. Information is always being added so keep checking.

There are file types other than deceased estates e.g. divorce, claims for compensation, applications for employment or for a licence for a firearm etc etc.

Death Notice, South African, 1903

Back to basics in SA family history research: the Death Certificate

You’ve found and accessed your ancestor’s Deceased Estate file including the Death Notice and other contents. Now, do you need the Death Certificate?

The Death Certificate is a civil document, usually completed by a doctor. The only piece of information it contains which does not appear in the Death Notice is the cause of death. (The Death Notice – see previous posts - is a legal document, usually completed by the next-of-kin.)

While the cause of death is generally of interest to most family historians, in certain circumstances this could be of vital significance e.g. if mention is made of a hereditary disease, or if there is any suggestion of violent death such as suicide or murder. Sometimes after a ‘suspicious death’ an inquest may be held e.g. in the case of a man who died after injuries inflicted by a passing train (did he fall into the path of the train, did he mean to fall, or was he pushed?). Shades of Miss Marple.

Among the facts which should be stated in the full Death Certificate are: forenames and surname, age and sex of the deceased, birthplace, marital status, occupation, date and place of death, residential address, intended place of burial, cause of death and duration of final illness, name of the medical practitioner, informant’s signature, qualification and address, and when and where the death was registered.

A Death Certificate can be ordered – only if precise and full information of the event is known - from the Department of Home Affairs or from the appropriate embassy/consulate, should you live outside South Africa.

The original civil register may be held in the Archives Repository in the relevant South African province. Only selected registers are available. The 20 year closed period applies to civil registers of Deaths.

Check the Family History Library Catalogue at www.familysearch.org for filmed registers. If the Library Catalogue is a new frontier for you, read Ellen Stanton’s article at www.eggsa.org/articles/locating-death-records.htm

You can see an example of a South African Death Certificate at
http://tornado.he.net/~mross2/ancestors/williamrossestate/page1.html

Hamilton family MI, Stellawood Cemetery, Durban.

Deceased Estates: more than just the Death Notice

The Death Notice is not the only significant document among South African estate papers. There would also be a Will (if one was made), Final Liquidation and Distribution Accounts, correspondence generated either before or after the death occurred, invoices etc.

All these are potential sources of information. To stop at the Death Notice – or to allow your local researcher to do so – is a grave mistake. Surprising facts emerge in apparently unlikely pieces of paper.

Undertaker's Invoice 1911 mentions 2 carriages &
a special tram car for mourners

Although many wills aren’t particularly informative, they generally name beneficiaries and sometimes give instructions as to burial or cremation which can be helpful when trying to find the ancestor’s last resting-place. Specific bequests – sometimes of unexpected items to unlikely people - can be intriguing. Inventories give us an intimate glimpse into the ancestor’s daily life. Invoices from tradesmen claiming settlement from an estate are worth a look, especially one from the undertaker which may offer the name of the cemetery where burial took place as well as the style and cost of the obsequies considered appropriate for the deceased.

Milliner's Invoice 1869

A fairly nondescript invoice listed items of clothing which turned out to be my great great grandmother’s mourning clothes ordered from the Silk Mercer, Milliner & Straw Bonnet Manufacturer for my great great grandfather’s funeral in 1869.

Letterheads among the estate correspondence may give snippets about a family business, its street address, who the directors were, or a picture of the building where the deceased lived, worked and died. How much more interesting, relevant and memorable it would be, rather than baldly stating the company name, to include a decorative engraved letterhead as an illustration when publishing the family’s story whether on the printed page or online.

Engraved letterhead 1911

Archival documents require interpretation, digging beyond the stated facts to unearth choice nuggets of detail to enliven the family history. This makes all the difference to a narrative which, no matter how accurate the names and dates might be, reads like a bland chronology of births, marriages and deaths.

Death Notices far from kith and kin

When an ancestor died at a distance from home and family his Death Notice may give comparatively little detail e.g. the informant could be the owner of a boarding house where the deceased was temporarily residing. Unless the boarding house owner had subjected the guest to close questioning, it’s unlikely that the former would know much more than the name of the deceased – possibly not even his full name – and the date and location of death.

In time of war, a Death Notice would be produced hurriedly at the place of death, probably by the Adjutant in charge of the camp. Later a more detailed Death Notice would be completed. This can result in two Death Notices emerging in one individual’s estate papers. I’ve found several instances of this occurring during the Anglo-Boer War.

If the deceased was living elsewhere, perhaps in pursuit of his occupation, there may have been no family members present at his death. Again, the informant signing the Death Notice might know few personal details. This was evidently the case in the example shown below. The name is given in full, a guess is made at the age of the deceased, his parents’ names are ‘unknown’ (i.e. to the informant), he is described as married and in the space where his children’s names should appear is a scrawled note, ‘supposed to have a family in the Colony of Natal consisting of 3 small children …’. The deceased’s occupation is given as ‘canteen-keeper’ and his assets consisted of ‘a tent and other movable property’.

Death Notice: New Rush 1873

The most significant clue appears at bottom left of the document: it is dated at ‘New Rush, 1 February 1873’. This explains the deceased’s occupation as well as the tent listed among his movable assets. New Rush was the original name for part of what is now Kimberley.

We could speculate that the deceased had left Natal to try his luck at the diggings. Apart from mining, the diamond fields offered various opportunities for making a living. The population of the tented camps which sprang up almost overnight required food, drink, provisions of every kind. John James Johnason’s canteen would have filled a need. Unfortunately, he died leaving his family without a breadwinner.
Despite the omissions from this Death Notice, it does offer several clues which invite further investigation.

Early mining, Kimberley.

Footnote: In 1873 the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Kimberley, insisted that places newly within his jurisdiction on the Diamond Fields should receive decent and intelligible names. He did not approve of ‘such a vulgarism as New Rush and as for Voortuitzigt ... he could neither spell nor pronounce it.’ The populist Diamond Fields newspaper objected to the new name (Kimberley) saying, ‘...we went to sleep in New Rush and awaked up in Kimberley, and so our dream was gone.’ 

 

 

More on the SA Death Notice

Despite occasional errors and omissions, a Death Notice should take you several paces forward in the quest for your ancestor. It may also present opportunities for locating living relatives e.g. following up married names of the deceased’s daughters.

A Death Notice is not available for every person who died in South Africa, though there should be a Death Notice for anyone who died leaving inheritable assets in that country. Death Notices only came into being in 1834, so before that date other research avenues must be relied on. If the deceased had minimal assets at date of death – literally no ‘estate’ – a Deceased Estate would not be lodged with the Master of the Supreme Court.

Should you find no reference to a Deceased Estate file for your ancestor on NAAIRS, this could be because of the date parameter: in Natal, Deceased Estate files up to and including 1974 are held at archives; Cape, up to 1957; Transvaal, to 1978; Orange Free State, to 1951. Estates filed after these years are held by the Master’s Office in the relevant province. There is no legal or other obligation for the Master to ‘release’ or ‘transfer’ (both frequently-used terms and both inaccurate) Deceased Estate material to an Archives Repository at any stage. More recent estates can be accessed at the Master’s Office in the province where death occurred. However, this is not as simple a task as finding an estate file held at an archives repository.

The most obvious reason for not finding a Deceased Estate file – and hence no Death Notice - for your ancestor is that, contrary to family belief, he died elsewhere i.e. not in South Africa. You may then have to dig further afield, in his country of origin perhaps, or in another colony.

Contents and format of the Death Notice vary slightly at different periods. Earlier Death Notices were printed in a sideways format and sometimes on shiny blue legal paper which may prove a challenge for the digital photographer. Comparatively recent Death Notices include the SA Identity Number which came into being in the mid 1950s. The ID number can be important if you want to acquire a South African Death Certificate.

Sideways Death Notice 1893: click to zoom in.

Using NAAIRS to find Anglo-Boer War Ancestors

The South African National Archives and Record Service online index (NAAIRS) at
www.national.archives.gov.za/ can help when tracing Anglo-Boer ancestors.

The Gravestones database (GEN) on NAAIRS offers memorial inscriptions collected by the Genealogical Society of South Africa (GSSA), some of which refer to casualties of the Anglo-Boer War. A Cemetery Recording Project run by GSSA now offers a series of index CDs (obtainable from the Society) – recently helping me to find an Australian trooper buried in a small graveyard in the Orange Free State.

A search of NAAIRS may reveal an ancestor’s deceased estate file with Death Notice included. Sometimes there are two Death Notices in such files of the Anglo-Boer War era: one filled in briefly at the place of death, by the Adjutant or Medical Officer perhaps, and another notice completed more fully later.

Correspondence in archival files could give information about the next-of-kin: widows or mothers claiming the deceased’s pay or the five pound war gratuity, a seemingly scant return for the supreme sacrifice. A memo mentions a youthful soldier’s only piece of movable property – his horse, ‘killed for food during the Ladysmith siege’.
If your ancestor's regiment is known, it's worth searching NAAIRS for likely references to its name. The combined used of British and South African records, published sources as well as online information, can help in the search for a gentleman in khaki who was, as Kipling said, 'out on active service, wiping something off a slate.'

THE ABSENT-MINDED BEGGAR

by Rudyard Kipling

When you've shouted " Rule Britannia," when you've sung " God save the Queen,"

When you've finished killing Kruger with your mouth,

Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine

For a gentleman in khaki ordered South?

He's an absent-minded beggar, and his weaknesses are great -

But we and Paul must take him as we find him -

He is out on active service, wiping something off a slate

And he's left a lot of little things behind him!

Duke's son - cook's son - son of a hundred kings

(Fifty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay!)

Each of 'em doing his country's work

(and who's to look after their things?) …

http://samilitaryhistory.org/  SA Military History Society: various articles by specialists in military history.

www.ladysmithhistory.com/ offers: a history of the KwaZulu Natal town of Ladysmith, the two famous stories of the town, the Siege of Ladysmith and the Relief of Ladysmith; a database of the residents of Ladysmith from its earliest days to around 1900; a database of all known British military personnel who died during the whole of the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902.


www.angloboerwar.com/ This website was started in 2004 with the objective of making available information on the Anglo Boer War 1899 - 1900.  The site is free to use and has grown over the years so that it currently consists of over 2,300 articles, over 11,000 images and more than 12,500 pages in searchable PDF format.

South African Death Certificate

Not to be confused with the Death Notice, the South African Death Certificate is a much briefer document. The piece of information it offers which does not appear on the Death Notice is the cause of death. This is given by the doctor in attendance, and includes duration of the final illness.

The only way to acquire an official copy of the Death Certificate is through the Department of Home Affairs. When ordering, ask for a FULL certificate, unless you need the certificate for certain visa or other legal purposes in which case obtain a VAULT copy. If delegating to a researcher, mention the reason for wanting the certificate.

In the SA context, pause for thought before embarking on the ordering of any certificates (birth, marriage or death). There is generally a waiting period for the ordering process to grind through the Department’s mill. If you have located a Death Notice for the ancestor it may not be worthwhile pursuing the Death Certificate.

Why no Deceased Estate file for my ancestor?

There isn't a deceased estate file for every person who died in South Africa. Reasons for not locating an estate file vary. The most obvious is that, contrary to what you've been led to believe, the individual may have died in another country. There could have been minimal assets, literally ‘no estate’. The death may be of too recent a date to appear on the online index, NAAIRS. Death Notices did not exist until 1834 and to find information for the period before that date trying other research avenues will be necessary.

An ancestor who lived in South Africa but died in England may have had a South African Death Notice if he owned property in South Africa. In such a case, the country where the estate was administered would depend on where the individual was resident at date of death. Frequently, delays may be caused and a South African Death Notice may not be filed for some time after the death occurred.

Finding two separate Death Notices in one deceased estate file may mean that the first form was completed at the place of death e.g. by the camp Adjutant during a military conflict – there are many instances of this during the Anglo-Boer War. Later, a more detailed Death Notice would be produced.

The format of the Death Notice changed at various dates. Earlier forms were printed horizontally across the page and often on blue paper which doesn’t photograph particularly well. These ‘sideways’ Death Notices were invariably completed by hand (not always legibly) in pen and ink. The vertically-printed Death Notice followed, but were still filled in by hand until the advent of the typewriter made them easier to read (except where the ribbon was over-used and the text faded).

Recent Death Notices include the SA identity number which first came into being in 1955. The ID number can be important if you want to acquire a South African Death Certificate.

Death Notice in SA research

The Death Notice is a significant document for the family historian seeking South African ancestors. It should provide the following details: full name of deceased, birthplace, parents’ names, deceased’s age at death, occupation, place of last marriage, marital status, names of surviving and pre-deceased spouses, date and place of death as well as names of major and minor children. If the children were minors, their dates of birth should appear; if daughters, their married surnames may be given (which could be helpful for tracing forward to the next generation); if the deceased was unmarried, his siblings’ names may be listed – and could be mistaken for children’s names if the Death Notice isn’t carefully read.

There should also be an indication regarding assets – movable (i.e. property, land/buildings) and immovable (i.e. furniture, jewellery etc) – whether these assets exceeded a certain value (this varies according to era) and whether the deceased left a will. The informant’s signature is shown, as well as whether he/she was present at the time and place of death.

It’s important to remember that the fullness and accuracy of the Death Notice is in direct proportion to the knowledge of the informant – who may or may not be the next-of-kin. Sometimes the names of the deceased’s parents aren’t given, but are substituted by the word ‘Deceased’ or ‘Dead’. ‘Birthplace’ may be stated as ‘England’, for example, with no clue as to county.

The informant, even a son of the deceased, could have forgotten his grandparents’ names and in all likelihood never met overseas family members. Close kin were under stress of bereavement when completing the Death Notice form, which could make a difference to the quality of information given. In cases where the informant was a boarding-house owner, or some other stranger who happened to be present at the death, details given on the Death Notice might be sketchy.

It has been suggested that some informants gave deliberate misinformation in Death Notices. If this is so, it happened rarely. Usually the contents of the Death Notice will help you make considerable progress with your family history quest.

Deceased Estate files in SA family history research

In the context of South African family history research, deceased estate documentation is a valuable starting point. If an ancestor died in SA, the chances of discovering further information are good – better than if he was passing through on his way to another colony or making a temporary stay before returning to his place of origin.

Using deceased estate material it’s possible to go back to his earlier history as well as forwards to more recent generations, even to living descendants.

First, search NAAIRS to identify a relevant deceased estate file for your forebear. If his area of residence isn’t known search on the RSA (all SA) database adding a reasonable time frame for the event in the ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’ facility at the foot of the search form. As always, it helps if the ancestor had an unusual surname or forename.

You can expect to find the following in an estate file: Death Notice, Will, Final Accounts and correspondence. All of these are potential sources of information. There’s a tendency to access only the Death Notice: while this is an important document, it’s advisable not to stop your search there but to check (or delegate your researcher to check) the other file contents too.

It is false economy to limit a search to the Death Notice alone. There is so much more to be discovered in even the most unlikely pieces of paper e.g. an argument by correspondence between family members over who would pay for the tombstone reveals precise details as to burial place of the deceased. Such information may not be obtained easily elsewhere.