South Africa Cemeteries

Cemeteries
The records available from cemeteries are:


 * Tombstone Inscriptions
 * Burial Registers

Tombstone inscriptions provide a wealth of information in that they provide information such as date and place of birth and death, age of the deceased at death, place of origin, names of other persons related to the deceased, besides the names, maiden surname and 'pet names' of the deceased.

The limitation is that the availability of the information is dependent on the location of the tombstone and only for as long as the inscription remains legible. There are of course a great many rural or farm cemeteries outside the jurisdiction of municipalities, considering that South Africa was, until relatively recently, primarily a country of farmers.

The National Council of the Genealogical Society is addressing this problem with their Cemetery Recording Project by which it is hoped to document the headstone inscriptions of all the cemeteries in South Africa, including remote rural farm cemeteries. This information is indexed by cemetery, and the results are published by the State Archives Service. Copies are available at all archives' depots and at various libraries and institutions that deem it necessary to purchase these volumes.

The cemetery information is also available on computer to which the following institutions have access:


 * The reading rooms of all the Provincial Archive Depots.
 * The libraries of the Universities of Cape Town, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth, Witwatersrand and UNISA.
 * The Cory Library, Grahamstown.
 * The HSRC
 * The South African Library and the Transvaal Provincial Library and Museum Service; click here for their website

New information is constantly being added, as more cemeteries are processed by the Archives Service.

Photos of headstones from various South Africa Cemeteries

 * Gravestone Photos
 * eGGSA South African Gravestone Photographs
 * National Archive of South Africa Data of the South African Genealogical Society on Gravestones