South Africa, Methodist Parish Registers - FamilySearch Historical Records

South Africa

What is in This Collection?
This collection of parish records from the Methodist Church in South Africa covers the years 1822 to 1996, and includes images of baptisms, marriages, and burials from several towns in South Africa. These records are written in Afrikaans and English. See the section For Help Reading these Records for translation helps.

Methodism arrived in South Africa with British soldiers in 1806, but the mission was launched by Barnabas Shaw, who reached the Cape in 1816, and William Shaw (unrelated), who accompanied the British settlers of 1820. Barnabas Shaw established a mission among the Khoi at Leliefontein in Namaqualand, and colleagues ventured across the Orange River into present-day Namibia and what are now the northern provinces of South Africa. William Shaw established Methodism throughout the British settlement in Albany and rapidly planted a chain of mission stations between the Cape Colony and Natal. In the late nineteenth century, missionary work was extended into the gold-mining area in Gauteng and north through modern Limpopo into Zimbabwe. Six missionary districts of the Wesleyan Methodist church became an affiliated conference in 1883. An independent conference was constituted in 1927 and enlarged in 1931 to include the Transvaal Missionary District of the British Conference and the small Primitive Methodist Mission.

Church records include important vital information, which can also help identify other ancestors. The civil registration records can be researched also after 1895.

These parish records were created to record the events of baptisms, marriages, and burials for the members of the Methodist Church in South Africa, and are a reliable source for doing genealogical research in South Africa.

Reading These Records
These records are in Afrikaans and English. For help reading these records see the following guides:
 * Afrikaans Word List
 * Netherlands Language and Languages
 * South Africa Language and Languages

Coverage Table
The collection contains records from the following locations: {| style="width=75%; vertical:33%,"|
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I Found the Person I Was Looking For, What Now?

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 * Church Records often were kept years before government records were required and are a good source for finding ancestors before 1900

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 * Remember that sometimes individuals went by nicknames or alternated between using first and middle names
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Citing This Collection
Citations help you keep track of places you have searched and sources you have found. Identifying your sources helps others find the records you used.

"South Africa, Methodist Parish Registers, 1822-1996." Database and Images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 14 June 2016. Methodist Church of Southern Africa, Grahamstown.
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