South African "probate" records and foreign researchers

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Steve Hayes

South African "probate" records and foreign researchers

Legg inn av Steve Hayes » 13 okt 2005 07:47:41

The following article originally appeared in the September 1989
issue of "Family Tree magazine" (Vol 5, No 11, p. 28). As it was
a long time ago, many people may not have read it, I'm posting an
updated version here.

SOUTH AFRICAN "PROBATE" RECORDS

The South African method of dealing with the estates of dead per-
sons 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.

If the person died intestate, or if no executors were appointed
in the will, the Master will convene a meeting of interested per-
sons 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 was completed by 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.

http://www.national.archives.gov.za/naairs_content.htm

It is better to use the computer terminal, 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".

The system 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. 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 dis-
tribution 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 bap-
tism 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.

There is even information about people 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 Afri-
can 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 an absolute
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 dis-
appearance 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 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, on 8
July 1913.

In his death notice, the names of his parents were simply
recorded as "deceased", but there was a death certificate, show-
ing 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, Wil-
liam 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 liq-
uidation 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.

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. Frederick Thomas Green went to the Lake
Ngami area of 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 frequently 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 Com-
missariat 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 ofprobate 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 cer-
tificates 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).

Searching from overseas

Now that the computer indexes to the South African estate files
are available, 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
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:

http://home.global.co.za/~mercon/

---------------
13 October 2005
(c) 1987, 2005
Stephen Hayes

--
Steve Hayes
E-mail: hayesmstw@hotmail.com (see web page if it doesn't work)
Web: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7783/

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