Ancestors South Africa offers a comprehensive document ordering service from any National Archive branch in South Africa as well as deceased estate papers, wills, divorce papers etc from the Master of the High Court from most major cities in South Africa.
Documents that I can obtain from the National Archives are any documents listed on the Archives website. You will need to choose the National Automated Archival Information Retrieval System (NAAIRS) link and then choose the RSA database to search the entire database, otherwise choose only the selected Archive where your document reference can be found. Please note that documents provided are high-resolution colour images. If you don’t know the reference number or how to use the system, let me know and I will obtain it for you. For estate papers references that are not on NAAIRS e.g. Cape Town after 1958, I will need to look that up on a separate database where there will be a small fee for that.
Documents to be ordered from the Archives will take approximately 5 – 10 working days.
Documents from the Master of the High Court can take up to 4 weeks or longer.
Please note that some estates can have as little as one page and others more than 20 pages. The following documents will be included in the estate papers if they are there:
- death notice
- death certificate
- will
- liquidation and distribution account
- inventory
- burial account
- any other document that may include names or details of family members such as marriage certificate, divorce record, baptism etc.
It is important to remember that many of these files are extremely tightly bound and they are difficult to photograph. The files cannot be un-bound, and I cannot use weights or clamps or any other device to hold these pages open completely. Many of these documents are very fragile and cannot be photocopied and no flash photography is allowed.
Any documents obtained from me via the National Archives that will be published in either book, TV, or on the internet will need permission from the National Archives.
